Challenging Events, Diminishing Influence? Relations with the Wider Europe

Abstract

The EU’s wider European neighbourhood moved from a condition of challenges to one of disarray in the course of 2013. Excepting the bright spots of the accession to the EU of Croatia and the opening of accession negotiations with Serbia, the enlargement policy of the Union to its neighbours remained largely static. The Vilnius summit of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) of November 2013, intended as a moment to mark a deepening of the EU’s relationship with its eastern neighbours through the agreement of a new set of bilateral relations, was unsettled and an already negotiated and initialled association agreement with Ukraine remained unsigned. The EU struggled to develop a coherent collective response between its Member States to the civil war in Syria and was a largely irrelevant actor in the post-Arab Spring transitions taking place in other southern neighbours – most notably Egypt and Libya. The overall assessment of the EU’s policies towards the neighbourhood is that 2013 was a period largely of unravelling of its already meagre influence within the neighbourhood. This comes on the back of a disappointing policy performance in the preceding three years (Whitman and Juncos, 2011, 2012, 2013). The EU’s policies for its neighbourhood are largely irrelevant to the transition processes in its southern neighbourhood. Furthermore, they are now being challenged directly and actively in its eastern neighbourhood by Russia, which has developed a competing model of economic integration to that on offer from the EU. The slow recovery of the eurozone economies in the course of 2013 has, however, had a locomotive effect for the economies of the EU’s neighbours in the Western Balkans. Assuming that the pace of growth continues, and the eurozone continues its move into what appeared to be a period of post-crisis stabilization, there may be grounds for optimism that the EU’s economic and political capital can be more fully engaged with the multiple challenges of its wider neighbourhood.