In 2007, the European Communities celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. This is an important milestone by any measure, but especially considering the unique nature of the European integration process envisioned by the Schuman Declaration and institutionalised in the Rome Treaties. To mark this important date, European Union (EU) leaders met in Berlin and adopted a commemorative declaration, which starts with these inspiring words: ‘For centuries Europe has been an idea, holding out hope of peace and understanding. That hope has been fulfilled. European unification has made peace and prosperity possible. It has brought about a sense of community and overcome differences’ (European Union 2007). Besides the clear idealistic nature of these words, they also illustrate the difficult process of emancipating the EU’s self-image from its historical experiences. The ‘Idea of Europe’ has been a recurrent metaphor used by thinkers of Europe—from Steiner (2004) to Bauman (2004)—to help us grasp the essence of what it means to be European. This desire to learn from the past and the wish to create political communities better suited to the human needs of emancipation is, in 2017, under considerable pressure. This is for several different reasons. First, the difficult political and economic context in the EU, following the financial crisis of 2008 and the austerity measures adopted by the EU, and the centrifugal forces of Brexit. Second, the challenges facing the Euro-Atlantic community with the election of Donald Trump to the White House. Third, the challenges posed by Russian foreign policy to peace and security in Eurasia. In such a context, the EU’s ‘politics of inclusion’ conceptualised by Smith (1996) as a novel era in the regional European order remains a powerful tool for power projection. However, can it be also a means for regional security?
The development of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2003 was meant as a response to the challenges brought about by the new regional reality of 2004 of an enlarged EU. These included high levels of variation in economic development and stability between the Union and its neighbouring regions, the disruptive effects in transnational flows caused by the EU’s rigid borders, or the emerging responsibility of the EU towards its new neighbours and their ambitions of peace and prosperity. Under this new policy framework, which combined elements of gradual and variable geometry political and economic integration with the EU, both the EU and its neighbours expected to create positive dynamics of stabilisation and development. With the development of the ENP, the EU hoped it could still use some of its enlargement-related approaches (promoting economic integration, use of socialisation and conditionality mechanisms, etc.) and simultaneously avoiding full political integration of these states into EU institutions .
Nevertheless, by proposing these intrusive mechanisms for regional stability (such as requiring legal harmonisation with parts of the EU acquis, alignment with Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) statements, and designing roadmaps for domestic reforms) the EU was clearly placing relations with the neighbours outside the scope of normal inter-state foreign policy relations. The expectation of some measure of integration into a shared political community became the underlying rationale legitimising the use of these forms of conditionality . The ENP is a privileged illustration of the EU’s dependence on its integ ration policies as successful security tools and of the pressures to emancipate it from this historical path-dependent approach (Haukkala 2016). This dual challenge creates important constraints on EU action, but also offers surprising insights into new forms of political community taking shape in the pan-European context. It is exactly because the EU’s view of regional peace and security is dependent on its own i ntegrative model that the ENP was designed as a framework to gradually institutionalise a shared political—and, we argue, also a security community between the EU and its neighbours.
This is the point of departure for the reflections in this book. This approach carries important dilemmas for the EU as a regional security actor, in terms of the tools it can deploy to promote peace and stability. It also raises issues regarding power relations in this pan-European space, including among EU member states and other European countries that, although sharing the values of democracy, human rights and rule of law, do not share the institutional framework of the EU. It includes also the former-Soviet states of Eurasia, whose European identity is disputed and whose institutional integratio n in ‘Europe’ has been limited. Finally, this expanding political and security community reaches its limits in the border s of Russia, Turkey and Iran, to varying degrees. Considering the central role of the EU in this European security community , the fact that the organisation is unable to int egrate these regional powers and former empires requires new diplomatic tools. Therefore, looking at the ENP in the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaija n and Georgia) seems particularly suitable to assess the extent to which this policy framework has been able to respond to these challenges and the dilemmas created by the interaction of the European security community with other forms of regional ordering , such as balance of power.
