scholarly journals The Resilience of the EU Neighbours to the South and to the East

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (86) ◽  
pp. 6-41
Author(s):  
Nikolay N. Gudalov ◽  
Evgeny Yu Treshchenkov

Resilience is a widespread concept and a key priority for the EU. We focus on resilience’s relations with stability. These notions have been subject to ongoing theoretical debate and have not been clearly separated in EU discourses. We explore how resilience and stability have been used regarding the Southern and Eastern dimensions of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and suggest how their different meanings may be better distinguished and conceptualised. Resilience has penetrated the ENP’s discourses unevenly and attracted the limited interest of the neighbours. Besides, the EU’s policies will likely face numerous practical problems mostly similar to the ENP’s both dimensions. The EU’s policies themselves have disturbed stability in its neighbourhood, and now, even restoring the old stability would be problematic, let alone attaining a more positive one. Furthermore, the EU could impose its views regarding stability and/or resilience. Also, Brussels could de facto uphold negative stability and/or resilience.

Author(s):  
Tatsiana Shaban

The European Union’s neighbourhood is complex and still far from being stable. In Ukraine, significant progress has occurred in many areas of transition; however, much work remains to be done, especially in the field of regional development and governance where many legacies of the Soviet model remain. At the crossroads between East and West, Ukraine presents an interesting case of policy development as an expression of European Union (EU) external governance. This paper asks the question: why was the relationship between the EU and Ukraine fairly unsuccessful at promoting stability in the region and in Ukraine? What was missing in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in Ukraine that rendered the EU unable to prevent a conflict on the ground? By identifying security, territorial, and institutional challenges and opportunities the EU has faced in Ukraine, this paper underlines the most important factors accounting for the performance of its external governance and crisis management in Ukraine.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v12i2.1310


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Reisner

The book series European Studies in the Caucasus offers innovative perspectives on regional studies of the Caucasus. By embracing the South Caucasus as well as Turkey and Russia, it moves away from a traditional viewpoint of European Studies that considers the countries of the region as objects of Europeanization. This second volume demonstrates this by looking into forms of inter-regionalism in the Black Sea–South Caucasus area in fields of economic cooperation, Europeanization of energy and environmental policies, discussing how the region is addressed in the elaboration of a new German Eastern Policy. In the section on norm diffusion, the contributors assess the normative power strategy of the EU and its paradoxes in the region, its impact on civil society development in Armenia, and democracy promotion in Georgia. In the section on legal approximation, issues of a global climate change regime and competition law in Georgia as well as penitentiary governance reform in the South Caucasus according to EU standards and policies are analyzed. All contributions also review regional or local contestations for the topics discussed here.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (Winter 2021) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramazan Erdağ

This article discusses why Russia replaced the South Stream project with the TurkStream by changing its route and name, and why Turkey is involved in a project on the North-South line although it plays a vital role in the Trans-Anatolia Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) project in the southern gas corridor. The article first examines the Russia-Ukraine natural gas crisis. It then moves to analyze the reasons behind Russia’s changing of the name and the route of the South Stream project. After exploring Turkey’s involvement in the project, the article concludes by arguing that both countries adopted a win-win approach toward the project that Russia has gained a significant tariff advantage and freedom from the EU third-party-access rule. The article claims that although both Russia and Turkey have different perspectives on some issues in international politics, they can develop their cooperation with a win-win approach in the TurkStream project.


Author(s):  
Beatrix Futák-Campbell

This chapter is about collective identity and how practitioners define this highly complex topic. Two main patterns emerge from the corpus. Practitioners’ main concerns while discussing the concept of ‘European’ identity are as follows: to differentiate between European neighbours and the neighbours of Europe, and to account for the European credentials of the South Caucasus or Kazakhstan. In addressing differentiation between the neighbours, practitioners draw on geography, culture, history and economic ties to distinguish between countries which are in Europe and those which are not. At the same time practitioners make explicit distinctions between the key EU policies: the European Neighbourhood Policy and the enlargement policy. They also build up the category of the ‘European’. When they offer accounts of the South Caucasus and Kazakhstan, one practitioner relies on a heredity account of the European civilization, while others seek to justify, in different ways, the European-ness of the Caucasus and potentially Kazakhstan.


Author(s):  
Graham Avery

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the European Union and the widening of Europe. Enlargement is often seen as the EU's most successful foreign policy. It has extended prosperity, stability, and good governance to neighbouring countries by means of its membership criteria. However, enlargement is much more than foreign policy: it is the process whereby the external becomes internal. It is about how non-member countries become members, and shape the development of the EU itself. The chapter first compares widening and deepening before discussing enlargement as soft power. It then explains how the EU has expanded and why countries want to join. It also looks at prospective member states: the Balkan countries, Turkey, Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland. Finally, it examines the European Neighbourhood Policy.


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