ABSTRACT
Although official EU documents and speeches by Commissioners and politicians are to a large extent available online, an analysis based on interviews and an understanding of more informal processes regarding the origins and implementation of a policy requires collecting more empirical material which is not always easy to obtain. This is partly due to the fact that interviewees sometimes recast events and negotiations differently, or the fact that civil servants tend to often change their position in the EU and especially in the more politicized administrations of the neighbouring countries. This chapter uses discourse analysis to show continuity, or the lack thereof, in the core ENP objectives and attempts to triangulate the data by drawing on EU documents, interviews and other sources to analyse behaviour and practice.1
