Abstract
The need to redefine the European Union's relations with neighbouring countries in the southern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe has become critical in light of the EU's most recent enlargement and the institutional reform process now underway. This paper explores the main instruments of the EU's external policy: the “integration without accession” principle of the European neighbourhood policy (ENP) and the idea of a “special relationship” proposed in the Lisbon Treaty. As the ENP and the Reform Treaty appear somewhat ambiguous and vague, the authors suggest “decentralised integration” as a new paradigm to craft the “special relationship” between the EU and its neighbours.
Keywords
Introduction
While the European Union is still busy with internal reform and institutional consolidation, it faces the ever-urgent need to engage with its vast neighbourhood stretching from Murmansk to Marrakesh. 1 There is, no doubt, an expectation gap between the EU, which has grown over the last few years, and its neighbours. On the EU side, the completion of the fifth round of enlargement in the period 2004-2007 has made it necessary to redefine the Union's relations with its eastern fringe as well as with the countries of the Mediterranean, which are all now covered by the European neighbourhood policy (ENP). The former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus want and need more from the EU, in light of their close relationship with the new members, their rising democratic aspirations and the changing geostrategic map. As in the 1990s, when the Union kicked off its eastern expansion, southern Mediterranean states fear being relegated to second-class neighbours and generally feel uneasy about the overall idea of “neighbourhood”.
This main arguments of this article are drawn from Bechev and Nicolaidis [1].
At the same time, the majority of the Union's own publics seem to be experiencing integration fatigue. This may be in part because of the fear of competition from less prosperous parts of the Union—as illustrated by the obsession with the “Polish plumber” in France. The public are therefore all the more resistant to potential competition from beyond the Union, be it Beijing or even Cairo or Kiev. A recent Eurobarometer survey indicates that while a majority of the EU citizens support the substance of the Union's policy in the neighbourhood, they are wary of its uncertain implications [2]. 2 Citizens in both old and new Member States care about issues such as immigration, the environment, energy security and the fight against terrorism, which are at the heart of the relationship between the Union and the ENP countries. They believe that the EU should tackle these issues through engagement with what one could call “source countries”, but at the same time they are concerned about the potential costs of proactive and ambitious policies.
According to the survey, only 20% of EU citizens have ever heard of the ENP. Furthermore, 63% of the respondents in the EU-15 disagree strongly with the proposition that the neighbourhood countries share the same values as the Union. In the new Member States, only 36% disagree while 44% believe that values are shared.
The EU response to these dilemmas has been twofold. First, it launched the ENP in 2003 with the European Commission's communication on “Wider Europe”—more fully developed in 2004—which proposed an open-ended process of what we term “integration without accession” of the neighbourhood. As EU officials, including Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the Commissioner in charge of External Relations and the Neighbourhood, put it, the ENP is “membership-neutral” in the sense that it assists the partners in implementing EU-compatible reforms but neither offers nor rules out the prospect of future accession. This is a sore spot for the hopefuls in the East as well as for some of the new Member States such as Poland or Romania, which are committed to further enlargements. Worse, perhaps, it is a deterrent for candidate countries like Turkey against participating in any ENP-related ventures. Clearly, at least in the short-term, EU expansion beyond the western Balkans and Turkey is not politically viable. Therefore, the EU faces the challenge of crafting new types of integration arrangements with the whole range of neighbourhood countries, stopping short of enlargement but going beyond the association or cooperation schemes that are in place at the moment.
Similar to the enlargement process, the ENP is based on the principle of conditionality. It aims to enhance the partners’ governance capacity and foster democratic reforms in exchange for benefits in terms of trade access and financial aid. The requirements are specified in an action plan adopted by the Union and the respective counterpart. This transformative ambition marks a departure from the policies implemented in previous decades. In the Mediterranean, the association agreements signed with countries such as Morocco, Tunisia or Jordan do contain conditionality clauses but they were never invoked, in order not to alienate the governments in question. Strategic considerations have typically trumped the logic of democracy promotion, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In the East, the partnership agreements signed in the 1990s have very feeble democratic clauses. However, the attraction of the EU was instrumental in the “coloured” revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine in 2004 and 2005.
However, even there, the EU's leverage was limited. Though the desire to “return to Europe” served as a focal point to rally the opposition to semi-authoritarian regimes, it has been insufficient to keep reformist majorities afloat in Ukraine or to foster consensus in Georgia, where President Mikheil Saakashvili and his rivals have moved from one political crisis to another.
The second response to the challenges and demands coming from the neighbourhood has come through instruments such as the now defunct European Constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, currently in the process of ratification. Both documents offer a long-term political vision to anchor the policies of cooperation and conditionality elaborated within the ENP. The treaties contain identically worded articles that put forward the notion of a “special relationship”, or “relations privilégiées” in the French-language version, between the Union and the neighbourhood countries. 3 There are, however, many outstanding questions concerning the arrangements conceived by the EU treaty-makers.
