The Routledge Handbook on the European Neighbourhood Policy

Tobias Schumacher, Andreas Marchetti, Thomas Demmelhuber, Tobias Schumacher, Andreas Marchetti, Thomas Demmelhuber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317429524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook on the European Neighbourhood Policy provides a comprehensive overview of the EU's most important foreign policy instrument, provided by leading experts in the field.

Coherently structured and adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this handbook covers the most important themes, developments and dynamics in the EU's neighbourhood policy framework through a series of cutting-edge contributions. With chapters from a substantial number of scholars who have been influential in shaping the study of the ENP, this handbook serves to encourage debates which will hopefully produce more conceptual as well as neighbourhood-specific perspectives leading to enriching future studies on the EU's policies towards its neighbourhood.

It will be a key reference point both for advanced-level students, scholars and professionals developing knowledge in the fields of EU/European Studies, European Foreign Policy Analysis, Area studies, EU law, and more broadly in political economy, political science, comparative politics and international relations.

PART I

Conceptual, theoretical and legal approaches in the study of the European Neighbourhood Policy

2
BEYOND ENLARGEMENT

Conceptualizing the study of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Frank Schimmelfennig

Introduction: beyond enlargement

From its very beginning, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was designed as an alternative to enlargement. It was limited to neighbouring countries that were not designated as candidate or potential candidate countries, and it offered them participation in a variety of European Union (EU) policies without integration into the EU polity – ‘sharing everything but institutions’ according to Commission President Romano Prodi (Prodi 2002). The ENP reflected both the EU’s reluctance to commit itself to a further expansion of its membership and its realization that the enlarged Union needed to deal with the interdependence at its prospective new borders. It was designed to create a ‘ring of friends’ and zone of stability beyond its formal members (ibid.). At the same time, Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen announced that the new policy would ‘build on the experience’ of eastern enlargement (quoted in Johansson-Nogués 2007: 26), and scholars have highlighted the organizational and practical path-dependencies of enlargement in the ENP (Kelley 2006).

This chapter describes how the ENP has been conceptualized in the academic literature on the EU. I argue that we find the same mix of delimitation and path-dependency as in the politics of the ENP. On the one hand, academic observers of the ENP have not only stressed the differences between the ENP and enlargement but also distinguished the ENP from traditional foreign policy. To the extent that they theorized the ENP at all, they have often imported concepts and theoretical approaches from the study of enlargement, as well as International Relations (IR) and foreign policy analysis. Because the IR concepts are the subject of other chapters in this handbook, I will focus on the literature on European integration.¹

The main sections of this chapter will discuss three core concepts and their application to the ENP – integration, governance and Europeanization. In adapting these core concepts to the EU’s external relations, observers of European integration have benefited from the increasing political diversity within the EU – from uniform to differentiated integration and from the hierarchical ‘community method’ of governance to a diverse set of governance modes and Europeanization mechanisms. Whereas the European integration and enlargement literatures have traditionally focused on the dichotomy of Member States and non-member states, and have regarded other institutional arrangements as irrelevant or transitory, the ENP fits well with an emerging literature on differentiated integration, which not only studies the internal differentiation of integration among EU members but also external differentiation and the selective integration of formal non-members (Holzinger and Schimmelfennig 2012; Schimmelfennig et al. 2015). Similarly, the ‘governance turn’ in the study of European integration initially focused on the (multi-level) policy-making within the EU (Jachtenfuchs 2001), but has since been extended to studying governance modes and outcomes in EU relations with third countries. The ENP has been an important catalyst for the concept of external governance (Lavenex 2004; Schimmelfennig and Wagner 2004). Finally, the study of Europeanization has travelled from an exclusive focus on the Member States (Green Cowles et al. 2001) via the Europeanization of candidate countries (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005a) to the European neighbourhood and beyond (Schimmelfennig 2015).

