November 2024
In September 2024 I was invited by the Anna Lindh Foundation to a stimulating workshop at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (oiip) titled “Old and New Leverages in EU-Neighbourhood Relations". The workshop in its various panels were reflecting on the state of the European Union’s European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) 20 years on. The workshop encouraged my own thinking on the issue.
The ENP was born in 2004 as a tool to deal with a set of countries surrounding the EU. It was also conceived at a time where the EU’s foreign policy was imbued with optimism. Eastern enlargement was seemingly such a success in providing a template for political and economic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, that the EU member states felt that the same methodology could be applied elsewhere. At the time, this assumption did not seem far off the mark as Color Revolutions took place in Eastern Europe. In North Africa and Middle East various leaders at least paid lip service to the goal of political and economic reform. The ENP thus appeared timely. The policy was hailed as an ambitious foreign policy to stimulate change in numerous political, social and economic areas by enticing partner countries with the prospect of “all but institutions”, i.e. they could seek as close of a form of an integration with the EU as they desired without becoming full-blown member states.
Two decades later, the situation could not be more different. The Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, as well as the different “cold peace” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Libya, Syria, and the ever tense relations between Algeria and Morocco have put paid to any prospects for sustainable political and economic reform in both the EU’s Eastern neighborhood and the southern. Moreover, across both regions more repressive forms of authoritarianism are setting in, which appear to then quell any democratic aspirations, however minor, of the peoples of the ENP regions. For these reasons, the question arises: has the ENP become irrelevant as a tool to manage the EU’s relations with neighboring countries?
This question was the gist of the workshop. My own thoughts on the topic were that while one can probably say that the ENP is no longer an effective means for the EU to structure its relations with the ENP East and South, experience shows that policies rarely “die”. Policies tend to linger and seldom are they given an expiration date. The reason for that is that the irrelevance or ‘death’ of a policy would entail a loss of face or failure of the institutions that created it. Policies thus do not go away. They tend to continue as long as that bureaucrats keep churning out performance indicators and assign budget allotments. The ENP will thus continue to live on as a policy and as a part of the architecture of policies that the EU has created for its neighboring countries since the 1990s.
However, at the same time it is still possible to affirm that the ENP is no longer being the main, nor even a very important, channel through which relations between the EU and neighboring countries passes. There are many reasons for this. We have already noted that the numerous conflicts in both the Eastern and Southern neighborhood are preventing the type of transformation the ENP envisioned. Second, the EU-promoted norms inherent to the ENP no longer in vogue.That is to say, in a context of rising authoritarianism and/or political repression in the neighboring regions and around the world, many EU partner countries, critical of EU promotion of human rights and democracy since decades back, now feel vindicated and emboldened in their resistance to some of the norms promoted through the ENP. The window of opportunity for positive normative political change that opened in the 1990s, and again with different popular revolutions in the two regions, appears to have closed firmly in 2024. Third, some of the ENP countries (Moldova and Ukraine) are aspiring for political and economic reform, but they are doing so in the framework of EU enlargement, not as a consequence of ENP. Finally, part of the demise of the ENP’s relevance has also been the EU itself. The economic crises of 2008-2012, of 2020 (COVID-19) and 2022 (energy), has inevitably meant less EU aid to spend on neighboring countries. Moreover, there is a frustration inside EU that the ENP has yielded so few tangible positive results.
At the moment it is fair to say that the ENP limps on as one of the many foreign and security initiatives that the EU has created for its eastern and southern neighbors since the 1990s. The tendency for the EU in the last decade, however, has been to stay away from grand policy initiatives à la ENP and instead focus on piecemeal, pragmatic initiatives. The piecemeal EU policies toward neighboring countries, focused on cooperation in specific sectors, are perhaps realistic in the current global conjuncture of conflict and democratic erosion but, the EU’s and the ENP’s goal of trying to champion positive political transformation in these countries apparently has been abandoned. There seems to be a loss of faith within the EU that the ENP’s goal of promoting a ‘ring of friends’ can ever be fulfilled.
Acknowledgement: This blog was funded by the European Union through the Jean Monnet Chair in Global Actor EU: The International Relations of the European Union in a Competitive and Fractured World (GLOBALEUTY), project number 101175018.
Disclaimer: Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, the European Education and Culture Executive Agency nor the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.