The European Neighbourhood Policy: ‘Conditionality-lite’?

EU Enlargement and the Wider Neighbourhood


The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) evolved out of the final stage of the EU’s eastward enlargement, which required the EU to better define its relationship with the new eastern neighbours – the ‘outsiders’. Policy discussions in the Commission and the Council intensified from December 2002, when then Commission President Romano Prodi spoke of the enlarged EU’s need for a ‘ring of friends’. The policy was first outlined in a Commission communication on The Wider Europe in March 2003, which included the EU’s southern neighbours. ENP has a clear security dimension: the EU is concerned about illegal migration, organized crime, the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and environmental disasters or ethnic conflicts destabilizing or spilling over its borders. In July 2003 a task force under Günter Verheugen, then Commissioner for Enlargement, was set up to develop the strategy and process behind ENP. The European Security Strategy of December 2003 makes a secure neighbourhood one of the EU’s strategic objectives. ENP assumed its final form in a strategy paper of May 2004, which extended the policy coverage further to include the countries of the South Caucasus. Thus, 16 countries - six of which belong to the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) - were designated as falling within Prodi’s notion of the ‘ring of friends’.1

ENP expresses three related concerns of the EU: the desire for political stability on the EU’s borders, the wish to mitigate the real or perceived negative effects of enlargement on neighbouring countries, and an attempt to define an alternative to full EU membership that would be attractive to the neighbours. ENP is located in the fuzzy space between the EU’s partnerships and full membership; it has been aptly described as ‘politics of the half-open door’. The difficulty for the EU is that some ENP countries, notably Ukraine, have already declared EU membership to be their strategic objective. Furthermore, as the EU’s response to Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ demonstrated, there is uncertainty within the EU itself as to whether ENP is an alternative, or precursor, to full membership.

During the EU’s eastward enlargement, the EU applied conditionality to secure compliance from the candidates on a wide range of political, economic and legal matters. The consistency and effectiveness of EU conditionality, however, has remained questionable, and the record of its impact on policy change is mixed across accession countries and policy areas. ENP might at first sight appear to be an alternative form of ‘conditionality-lite’ for countries that are not seen as future candidates. Paradoxically, the conditionality inherent in ENP is ‘hard’ rather than ‘soft’, as compliance is not rewarded with the ‘carrot’ of full membership.

The inconsistency of ENP is clear from the way the EU has amended its incentive structure. ENP was explicitly built around a country’s prospect to participate fully in the EU’s four freedoms (movement of goods, services, capital and persons). However, the freedom of movement of persons has proven to be too politically controversial and gradually it has been replaced by references to visa agreements. Moreover, the EU has increasingly stressed that ENP’s benefits are bilateral and economic (a free trade area and the offer of a ‘stake’ in the EU’s internal market) rather than political.
A key incentive in ENP is funding. It envisages the streamlining of technical assistance programmes for CIS countries, such as TACIS and Interreg, into a new financial ‘ENP Instrument’ (ENPI). It was proposed to commit almost €15 billion Euros to ENPI during the 2007-2013 budget period, but the final figure might be closer to €12 billion. In principle, such funding gives the EU leverage in securing reforms to promote ‘good governance’ and improvements in the trade and investment environment in ways that accord with the EU’s own security and economic interests, especially with regard to cross-border initiatives.

The core institutional elements of ENP are the bilateral, tailored ‘Action Plans’ between the EU and individual countries.2 This emphasis on bilateralism is hardly consistent with the claim to an overarching ‘neighbourhood’ policy. Legally, the Action Plans do not overrule the Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCAs). Nevertheless, expectations may be raised given that the Action Plans resemble the ‘accession partnership documents’ with the candidate countries. The Action Plans and the monitoring process surrounding them are reminiscent of the formalism, generalities, and absence of clear benchmarks that characterized the regular reports on the candidate countries during the Eastern enlargement.

ENP’s sweep from the CIS to North Africa counterbalanced the interests of the EU’s northern and southern member states. Evidently however, the priorities for the eastern and southern dimensions of ENP are not easily reconcilable. A southern neighbour like Morocco has long ago seen its membership application refused on grounds of not being a ‘European’ country, whereas this argument cannot be applied to the eastern neighbours, such as Ukraine and Moldova. The sweep of ENP has widened the EU’s geopolitical concerns: the EU is becoming more directly engaged in managing regional and local crises on its periphery, which may require it to develop a stronger capacity for conflict management, possibly involving a military component. In the case of Eastern Europe and the CIS, such engagement creates tensions in the EU’s ‘strategic partnership’ with the Russian Federation, while, in the case of the Middle East, it causes friction with the United States.

The political inconsistencies of the EU’s implementation of ENP are most evident in the case of Ukraine. The EU-Ukraine Action Plan of February 2005 was largely negotiated under the old Kuchma regime. The ‘Orange Revolution’ of late 2004 and Yushchenko’s subsequent push for full membership forced the EU to dilute the logic of ENP and drop the label ‘neighbour’. The EU added ‘10 points’ to the Action Plan which included a promise to ‘respond’ if Ukraine implements the Action Plan, and a commitment to increased financial assistance. The core substance of the Action Plan has not changed but the door has been opened a little wider to the prospect of Ukraine’s membership of the Union. Ukraine’s Partnership and Cooperation Agreement is up for review in 2008, and the Action Plan adds to the momentum for a redefinition of the relationship between the EU and Ukraine at that stage. There seems to be a tacit acceptance in the Commission and the Council that the Action Plan has de facto acknowledged Ukraine’s membership prospect.

The limitations of ENP are all too apparent. It comprises a large number of diverse countries that are geographically spread out on the EU’s periphery, with very different reform challenges, and varying links with the EU or individual member states. In such conditions, the chances for ENP to become a coherent and successful foreign policy instrument for the EU are slim. In its current form ENP will work best in those countries that do not aim for membership, or have almost no prospect of securing it.

We can debate whether ENP evolved as a considered attempt by the EU to provide itself with a vision for the future relationship with its periphery, or was a rushed effort to give itself a breathing space after the 2004 enlargement. The paradox of ENP, however, is that as the ENP countries are adopting EU norms and legislation, and are being socialized into EU networks, the expectations for an ‘ENP-plus’ grows. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was the first serious test for ENP, and the EU blinked. The EU-Ukrainian relationship is likely to be redefined in a way that supersedes the ENP at the end of the three-year Action Plan. This could then have a knock-on effect on expectations elsewhere.

Gwendolyn Sasse is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative European Politics at the London School of Economics, and a deputy editor of Development and Transition. A fuller version of this piece will be published as ‘Conditionality-lite: The European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Eastern Neighbours’, in: Costanza Musu and Nicola Casarini (eds), The Road to Convergence: European Foreign Policy in an Evolving International System, Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2006. g.sasse@lse.ac.uk