ABSTRACT
Introduction: theorizing the European Neighbourhood Policy The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) emerged in 2002 in response to calls in the European Union (EU) for a new ‘proximity policy’ that would mitigate any negative effects of the EU’s imminent Eastern enlargement on its future neighbours. Initially focused on Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine as well as Russia, the ENP quickly expanded, first to the Southern Mediterranean countries and then to the South Caucasus, reflecting the EU member states’ different interests in the neighbouring regions. After Russia opted out of the new policy in favour of a more equal bilateral partnership with the EU, the ENP embraced 16 neighbours to the EU’s East and South. It aimed ‘to avoid drawing new dividing lines in Europe and to promote stability and prosperity within and beyond the new borders of the Union’ by offering these neighbours ‘the prospect of a stake in the EU’s Internal Market and further integration’ and by turning them into ‘a ring of friends’ (European Commission 2003: 4). Then European Commission President Prodi (2002: 6) spoke of a framework ‘in which we could ultimately share everything but institutions’. The ENP instruments were to a large extent modelled on the EU’s enlargement policy, using similar tools as for candidate countries in terms of benchmarking, regulatory and legislative approximation, monitoring and reporting, political conditionality, technical and financial assistance, or dialogues. The EU’s neighbourhood and the ENP have over the last decade had to cope with manifold problems. At its launch, these challenges ranged from the management of borders and trade, investment and infrastructure networks to ‘threats to mutual security, whether from the trans-border dimension of environmental and nuclear hazards, communicable diseases, illegal immigration, trafficking, organised crime or terrorist networks’ (European Commission 2003: 6). To these challenges came events such as the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, the Arab Spring, which began in December 2010 and led to the ousting from power of long-time authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and to civil wars in Libya and Syria, the advent of the jihadist Islamic State/Da’esh, the ‘refugee crisis’, the Ukrainian revolts in 2014 and the subsequent annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia, which was followed by a violent conflict involving pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine.
