Integration without Membership? Achievements and Limitations of Functionalist Cooperation in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood

Abstract

Abstract Focusing on Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, this chapter analyzes how the model of integration proposed by the European Union (EU) to neighbouring countries has played out since the early 2000s, when the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched. It starts by reviewing the ENP against other models of integration offered to third countries. The chapter then scrutinizes the leverage used by the EU to induce domestic change in its neighbourhood in the absence of a membership perspective. Finally, it analyzes how far ENP countries have come in adopting and applying EU norms and templates. The chapter argues that the Eastern Partnership (EaP, designed as the umbrella framework for EU–eastern neighbours relations) can no longer be regarded as a single model of relations with the EU. Its relevance and sustainability are undermined by the extreme differentiation in neighbours’ modes and levels of integration with the EU, which results from partner countries’ miscellaneous aspirations and preferences in their relations with the EU.