ABSTRACT
Introduction The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched in 2003-04 as a novel kind of both external governance and integration policy on the Eastern and Southern borders of the European Union (EU). The Strategy Paper introducing the ENP states in its first paragraph that this new policy comes as a response to the historic expansion of the EU and in order ‘to realise the objectives of the European Security Strategy’ (European Commission 2004: 1). Its vision ‘involves a ring of countries, sharing the EU’s fundamental values and objectives, drawn into an increasingly close relationship, going beyond co-operation to involve a significant measure of economic and political integration’ (ibid.). In line with this vision, the EU’s neighbourhood policy has been widely interpreted by analysts as a tool of external governance in which the European Union combines the pursuit of general foreign policy goals with the partial extension of its own regulatory framework (see for instance Lavenex 2004). Governance in this regard can be defined as the ‘establishment and operation of social institutions . . . capable of resolving conflicts, facilitating cooperation, or more generally alleviating collective action problems in a world of interdependent actors’ (Young 1994: 53). In the geopolitical context of the post-Cold War era, governance implies a non-coercive creation of order based on norms and rules around which actors’ expectations converge. On the one hand, the EU aims at external Europeanization, extending European norms and rules outside its borders, while integrating non-EU areas into a single European space (in material and normative terms). On the other hand, it aims at consolidating stability and addressing key security challenges emanating from the neighbourhood and beyond. In particular, protracted conflicts, organized crime, energy security and geopolitical competition in the wider Black Sea area have been placed at the top of the list of European security threats. This double scope of the ENP − exporting European governance on the one hand and consolidating stability on the other hand − suffers from an inherent tension. The export of liberal democratic institutions in ‘closed’ societies (that is, societies with rigid stratification and limited freedom) risks leading to social unrest until the ‘new normal’ is established. On the other side, prioritizing stability might undermine the promotion of ‘good governance’.
