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"The European Union is in the middle of developing policies for dealing with the countries in its neighborhood. The ongoing series of events in the EU’s southern neighborhood create the need to answer a challenging question: If the strategic answer to the fall of the Iron Curtain was enlargement, what then is the European Union’s strategic response to the Arab Spring?
Since the accession of Bulgaria and Rumania in 2007, the integration capacity and the transformative power of the Union have been disputed. Governments and citizens are increasingly skeptical about further enlargement. There is no convincing rationale for enlargement (why is Turkey on the list, and not Ukraine?), and the financial, economic, and sovereign debt crises have made the EU more introverted. Most of the Western Balkan countries will not become EU members any time soon. And a self-confident Turkey is less and less.
The ENP, on the other hand, a framework concept that was launched as a response to the 2004/2007 enlargements, has not yet developed into an attractive policy or an alternative to EU accession. Countries that want to join the Union regard it as a “policy of rejection.” For countries that do not want to join the Union, the ENP has not delivered the results that the EU was hoping for in its “Wider Europe” concept of 2003: stability, peaceful cooperation, and prosperity.
There are clear reasons why ENP and Enlargement Policy exist as separate approaches, the most obvious explanation being that the countries covered by Enlargement Policy will join the Union, while the ones under the ENP will not (or at least not for the foreseeable future). However, this separation of (to be) “ins” and “outs” is not helpful. The EU needs a policy somewhere between Enlargement Policy and ENP.
This set of chapters suggests that the EU turn the European Commission’s concept of the “Three Cs for enlargement” into a new concept for the whole neighborhood: (1) Conception: The EU should embrace its neighbors with a more daring approach of selective areas of functional and regional integration; (2) Communication: There is a lot of room for improvement in the EU’s way of communicating with its neighbors; and (3) Cooperation: The EU must be selective with regard to partners, and it needs to develop a real spirit of partnership.
The European Union will be a lot more successful if it manages to blur the boundaries on the European continent by creating overlapping spheres of partial integration with its neighbors. By “crossing borders,” the Union will also strengthen its ability to function as a network; a quality that will be a major asset in a multipolar, interconnected world." [author's abstract]
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