ABSTRACT
Introduction The 2004 ‘big bang’ enlargement of the European Union (EU) shaped the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in both its substance and the approach to its study. The success of the enlargement policy in bringing about political, social and economic transformations in Central and Eastern European countries also inspired the new policy launched towards 16 Eastern European and Southern Mediterranean neighbours. The ENP’s creation stimulated lively academic debates following the lessons learnt during the EU enlargement process. In these debates, the EU’s influence on its neighbourhood represented a main concern for both practitioners and scholars. On the one hand, the practitioners designed and implemented policies with the unambiguous aim of shaping the transformative process in the neighbourhood (European Commission 2004). On the other hand, scholars attempted to capture and generalize these efforts and their effects. Therefore, the concepts of EU normative power (Pace 2007; Bicchi 2006), transformative power (Börzel and Risse 2009) and ethical power (Barbé and Johansson-Nogués 2008), as well as approaches related to conditionality, socialization and external governance (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009), were employed to account for the EU’s influence in the framework of the ENP. These EU-centred concepts and approaches assumed the EU’s superiority and independent influence in the neighbourhood. However, such assumptions also have certain consequences: they highlight some phenomena and exclude others, and they make some issues more visible while ignoring others. The assumption of the EU’s superior centrality in the neighbourhood neglects the possibility that the EU itself is influenced by other international actors in spite of the fact that its power ‘is significantly circumscribed by the attitudes, preferences, strategies and identities of those it seeks to influence’ (Browning and Christou 2010). Therefore, this chapter aims to examine the theoretical assumptions underlying the mainstream approaches in the study of the ENP. It asks how the EU’s activities in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) are influenced by other international actors such as international organizations (IOs). I argue that international regimes1 and IOs
normatively structure EU actions in the neighbourhood and actively contribute to the elaboration and implementation of EU policies in that neighbourhood. In order to illustrate this argument, I develop the idea of power as relations shaping the possibilities for other actors. The power relations can be specific by directly involving actors in interactions or diffused and mediated by physical, temporal and social distance. Direct power relations emphasize agency, indirectly underlining the structural aspects of power relations (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 47-9). By emphasizing the relational nature of power, I draw on the so-called ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences. The practice turn underpins an increasingly prominent approach to studying international politics and European integration (Neumann 2002; Bueger and Gadinger 2014; Adler and Pouliot 2011; AdlerNissen 2016). Practice theories have also inspired a growing number of studies addressing some aspects of EU foreign policy (Bicchi 2014; Kuus 2014) and the ENP in both its Southern and Eastern dimensions (Bremberg 2015; Korosteleva et al. 2013). In this chapter, I elaborate specifically on thinking tools conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu (1977; see also Grenfell 2008) to address the consequences of analytical concepts and assumptions on the study of power relations. The chapter is structured into five sections. First, I discuss two mainstream power-related assumptions in the literature on the ENP. Second, I introduce Bourdieu’s thinking tools, which are employed in this analysis. In the first empirical sections, I analyse the symbolic power of international regimes and IOs as the providers of normative structures shaping the relations between the EU and the EaP partners. Then, I study the network of interdependencies between the EU and IOs, which is characterized by the EU’s centrality without superiority as the promotor of transformations in the EaP. The last section summarizes the findings.
