Europe’s Neighbourhood and Transboundary Differentiation

Abstract

The European Union has long sought to influence countries in its neighbourhood whether in the interests of stability, security or prosperity. If, during the Cold War, these efforts were largely directed towards members of EFTA and the countries of the Mediterranean, the Cold War’s end brought about a profound transformation of the geopolitical landscape of Europe, with 10 central and eastern European states (CEECs) becoming EU members in 2004 and 2007. That enlargement not only extended the EU’s borders with Russia but brought the EU to the shores of the Black Sea and created new or near neighbours in eastern Europe and in the southern Caucuses. The result has been tension between sometimes differing aims: managing the new borders in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness, especially to counter illegal migration and criminality; preventing new divisions between countries that had formerly been highly integrated within the former Soviet ‘space’; and, at the same time, reconciling those seeking to fulfil their European vocation through future EU membership with an alternative path towards ‘Europeanization’. All this had to be set against a widespread sense of ‘enlargement fatigue’ within many older Member States, compounded by the fact that Turkish and Croatian applications were already on the table, and seemingly confirmed in the negative responses to referendums in France and the Netherlands. It was a fatigue that was also symptomatic of deeper questions about the nature of the European construction, its identity and its borders.