Framework Of European Neighbourhood Policy Research Articles

Humanitarian Tools of EU External Policy: The Case of Eastern Partnership

The article deals with recent developments in the EU foreign policy towards neighbouring countries. The EU humanitarian influence mechanisms within the framework of European Neighbourhood Policy, Eastern Partnership program, along with the case of Belarus are explored. The article outlines that the European Union creates instruments of external influence through fostering humanitarian infrastructure in the periphery countries. As a result, the official government of a targeted country is not only unable to participate in the shaping of “European norms and rules”, but also ceases to be the single Brussel‟s counterpart. NGOs supported by the EU involve in to the dialogue between Brussels and the official government on behalf of the civil society. The latter contributes to the asymmetrical “teacher-apprentice” relationship between the EU and the bordering countries. Particular humanitarian instruments and cases exercised by the EU are explored. The interconnections between economic, political, and humanitarian tools in EU foreign policy are outlined. It is concluded that the “soft power” concept fails to explain comprehensively the EU foreign policy in the humanitarian sphere. Brussels seeks to exert systemic influence upon the humanitarian sphere of the periphery countries to bolster its political and economic position.

The Regional Impact of EU Association Agreements: Lessons for the ENP from the CEE Experience

The Eastern Enlargement of the EU saw a proliferation of association agreements with countries in the ‘near abroad’ under EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy framework. Although such agreements are considered to be strictly welfare-enhancing, there is very little evidence to show their economic effects, including their distributional consequences across space, separately from other concurrent processes (transition, internationalisation, capital deepening, etc). This paper draws on the experience of pre-accession agreements in Central and Eastern Europe to estimate the effect that such agreements had on regional growth, and thus on the long-run evolution of regional disparities, in the associated countries. We apply an event-analysis and exploit the country variation in the timing of these agreements to identify their distinctive effect on regional growth, using regional data at the NUTS3 levels covering the period from the early transition phase (1991/92) until the eruption of the financial crisis (2008). Our results provide strong evidence that EU association agreements accelerate growth; but show that this is far from evenly distributed across space – with denser, larger and more diversified regional economies gaining the most. We discuss what these findings imply for regional growth and spatial imbalances in the new wave of associated countries under the ENP.