European Security Community Expansion

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This chapter introduces the concept of security community and proposes the concept of security community expansion as an illustration of the processes taking place under European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) relations with the Eastern neighbours. It focuses on the main institutional and ideational elements through which the European security community has been historically consolidated. It makes the argument that in the wider European space, the increasing prominence of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in European security, the ENP has raised its profile as a border-making mechanism, contributing to the definition of existing security community and those seeking to join it. This chapter proposes a focus on the mutually constitutive nature of norms and the practices sustaining security community expansion. The focus on a broad understanding of elites, on the quality of integration processes and the acknowledgement of political agency outside the security community are distinctive elements advanced in our analytical approach.