Article 7a of the TEU (as introduced by Article 1 par. 10 of the Lisbon Treaty): (1) “The Union shall develop a special relationship with neighbouring countries, aiming to establish an area of prosperity and good neighbourliness, founded on the values of the Union and characterised by close and peaceful relations based on cooperation; (2). For the purposes of paragraph 1, the Union may conclude specific agreements with the countries concerned. These agreements may contain reciprocal rights and obligations as well as the possibility of undertaking activities jointly. Their implementation shall be the subject of periodic consultation.”
Questioning “special relationship”
To start with, we need to ask what a “neighbour” is: is it a country that shares a common border with the EU, or is the definition looser? In effect, the ENP brings together under one framework countries neighbouring the new members to the east and those which are part of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership (EMP) initiated at the 1995 Barcelona Summit. Many of those countries, both in the east and to the south, do not (and may not in the near future) qualify for an advanced form of integration into the EU. There are numerous obstacles, including the state of their economies, the capacity of their institutions to formulate and implement public policies and, not least, the shortcomings of their domestic political regimes. If special-relationship status were seen as a measure of convergence, the Union would have elaborated a set of conditions reminiscent of the Copenhagen Criteria and only the best-performing partners would likely be granted this statut avancé, to borrow a phrase from the standard lexicon of Moroccan diplomacy. If, on the other hand, special partnership status were seen as a measure of proximity and geostrategic interdependence, then a greater range of countries would qualify.
In this context, Turkey is a burning issue. While its leadership adamantly rules out “privileged partnership”, this remains a long-term possibility, especially if one or more EU Member States fail to ratify the accession agreement. This is why Turkey wants nothing to do with the ENP. Here is the paradox, however. In the Turkish context, the connotation of “privileged partnership” is that of “less”, less than membership. But the impact of “privileged partnership” would be one of “more” for most other neighbours. This is because were Turkey to become such a “partner” instead of “member”, Turkey would no doubt have made great progress on the path of economic and legal integration with the EU, and thus the same level of inclusion into the EU policies and institutions would become the benchmark for other third countries admitted to some sort of an “accession-minus” status (e.g., Ukraine, Moldova or perhaps even Israel or Morocco). 4
The latest Communication of the European Commission accompanying the annual progress reports of 2008 singles out these four countries as frontrunners and opines that “joint work on implementing the Action Plans has intensified in such a way that a particular deepening of relations with the EU is warranted. This will be taken forward in each case in a manner tailored to the specific circumstances, consistent with the overall philosophy of the ENP, including the principle of agreed benchmarks” [3, p. 9].
Second, the Reform Treaty is fairly ambiguous when it comes to the nature of the agreements and joint actions it mentions. To start with, the clause enables the EU to pursue such agreements but does not put it under any legal obligation to do so: “may conclude” as opposed “shall conclude”. Considering the scope of economic integration, future bilateral treaties might range from the association agreements signed with certain countries of the western Balkans (Croatia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, the latter two still subject to ratification) and the Mediterranean to the comprehensive arrangements contained in the European economic area (EEA) agreement of 1992.
Finally, the ENP in its present shape hinges on the ability of the Union's “soft power” to transform the partner countries while minimising the neo-colonial connotation of the exercise. This depends, in no small measure, on the preparedness, institutional capacity and indeed the political will within the countries in question to meet Brussels’ criteria. The experience of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has demonstrated how the promise of membership could steer domestic dynamics in the direction of compliance with the EU criteria. Lacking this “golden carrot”, the ENP has to define appropriate incentives for political, economic and institutional reforms. The remoteness of prospects for membership has turned out to be a problem even in countries that are officially considered potential candidates for accession (e.g., the western Balkans) and is likely to undermine the effectiveness of the ENP in the near future. The key challenge for policymakers is to make the integration strategy and the cooperation instruments tied to special relationship sufficiently credible for the partner countries.
At the heart of the ENP is a dilemma: while it must remain open to membership in order not to put off partners, it must also be a suitable alternative to accession. The provisions at hand are thus necessarily ambiguous and open to interpretation. One the one hand, as observed by David Phinnemore [4], amongst others, they provide a legal basis with countries “either not seeking or deemed ineligible for membership”. On the other hand, these clauses establish a “second track” of institutional affiliation, which can be seen as only a temporary alternative to membership for countries that have or might have in the long term the capacity and the will to join the Union.
Decentred integration: a novel dimension in the EU approach?