The book is interested in the potential and limitations of the ENP in sustaining the expansion of the European security community , particularly towards Eurasia. The puzzle driving this research is both empiric and theoretical. At the empirical level, research on the South Caucasus’ relations with the EU provides us with a privileged view on the region’s security. The Caucasus’ complex regional security dynamics, intertwining armed violence, challenged sovereignty, institutional and social and human fragility with regional and great power rivalry and competing visions of regional stability, are a hard test for the building of a security community. Moreover, intraregional dynamics, including inter-state conflict between Armenia and Azerba ijan, make the security dynamics of the South Caucasus particularly complex, displaying the limitations of the E NP’s approach to regional security through security community building and the adaptation processes pursued by the European Union.
At the theoretical level, the book is driven by two central puzzles. On the one hand, despite the ENP’s rationale for reinforcing regional security through liberal reforms and integrati on, the EU’s eastern (and southern) neighbourhoods have become less secure, raising questions regarding the ENP’s conception of security through reforms and socialisation. On the other hand, the Eastern Partnership (EaP) illustrates important dynamics of interaction between competing projects of regional stability, namely in its interactions with Russia’s regional ordering initiatives such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Thus, the book continues the discussion by Adler and Greve (2009) on the interaction between different regional ordering mechanisms.
With these puzzles in mind, the research question guiding the book addresses the identification of the factors, which both enable and hinder the ENP’s attempt to expand the European security community to Eurasia. The book maps these factors and the interactions they evidence and contends that there are two strong explanations for the difficulties in expanding the European security community (i.e., security provision at the b orders of the European Union). The first is driven by the contradictions inherent in the EU’s conceptualisation of regional security as being driven by integr ation; and the second is derived from the interaction of the security community with competing balance of power structures.
Through this analysis, the book provides readers with an updated and innovative approach to the EU’s role as a security actor and particularly the security community-building dynamics of the ENP (see Lynch 2005; Cameron and Balfour 2006; Gänzle 2007; Jeandesboz 2007; Christou 2010; Delcour 2010 among others). It further makes a theoretically informed contribution to the literature on EU relations with the South Caucasus. With these objectives in mind, the book has three interrelated goals. First, by assessing the ENP through the lenses of the security community expansion, the book engages with previous literature on the topic (Rieker and Bremberg 2014; Noutcheva et al. 2013), moving it forward in two central ways. First, the book rejects the need to choose between constructivist-driven analytical schemes that focus on norms and those focusing on practices as t he main vehicles through which shared perspectives of peaceful change develop. This book uses a constructivist-inspired take on security community expansion, looking at the role of ideas and specific practices as being mutually constitutive (at times reinforcing each other, at times contradicting each other). Second, the book conceptualises the EU’s vision of regional security in a continuum from integra tion and community building to geopolitical competition taking up previous contributions that considered how the EU has expanded its security community (Kavalski 2008) and updating it to the ENP institutional context, where integratio n is either not offered or, in some cases, not desired.
The European Security Community
Th e book puts forward the conceptual framework of security community expansion to shed light on the dilemmas of the EU’s developing security functions and the changing dynamics in the South Caucasus. We define security community expansion as the ability of a group of states, currently enjoying a security community, to develop dynamics of positive integr ation with other polities in order to create the conditions for the development of common expectations of peaceful change. We are therefore interested in researching the processes through which the security community, which the EU enjoys, is, or can be, expanded and the extent to which the ENP responds to this purpose. We also address the challenges posed by the interaction with other forms of regional ordering in this context.
The concept of security communities has been a rather problematic, albeit recurrent, tool for scholars of International Relations and policy makers to understand inter-state security relations. This problematic nature arises mainly because the concept tries to explain the absence of conflict among sovereign states and the development of long-term expectations of peaceful interaction. Considering the long-standing realist tradition in the study and conduct of international affairs, which in its offensive form posits, among other things, that states interact in a context of international anarchy where their security is constantly under threat and is assured only by their accumulation of power, the possibility of long-term peace seems rather unlikely. European integration , and the period of peace among European nations this process has assured, is often perceived as the best empirical illustration of this concept. The success of the EU in preventing armed violence among its members is also a fundamental test for the validity of the concept, although worldwide there are other illustrations of security c...