Eastern Partnership

After the turmoil of the Maidan protests, the removal of President Yanukovich and the annexation of Crimea by Russia, Ukraine is undergoing profound political changes and is facing difficult challenges. Identity issues and regional dynamics in Ukraine are at the heart of its domestic politics as well as its geopolitical orientation. Although many ethno-linguistic stereotypes often cited in the media do not withstand scrutiny, Ukraine is indeed diverse and pluralistic. This is both good and bad news for its future. The Maidan protests contributed greatly to forging a unifying state-building agenda for Ukraine. If this agenda prevails in the post-revolutionary phase, the inherent pluralism and diversity of the Ukrainian society will be the best safeguard against the centralisation of power by another autocrat. At the same time, a worrying rise of nationalistic discourses and actors as well as tensions in some regions of Ukraine may undermine the newly found sense of unity. A fractured Ukraine is also less likely to remain on the path of further democratic reform.

After the period of the Washington Consensus and the structural adjustments, importance of international democracy promotion and the “good governance” agenda grew gradually. Great deal of question has been asked on how to make the policies of international development more effective, but most of them remain unanswered. Most of the democratisation theories focus on primarily domestic affairs, while the process in which external factors interact with the internal dynamics, remains rather undertheorised. The article attempts to identify the problems with the promotion of democratic governance and discover the correct variables by looking at the causation of internal and external elements. Despite the great number of pessimistic viewpoints regarding the effectiveness of democracy transfer, the paper will attempt to demonstrate that the failures happen because of the absence of certain structural preconditions, both inside and outside of country. The case of the European Union promotion in Ukraine is a good example of the interaction failure in its internal/external dimensions.

The hasty departure of President Viktor Yanukovych opened the door toward political change, yet a lot remains to be done to ensure the success of this tentative transition. Comprehensive political reforms and an inclusive and transparent political process are needed to renew and strengthen political institutions and regain legitimacy. As the government is struggling to contain the crisis in Crimea, the broader picture should not be lost from sight.

"A new institutional framework was designed under the Eastern Partnership and it has been progressively established over the past two years to frame the increasingly close relationship between the EU and its Eastern neighbours. This working paper provides an early assessment of the Eastern Partnership’s institutional functioning. It focuses on the multilateral track (thematic platforms and panels, participatory initiatives, flagship initiatives) which for the first time gathers all six Eastern partners and the EU at various levels of representation and in different arenas. The EaP’s multilateral track is thus an attempt to develop a multilayered and participative institutional framework based upon a logic of socialisation.
An examination of the ‘governmental track’ highlights however a discrepancy between levels of cooperation. While panels are assessed very positively and foster links both among Eastern partners and with the EU, other formats, including platform meetings, do not appear to favour joint ownership of the policy process. Another weakness is the current lack of synergies between various institutional formats under the multilateral track. Overall the paper identifies three potential sources of tensions in the EaP functioning:
- EU member states’ uneven engagement in the policy process: while Western European member states’ participation in the multilateral track is weak, their involvement is needed to turn the Eastern Partnership into a EU-wide foreign policy;
- Partner countries’ different level of involvement in the multilateral track, which is perceived by some of them as a ‘one-size-fits-all’exercise;
- The combination, in the multilateral track, of a logic based upon joint ownership, inclusiveness and socialisation with some elements reflecting a more hierarchical approach and limiting participation."

The European Union and Russia are two interdependent great powers in contemporary Europe. They have declared their intention to establish a strategic partnership, but the fights for influence over the shared neighbourhood are tensing their relations and creating instability in the region. In this study it will be analyzed the current policy framework operating in the shared neighborhood, divided in three different policies: the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and its derivation through the Eastern Partnership, the Russian neighbourhood policy, and the EU-Russia relations. It will be argued that, under the present framework, ‘competition’ will continue to define the interaction between all three policies, preventing the commonly declared objective of creating a Europe without divides. Therefore, a new single integrated framework capable of creating synergies where currently competition reigns will be proposed.

This paper studies public welfare preferences in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Generalised ordered logistic regression models and predicted probabilities are employed to analyse comparable attitudinal survey data. The results vary considerably among the countries, but age is the most important covariate of welfare preferences, followed by individuals’ socio-economic characteristics. The findings also indicate that transitional perceptions, notably in Ukraine and Moldova, are most strongly linked to preferences concerning the state’s involvement in reducing the gap between the rich and the poor rather than to preferences regarding the main welfare state programmes such as pensions and healthcare.

The EU continuously searches for more effective policy towards its eastern neighbourhood, which is reflected in the on-going adaptation of its existing approaches, discourses and policy strategies to the new challenges of its external environment. In order to understand the complexity and limitations of the EU framework under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership Initiative (EaP) – that is, to consider the interface between policy instruments, institutional structures, and multiple agents – one needs to adopt an original analytical perspective of practices to comprehensively assess the policies' outcomes.

This contribution analyses if and how the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) work as  security community-building instruments in EU–Moldova relations –whether, how and to what extent the EU has managed to promote security and stability through the externalization of rules and values. We adopt the framework developed by Rieker (2014), which holds that building an effective security community requires a certain level of integration combined with a certain level of attractiveness . Our study examines the level of Moldova’s integration with the EU and the domestic support for such integration, based on four main indicators: scope/ comprehensiveness of the association, level of adaption/external Europeanization, level of participation/contribution and the level of attractiveness of the EU. We conclude that the ENP/EaP has been relatively successful in stepping up the political and economic integration of Moldova into the EU, but that the process of building a security community is still not mature enough to 'lock' Moldova into a sustainable path towards European integration.

""Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, European Union (EU) efforts in transforming Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been enormously successful. The 2004 enlargement is widely regarded as the single most effective foreign policy strategy in the Union's history, and the recent European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was designed to repeat that success in countries located on the EU's new Eastern borders. Although the ENP has been the subject of substantive discussion in European academia, Belarus is the one country in Eastern Europe that has largely escaped scholarly attention. This article takes stock of recent developments in EU—Belarus relations and seeks to explain the very limited leverage of the EU over the country. We first examine the EU's relations with Belarus through the theoretical lens of external governance. By taking for granted the EU's ability to transfer its norms and values, however, the governance perspective does not account for the EU's very limited success in changing Belarus. We therefore revisit Michael Smith's notion of `boundaries of order' to highlight the impact of legal/institutional, transactional, cultural and geopolitical factors on EU—Belarus relations. We argue, in particular, that the existence and the construction of boundaries between the Union and its neighbouring states are essentially mutually constitutive processes. Besides shifting its own boundaries (and thereby extending its rules to outsiders), the EU is itself subject to the boundaries enacted by neighbouring states. In our conclusion, we juxtapose the notion of external governance as `rule transfer' with `partnership' as a more suitable mode of interaction between the EU and Belarus. ""