The dominant paradigm of the EU's relations with its neighbours has been to link access to the Union's markets, aid and decision-making processes (and ultimately to the Union itself) and convergence with standards—political, economic or technical. The more a country complies with the EU rules the closer it moves towards the Union. This linear relationship between convergence and access is clearly apparent in the enlargement policy presently applied to Turkey and the western Balkans, but it was also visible in the association arrangements extended to the CEE countries in the early 1990s as well as in the case of the EEA, where convergence with the Union's legislation was tied to access to the internal market. However, “special relationship” and, by implication, the ENP cannot follow the same logic, because the EU is not currently in a position to offer improved access beyond the level of free trade in industrial goods, and the target countries themselves are unable and/or unwilling to comply with the shopping list of conditions contained in the ENP's Action Plans.
Moreover, the notion of convergence is at odds with the notion of partnership. The very idea of standards of convergence sometimes uncomfortably echoes the “standards of civilisation” of a bygone era, as does constrained access to the metropole with its glass ceilings, and second-class citizenship. If that is the case, at least in the world of perceptions and historical legacies, it is up to the EU and its partners jointly to devise modes of relating that truly reflect what we can call a “post-colonial agenda”, reflecting the simple fact that ours is no longer a “European world”, forged by European legal precepts and political imperatives.
In our view, rather than the Brussels-driven ENP, inspired by enlargement but unable to emulate its model, EU policymakers should consider adopting a decentred-integration approach to “special relationship”. Decentring can mean many things and be pursued at several levels:
Co-development: On the side of policymaking, special relationships can be seen as “partnerships for co-development” that may accommodate the shared strategic goals of the EU and its partners in innovative ways. Perhaps the most politically salient dimension of co-development has to do with the management of the movement of people. To a great extent, the problem we have with migration in Europe today is that when citizens from “the periphery” make it to our shores (possibly by risking their lives), they are reluctant to ever go back home (to visit or try to resettle and reinvest their savings) for fear of never being allowed back into the EU and thus being cut off from family, friends and the elements of the host country culture that they have made their own over the years. Intelligent policy on flows of people should be about organising the back and forth, temporal and fluid movement of people, and creating the right incentives to do so—acknowledging the desirability of “semigrants”, in other words. This includes obviously a much more fine-tuned visa policy where “rights of entry” pertain to entry coming and going, at home at well as “at host”.
Empowerment: Such a philosophy of co-development would, in turn, have significant implications on the security front—the fight on terror—as well as on the political front—the accommodation of political Islam and democracy. It is about empowering individuals or groups to do what they decide themselves to do; helping to create political, economic and social spaces where standards of development and modernity are negotiated locally rather than shaped in Brussels. Still, the EU has to keep the principle of conditionality. For instance, it should insist on the right of association and action for human rights NGOs or trade unions. This condition sometimes meets with more resistance than the direct imposition of substantive standards.
Ownership: Despite the very asymmetric relationship between the EU and its neighbours, the latter ought to be involved as much as possible in defining the scope and contents of the special relationship. Although this much is usually stressed in official documents underpinning the ENP, in practice the action plans, with a few notable exceptions, have been drafted by the EU rather than in true partnership. This calls into question the effectiveness of the EU's policy over the long run.
Decentralisation: Decentring away from Brussels need not always mean away from European governance. In this sense, the local representatives of both the EU and its Member States could be much more involved in the design, implementation and monitoring of special relationships. Local delegations, through their more intimate knowledge of the country and its actors, are better able to engage and fine tune as well as listen to the partner actors.
Autonomous institutions: Rules and forums underpinning the relationships need not all emanate from Brussels. Joint institutions, equal rotation and “decentred summits” can be devised to reflect greater symmetry in the relationships.
Status: Most importantly, the demand for status on the part of the EU's partners has been a Leitmotif in the engagement with neighbourhood countries. But we also acknowledge that the access-for-convergence logic, while fundamentally sound, may reach its limits owing to the real or perceived constraints on “integration capacity” as well as to the drawbacks of “EU-centrism without membership”. If this is the case, it might be worth thinking of “status” as a category clearly decoupled from access and indeed the correlative standards of convergence. If the EU functions by rewarding convergence with access, which ultimately suggests membership, it might do well to explore a different type of status altogether. This could mean membership in a broader regional organisation involving the EU on one side and its neighbour on the other.
Geopolitical vision: Finally, decentring might allow us to better address the regulatory/technical and geostrategic concerns in their own right, as well as the priorities of the Mediterranean and East European countries separately. The geopolitics of the 21st century will not be Eurocentric, as the EU becomes increasingly provincialised in an emerging world order of rising powers and a shifting balance of power. In this context, the EU's geostrategic interest may very well be to be a part, indeed the driver, of a wider strategic community, stretching from Gibraltar to Kars, or, alternatively, an overlapping security community. A geopolitical vision is crucial for the EU's future, including in its relations with Turkey, and cannot remain hostage to the hard constraints of regulatory and technical convergence.
