At the same time as it settled the final package of the accession's
negotiations with the ten new members who joined the EU on the 1st May 2004,
the December 2002 European Council opened the prospect for a new policy with
the neighbour countries of the EU of 27 with Bulgaria and Romania which are to
accede by 2007. The simultaneity of completing enlargement negotiation with the
kick–off for the neighbourhood policy was not only coincidental: it actually
expressed the continuation of the same goals but in a wider context and with
lower leverage.
The scope of models ranges from models incorporating
bilateral deep free trade or multilateral simple free trade arrangements to
models incorporating a stake in the common market, with its four freedoms
(maybe without freedom of labour), which is seen as the most attractive
economic offer right now. For the time being, economic integration remains a
bilateral instrument that has a basic trade component and specific co–operation
schemes depending on the interest of either the EU or ENP countries. Generally, co–operation is tailored towards
establishing bilateral relations, with the intention of postponing decisions on
concrete steps of integration into the future
The
AP priorities range from holding free and fair elections and reforming the
judiciary to revising company law and adopting a nuclear waste strategy. Thus,
the AP envisages projecting not only Community norms and values, such as
democracy and human rights, but the standards of the Union as a whole (that is
much of the acquis).
Thus, the ENP follows the enlargement strategy of the simultaneous
application of polity conditionality, or reforms of political and economic
structures and processes, such as democracy, minority rights, and
policy–oriented conditionality, that is the adoption and implementation of the
acquis during the enlargement process. That the AP envisages approximation to
the standards of the Union as a whole (parts of the acquis) is not surprising
given that much of the acquis pertains to the functioning of the internal
market, access to which is a key reward for implementing the reforms.
This emulation of the enlargement strategy through combining polity and
policy conditionality in the ENP is driven by the belief that these two types
of conditionality were mutually reinforcing during the enlargement process. As
was the case during the accession process, under the ENP, the neighbours are to
benefit from developing and modernising their public policies and economies by
anchoring them in the EU model of governance. Yet, while clearly borrowing many
elements from the enlargement strategy, the ENP was devised as an alternative
to enlargement.
Through its enlargement policy, the EU aimed at sharing common values,
promoting political stability and diffusing well–being and prosperity by
offering membership to 12 candidate countries.
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) is to achieve the same goals
beyond the new Union's border through a privileged relationship with the new
neighbouring countries but setting apart the issue of a prospective accession.
The March 2003 Commission's communication stresses the connection between both
processes:
Over the coming decade and beyond, the Union's capacity to provide
security, stability and sustainable development to its citizens will no longer
be distinguishable from its interests in closer cooperation with the neighbours
... closer geographical proximity means the enlarged EU and the new
neighbourhood will have an equal stake in furthering efforts to promote
transnational flows of trade and investment as well as even more important
shared interest in working together to tackle transboundary threats – from
terrorism to air–borne pollution.
After the Commission had delineated the Neighbourhood approach and
revealed a two phase programme, it drafted a third Communication, that of 12
May 2004, entitled 'Strategy Paper', proposing that the ENP should consists of
two kinds of acts: Actions Plans encompassing all the dimensions of the
enhanced partnership would first be set up for the next three to live years,
using existing means as well as the new post–2006 instrument. These Actions
Plans would be defined by common consent with each partner, expressing the
'Joint Ownership' of the ENP. The second step 'could consist in the negotiation
of European Neighbourhood Agreements, to replace the present generation of
bilateral agreement, when Action Plan priorities are met'. After the Commission
had issued its Strategic Paper, it drafted on 29 September 2004 a 'Proposal for
a Regulation laying down general provisions establishing a European
Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument', which was submitted to the
co–decision of the European Parliament and of the Council. The Regulation
should have its legal basis in the EC Treaty, in particular in its article 179
(multi–annual programmes for Developing Countries) and 181a (Economic,
Financial and Technical Cooperation with Third Countries).
Theoretical
and empirical research on European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) is not yet well
rooted in the literature on Europeanization. The concept of Europeanization was
introduced during the early 1990s and has, by now, become a rather fashionable
and widely deployed research approach amongst scholars from International
Relations, European Studies and Comparative Government traditions alike (see
Axt et al., 2007). However, it
has only been recognized at the end of the 1990s as constituting a ‘distinctive research area in EU studies’ (Sedelmeier, 2006, p.
4). When reviewing the rapidly growing body of literature from the early 1990s
to the present day, it is possible to identify three distinct phases and –
consequently – three streams of Europeanization research, where each new stream
draws on and adds to the previous one:
•
Membership
Europeanization, which delineates the EU’s impact
on existing EU Member States;
•
Accession
Europeanization, which is applied to post–communist
countries with a clear EU membership perspective; and, more tentatively, what
we would label
•
Neighbourhood
Europeanization, which (mainly through ENP) affects
the EU’s neighbouring ‘outsiders’, who have no immediate accession perspective.
‘The basic deal the EU has offered the ENP states
consists of economic co–operation in exchange for political reforms’ (Vincentz,
2007, p. 117). However, the economic dimension of ENP remains rather vague
(Escribano, 2006).
The Action Plans give only broad guidelines and do not
provide threshold levels for eventual achievement (Noutcheva and Emerson, 2007,
p. 91). Unlike the EU enlargement and Balkan policies, ENP has a development
component and is strictly bilateral (see the discussion of ENP as a
‘hub–andspoke’ policy in Hummer, 2005), which means opportunities to create a
unified economic region are ignored. There is a huge debate on appropriate
models for future economic integration between ENP members and the EU.