ABSTRACT

Since 2002, the European Union has struggled to formulate a coherent strategy for the ‘wider Europe’, then including several countries that subsequently became neighbours of the enlarged community. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) emerged out of the dilemma over membership that faced the EU, offering an uneasy and varied mix of proposals and plans for closer cooperation with a very diverse group of countries. In essence, the ENP is a process of norms diffusion in the European ‘near abroad’, largely influenced by the EU’s security concerns and realized under the constraints of the ‘enlargement fatigue’. Most analysts of the ENP focus on the mechanisms through which norms are spread. Inevitably, comparisons are made between the neighbourhood and enlargement policies; these two policies share numerous similarities – in their origins (Jeandesboz 2007), principles (extending the European internal order, embedded in its social preferences) and methods (conditionality and socialization) (Kelley 2006; Tulmets 2006) – but there is also a fundamental distinction between the two policies in the absence of membership prospects for the ENP. Other studies are centred on the political and security interests developed in the ENP framework, in various fields: migration, asylum, justice and home affairs, etc. It is also generally well-noted that because of security and political considerations, the new enlarged EU can no longer stay passive in its own ‘semiperiphery’. The latter is now closely linked to the ‘core’ through a whole set of features – geographical mobility of individuals, economic factors, claims for ‘Europeanness’, and geopolitical proximities.