Relations with the Wider Europe

Abstract

For the majority of the year, the European Union’s neighbourhood exhibited a high degree of stability and stasis with a significant degree of continuity in the situation that prevailed in 2009 (Whitman and Juncos, 2010). This countered the expectation that the wider neighbourhood was to be the region in which the Lisbon Treaty’s foreign policy innovations, and the drawing together of external relations and the common foreign and security policy, were anticipated to have impact. However, the High Representative’s preoccupation with the creation of the External Action Service (EEAS) left no room for new policy initiatives or innovation. The Union has now faced two years in which there has been a ‘bedding down’ of the Eastern Partnership and the Union for the Mediterranean, with neither exhibiting a substantive change in the Union’s relationship with its neighbours. Rather, those neighbours largely exhibited familiar traits in their relationships with the Union, with no breakthroughs in relations with the most problematic neighbours or improvement of the neighbourhood’s most intractable problems. The situation between Georgia and Russia over Abkhazia and South Ossetia remained in stalemate, the conflict between Hamas and Israel persisted and the government of Belarus resisted political reforms. By the end of 2010, the Union had not faced a replication of gas supply interruptions that had marked the preceding two winters. However, the hangover from the global financial and economic crisis meant that governments and political JCMS 2011 Volume 49 Annual Review pp. 187–208