ABSTRACT
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was certainly not the Union’s fi rst attempt at creating an integrated policy framework towards the neighbours. The ENP was preceded by the adoption of three Common Strategies, 1 an instrument which had been included by the Treaty of Amsterdam to overcome the disjunction between political and economic dimensions of Union external policies. Common Strategies have been adopted for Russia, Ukraine and the Mediterranean, but they failed to achieve their political goal: they were designed to overcome the pillar-divide but had been too meticulously negotiated, were strongly connected to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and fi nally became nothing more than inventories of existing policies to a particular country or region. 2 The ENP builds upon that foundation, and as a consequence was constructed ‘above and beyond’ specifi c competencies through employing soft legal action plans to further Union external objectives.
