ABSTRACT
Introduction: the EU’s long journey to the neighbourhood The European Union (EU) has come a long way in attempting to develop more sustainable relations with its neighbourhood. Initially conceived as a ‘proximity policy’ (European Commission 2003), a mixed approach with an ambitious and yet ambiguous vision to ‘see a “ring of friends” surrounding the Union . . . from Morocco to Russia and the Black Sea’ (Prodi 2002), within a decade it has evolved into a comprehensive European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) with a complex set of wide-ranging instruments and outreach activities. More specifically, by 2009 the policy branched out into two distinct regional initiatives – the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) – and now boasts a more differentiated focus and a highly technocratic apparatus of expertise, budgetary and legal instruments. The Association Agreements in particular have become a referent framework for structuring the EU’s external relations, especially in the East, which, aside the political acquis, also comprised Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs) and Mobility Partnerships (European Commission and High Representative 2015b). And, yet, the policy has been struggling to gain traction within the neighbourhood and remains surprisingly ineffectual in terms of stabilizing the region and delivering the EU’s transformative agenda. By the EU’s own admission, ‘today’s neighbourhood is less stable than it was ten years ago’, being engulfed in ‘the on-going conflict in Ukraine . . . caused by an increasingly assertive Russian foreign policy’, afflicted by civil war in Syria, conflict in Libya, ‘complex political change in Egypt’ and a stalled Middle East Peace Process, all serving to ‘increase the challenges faced by both the EU and its partners, aggravating economic and social pressures, irregular migration and refugee flows, security threats and . . . diverging aspirations’ (European Commission and High Representative 2015a: 2). What has gone amiss in the EU’s relations with its neighbourhood, and especially the Eastern region, which is the focus of this chapter? Part of the problem, as this chapter contends, is the EU’s continuing failure to imagine a new social order, which would give a relational value to ‘the Other’, the outsiders, and not by way of disciplining them to the EU’s purported standards but, rather, by way
of aligning existing differences to a mutually agreeable ‘norm’. While generally often being reflective in its external approach, which mainly focuses on the expansion of new policy and financial instruments, the EU admittedly struggles to understand the world beyond its borders – that is, the world pari passu, and yet predicated on different norms and often driven by complementary commitments. Instead, what seems to be increasingly the case is that the EU perceives the outside as an opportunity to extend its own mode of governance ‘inside-out’ (Lavenex 2004), and not by way of contestation – ‘the political’ – but rather by way of ‘politics’, that is, as a process of establishing its rules of the game (Edkins 1999). At the same time, the EU often seems to forget that ‘politics is not in any sense given’ and that ‘it is the result of contestation’ (Donald and Hall, quoted in Edkins 1999: 2). Hence, when externalized, it has to be open to ideological struggles and mutations to render the production of a new optimal space and reciprocal circuits of power legitimate and sustainable, before sealing them off by rules of bureaucracy and technology of expertise. As Edkins (1999: xii) insists, in today’s world, ‘much of what we call “politics” is in many senses “depoliticized” or technologized: the room for real political change has been displaced by a technology of expertise or the rule of bureaucracy’, thus leaving the world more exposed and vulnerable to the normative impositions with ensuing conflicts of interest and resistance – a situation to which the conflicts in Ukraine and the wider neighbouring region unambiguously testify. Based on scholarly literature and empirical research in Brussels, Baku and Chisinau between 2014 and 2015, this chapter takes the opportunity to revisit and reframe the EU’s agenda in the Eastern neighbourhood. It argues that, in order to make EU policies more sustainable for dealing with ‘the outside’ as distinct and yet permeable to the negotiation of new boundaries of knowledge, one can no longer afford to simply tinker with policy contents or to experiment with new instruments and budgets. A new outlook is required which would problematize the very fundamentals of the EU’s relations with the outside in order to imbue a new sense of direction and commitment both for the EU and for its Eastern partners. This chapter therefore contends that EU ‘politics’ ought to become more open to ideological debate and contestation: it needs to be ‘repoliticized’, with ‘the political’ firmly entering the ‘politics’ agenda, precisely to challenge the hegemony of the existing liberal world order and to unlock the potential for making power relations more attuned with the outside and consequently more sustainable. The chapter will proceed as follows. After introducing the conceptual framework of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, we will evaluate the ontology of the EU’s relations with the Eastern region, to expose its self-domineering and depoliticized modus operandi. It will be argued that, while generally reflective, the EU’s approach remains predominantly unilateral and technocratic, effectively promoting EU ‘politics’ (a technocracy of governance) rather than engaging with ‘the political’ as an opportunity to legitimate its course and unlock the potential for a new reciprocal space. Consequently, being caught in its own ‘politics’, the EU continues to grapple with the concept of ‘othering’, unable to ‘move outside’
(Foucault 2007: 117) to understand the world for ‘what it is’ rather for ‘what it should be’, from the EU’s perspective. Hence, bringing ‘the political’ back in, and repoliticizing EU external relations, we argue, may shed a new light on our understanding of the role of the Other in making EU regional politics more effective and sustainable. Furthermore, we will demonstrate the relevance of ‘othering’ by unpacking its two central tenets – ‘differentiation’ and ‘normalization’. The former has become a key word in the EU’s revised neighbourhood strategy (European Commission and High Representative 2015b) and, yet, it still purports differentiation as ‘deviation’ from the EU-set norms, instead of conceiving it as a process of alignment with partners’ needs and perceptions, which will be effectively shown with reference to the example of EU-Azerbaijan relations. Normalization, which signifies the interplay of different normalities (Foucault 2007), requires the EU’s recognition and acceptance of differing norms in a joint effort to harmonize relations towards a new joint ‘normal’, which in turn will be illustrated on the case of Moldova’s visa liberalization and border management processes.