Integration, governance and Europeanization are conceptually linked but cover different aspects. Integration is mainly concerned with the level and scope of authority transfer from the state to a supranational union. Governance focuses on the forms and modes in which this authority is exercised to make binding collective rules beyond the state. Europeanization refers to the mechanisms through which European governance affects states and their policies – and the effects they produce. For each of these core concepts, the chapter will give an overview of conceptual developments, sketch theoretical arguments and summarize key findings.

Differentiated integration

Traditionally, EU studies have drawn a hard border between ‘integration’, reserved for the Member States of the EU, and ‘external relations’ with non-member states. In this conceptual dichotomy, ‘enlargement’ denoted the formal transition from non-member to member status or from external relations to integration. This has never been an accurate description of European integration. Since the Treaty of Rome came into effect in 1958, the EU and its predecessor organizations have developed a variety of association arrangements for non-member states, some with and some without a link to potential future membership. Early examples are the Association Agreements of the early 1960s with Greece and Turkey and the free trade agreements of the 1970s with Western European non-members. These arrangements have responded to international constellations, in which the Member States rejected enlargement and/or a non-member state refused to join, and in which both the member and the non-member state had a common interest in an institutionalized relationship that allows the non-member state to participate selectively in European integration (Schimmelfennig 2016).

During its history, the EU has thus created an ever more fine-grained system of differentiated integration for non-member states. The grades of membership in this system have been both durable and permeable. They have been durable because none of the institutional arrangements established since the early 1960s have come into disuse. At the same time, the grades have been permeable because most countries have moved up across the grades of membership – for example, Austria, Finland and Sweden, from free trade partners to Member States; and 13 Central and Eastern European countries, from trade and cooperation arrangements, via association and candidacy, to membership. Only a few have moved down (such as Belarus or Yugoslavia).

These developments have prompted scholars to go beyond a dichotomous conceptualization of membership and enlargement. The concepts of ‘horizontal institutionalization’ (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2002: 503) and ‘horizontal integration’ (Leuffen et al. 2013: 11–12) refer to a continuous process of territorial extension of EU norms and rules and a continuous measure of the EU’s territorial scope. ‘Horizontal differentiation’ (Leuffen et al. 2013: 12; Schimmelfennig et al. 2015: 765) captures the fact that the states of Europe and its neighbourhood, participate selectively and at various levels of integration in EU policies. Horizontal differentiation is, of course, not limited to non-members of the EU; it extends to formal EU members who do not participate in EU policy areas such as the euro or Schengen areas.

The horizontal differentiation of European integration has boosted conceptual innovation. Terms such as ‘multi-speed Europe’, ‘core Europe’, ‘variable geometry’ and ‘Europe à la carte’ have long entered scholarly and political discourse (Stubb 1996), but mainly refer to Member States. Regarding neighbouring non-members, Christiansen et al. (2000) speak of ‘fuzzy borders’ and Lavenex (2011) and Schimmelfennig (2010) map them as ‘concentric circles’. Categorizations of the EU as an ‘empire’ are also consistent with the idea of graded, differentiated membership and fuzzy, flexible borders, which are common features of empires (Beck and Grande 2011; Marks 2012; Zielonka 2006).

Measurement of differentiated integration is often based on the number or share of EU rules or policies that European states subscribe to. Such quantitative measures are only available for the differentiated integration of formal Member States (Schimmelfennig and Winzen 2014; Duttle et al. 2017), the European Economic Area (EEA) (Frommelt 2017) and to some extent the candidate countries based on the Commission’s Progress Reports (Böhmelt and Freyburg 2013) and national scoreboards for the adoption of EU legislation. There are no such comparative quantitative assessments for the ENP.

Classification schemes including the ENP are therefore generally based on qualitative distinctions of the level (depth) and (policy) scope of integration. Lavenex (2011) distinguishes four circles of external governance based on the strength of regulatory and organizational ties. Gstöhl (2015) classifies the EU’s expansion of economic community with regard to scope and the degree of institutionalization (a measure of depth). Schimmelfennig (2016) uses an inductive ranking of grades of membership for formal non-members – trade, cooperation, free trade, bilateralism, association, internal market (EEA) and candidacy, which can also be reconstructed as representing an increase in the level and scope of integration.

