The Eastern Partnership policy and EU Neighborhood Policy in Georgia - Analyzing EU-Georgia relations
By Ana Kikadze, 2017
Focusing on EU neighborhood policy and Eastern partnership policy, this paper aims to showcase the improvements, which was achieved between EU-Georgian relationships. The main ascent will be done on Georgia’s perspective. The paper aims to examine how does the EU conducts relationship with Georgia and how will Georgia benefit from this relationship. Furthermore, the following questions will be answered: Why was the Eastern Partnership policy created? What are the main factors that led to its development? What are the main differences between EU Neighborhood policy and Eastern partnership policy?
Competing Regional Orders in the Shared Neighborhood: The EU, Russia, and the Norm Contestation in the Post-Soviet Space
By Kazushige Kobayashi, 2017
The paper investigates the dynamics of interaction and counteraction between competing conceptions of regional orders advanced by the EU and Russia in the shared neighborhood by employing qualitative textual analysis method and comparative research design. What happens when a region is exposed to both liberal and non-liberal influences, and more importantly, when these normative projects are competing with each other for primacy? This has been the case of the post-Soviet space, where tensions have emerged from the collision between the liberal and statist visions of regional orders promoted by Brussels and Moscow, respectively. Since the early 2000s, Brussels has promoted the liberal regional order through various institutional initiatives in the post-Soviet space. At the same time, Moscow has also strategically advanced the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) as an alternative institutional project to support, legitimize, and consolidate the statist regional order in its neighborhood. The study demonstrates that the emergence of competing region-building projects has produced a sense of hostility between the EU and Russia, while regional states have learned to play both sides to maximize their freedom of action. As a consequence, the post-Soviet space has become ever more polarized and it is increasingly difficult to speak of the singular regional order. Challenging the rational institutionalist perspective (which primarily sees institutional initiatives as a source of cooperation and stability), the paper concludes that the development of multiple regional integration initiatives may actually induce more conflicts when there is no coordination among and between the normative projects with opposing political visions.
The Eu’s Neighborhood Policy and the South Caucasus: Unfolding New Patterns of Cooperation
By Licínia Simão and Maria Raquel Freire, 2008
This paper looks at the European Union (EU) process of engagement in the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) in the context of its Neighborhood Policy. It looks at how divergent perceptions of the region, both inwards and outwards-driven, impact on regional policy choices, with an emphasis on regional cooperation. Though these states remark on the outlived usefulness of artificial framings, and regional cooperation among the three is virtually non-existent, when engaged in larger and wide-ranging formats, cooperation might not only be possible, but fruitful. It is therefore argued that regional cooperation should overcome the artificially constructed “South Caucasus” regional label and unfold along different patterns and variable compositions. The paper advances the proposal for a Eurasian/Black Sea security complex, framing in a wider format regional bounds, while maximizing them in new cooperation frames, inverting the tendency for imposed labels and uncooperative stances in the area.
 The Eu’s Neighborhood Policy and the South Caucasus | [ ] |
A strategy for Europe’s neighbourhood: keep resilient and carry on?
By Sven Biscop, 2017
While external and regional powers are engaged in fierce geopolitical competition in Europe’s neighbourhood, the EU itself wants to focus on building up the resilience of its neighbours. Not only is it far from clear who is to be made resilient against what where there is no more or less benign government but, where countries are only just coming out of war, their first priority is national survival and their demand is for security guarantees. Would sovereignty and equality not be a better Leitmotiv for EU strategy in the neighbourhood?
| Biscop (2017) A strategy for Europe’s neighbourhood | [ ] |