Where does the ENP fit in the concept and classification of differentiated integration? On the one hand, the ENP is generally in line with the notion and underlying rationale of horizontal, external differentiation. It provides for the selective participation of ENP countries in a wide range of EU policies. Its initial purpose, to create a ‘ring of friends’, is in line with the ‘concentric circles’ metaphor. The ENP is an open-ended process (up to a point) allowing for the progressive integration of neighbouring countries. Generally, the ENP is classified as the ‘outer circle’ of European integration. In Lavenex (2011), it is the circle with the weakest ties; Gstöhl (2015) classifies the ENP as having both narrow scope and low depth.

There is a problem with general classifications of the ENP because the ENP is differentiated itself. Informal differentiation across ENP countries results from the Action Plans they negotiate with the EU, which vary greatly in the scope and intensity of cooperation. Some ENP countries do not even have an Action Plan. In addition, differentiation is based on formal agreements, such as different types of bilateral agreements (Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreements, Partnership and Cooperation Agreements, and the planned Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs)), as well as the separate, more multilateral frameworks of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). Differentiation has been emphasized even more as a core principle in the 2015 ENP review (Delcour 2015). Thus, the ENP is differentiated across countries and across policies. This has been corroborated in comparative analyses of integration across sectors in the ENP that highlight the variety in the scope and intensity of cooperation across issue-areas (Lavenex et al. 2009; Lavenex 2011). These features make it difficult to classify the ENP as a single grade of membership.

Finally, what explains the placement of the ENP and ENP countries in the outer circle of European integration and the low grades of membership? Generally, analyses of non-member state-differentiated integration are descriptive rather than explanatory (Lavenex 2011; Gstöhl 2015). By contrast, Schimmelfennig (2016) distinguishes between two groups of non-member countries – the ‘refuser’ countries that do not want (further) integration with the EU; and the ‘refused’ countries that are not allowed (further) integration with the EU. According to this analysis, which only includes a subset of ENP countries, the difference in good governance, between the core EU and the refuser and refused countries, explains their grade of membership. Refused countries have ‘worse governance’ than the EU core and move closer to the core as they improve democracy, the rule of law and government effectiveness. By contrast, refuser countries enjoy ‘better governance’ than the EU, and the further away they remain from the core, the better their governance is. This explanation of differentiated integration is only partly helpful in the case of the ENP countries. First, the ENP comprises both refuser countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan that have suspended their association process in 2013–2014 and countries that have been refused further integration at some time (such as Belarus or Morocco). Whereas the quality of democracy and governance largely explains the differentiation between candidate countries and Eastern Partnership countries, it does not account for the geographic reasons, for which Morocco’s membership bid in 1987 was rejected, the geopolitical reasons, for which Armenia refused association, or the resource wealth that allows countries like Azerbaijan and Algeria to forego closer ties with the EU. The ENP countries are too heterogeneous to fit a single explanation of their status in Europe’s system of differentiated integration.

External governance

Just as with the concept of integration, the concept of governance has traditionally been reserved for the Member States of the EU’s system of ‘multi-level governance’ (for example, Marks et al. 1996). Within the EU, the governance concept was based on the assumption and observation that ‘institutionalized forms of coordinated action that aim at the production of collectively binding agre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptual, theoretical and legal approaches in the study of the European Neighbourhood Policy
• Part II The EU and its neighbourhood: drawing borders, shaping identities
• Part III European Neighbourhood Policy-making: institutional dynamics, actors and instruments
• Part IV Bilateralism, region-building and conflict management in the European Neighbourhood Policy
• Part V The European Neighbourhood Policy and sectoral cooperation
• Part VI The European Neighbourhood Policy and the promotion of EU norms and values
• Part VII The European Neighbourhood Policy and future lines of inquiry
• Index