Whither special relationship? Four scenarios for the future
It is obvious that the neighbourhood, both in the east and the south, will be one of the top priorities of the EU in the years to come. What are the options before European policymakers and how can the concept of decentred integration be put to work in the context of the Union's external policy? Below we explore four distinctive scenarios.
The step-by-step approach
The present incremental approach can be seen as a way of “muddling through” the challenges in the EU neighbourhood. The key benefit is the policy's flexibility, allowing for differentiation between “good pupils” and laggard countries. As such it has a measure of transformative potential when it comes to the administrative capacity of the partner countries, less so at the level of their political systems or their societies at large. These gains, however, are and will likely remain rather modest. Witness the case of Ukraine, the flagship country within the ENP, sliding into an ever-deeper political crisis in the course of 2006 and 2007. In more formal terms, incrementalism also means that the provisions of the Reform Treaty would have largely symbolic value and would not bear directly on how relations with the partner countries are structured. The end result would be a web of bilateral relations between the EU and its partners characterised by a variable degree of intensity in terms of trade integration and legal harmonisation.
Even within this approach, there could be marginal improvements to achieve more by way of convergence and provide more ample opportunities for access to the EU's market and institutions. Thus the December 2006 Communication from the European Commission listed a set of proposals for strengthening the ENP. The most far-reaching amongst them is the concept of comprehensive free trade involving harmonisation with the EU acquis or, potentially, mutual recognition of standards, tailor-made for particular partner countries. Notably, the EU is at present negotiating such an agreement with Ukraine. Another “ENP Plus” element is the opportunity to align with CFSP declarations, which is now extended to both the East European and the Mediterranean countries.
However, the upgrading of the ENP is bound to increase the differentiation between the frontrunners and the laggards and jeopardise consistency in the name of effectiveness. The special relationship would be an option only for a handful of countries within the neighbourhood. Once this dynamic is in place it becomes almost inevitable that such frontrunners will put forward the status issue and request institutional affiliation that goes beyond the “association plus” level. This is rooted, in effect, in the quasi-enlargement logic built into the ENP, which has the potential to develop its own dynamic. This essentially means that while the EU can avoid the question of status at present it might not be in a position to do so for much longer.
The decoupling approach
This option would entail the partial compartmentalisation of the ENP, with a southern and an eastern dimension. Under this scenario, the special relationship would function for some states as a “pre-pre-accession” stage, thus boosting the EU's transformation agenda over time. In the near term, this would mean the allocation of even greater financial and human resources by the European Commission and its delegations in places like Kiev and Chişinău to assist and monitor reforms. Surely the establishment of such a relationship with the Union should be made conditional on stringent criteria. With the accession perspective, the differentiation principle already present within the ENP could be harnessed even more effectively by the EU to reproduce, again in the long run, the “regatta” dynamic observed in the CEE, with an even greater emphasis on pre-conditions, given the potential for blowback. At the symbolic level the EU can specify benchmarks to qualify for the status of a “potential candidate” that was originally established for the western Balkan countries in 2002.
For southern partners, in contrast, decoupling would mean that the EU would be less capable of applying stringent political conditionality. It would signal the return to the community-building approach of the 1990s and might lead to a relaunch of the Barcelona Process. For all its flaws, the Mediterranean Union proposed in the first half of 2007 by French President Nicholas Sarkozy could be seen as a harbinger of a new state of mind and an attempt to rethink the EU's southern dimension. Under this banner, the Union could bring together, at least initially, the three main southern Member States and the three Maghreb countries. But rather than marginalise the EMP, such a grouping would only be acceptable to other EMP states if it were seen as a kind of laboratory or experiment exploring various forms of “reinforced cooperation.” In the French approach, the southern partners would still benefit from comprehensive association agreements, possibly incorporating elements of comprehensive free trade, CFSP/ESDP cooperation and perhaps even clauses on the free movement of people.
Nevertheless, the idea of relaunching the Mediterranean dimension on the basis of cooperation among a small number of Member States and Arab partners appears problematic in the eyes of many actors in the region. At a minimum, it would certainly be a challenge to the integrity of the EU itself. For instance, how could there be partial liberalisation of the movement of people and visa regimes within the future Mediterranean Union in a pan-EU context framed by Schengen and other agreements? Could a gradual approach be envisaged that would multilateralise specific schemes for the movement of people once they have been tested under a “Mediterranean Union” scheme? These questions are crucial but should not prevent the European Parliament from exploring the idea of laying the groundwork for a revamped EMP.
Variable membership in a broad EU
This scenario would involve an open-ended and functional approach to the question of EU borders. In this broad context, all the neighbourhood countries could in theory eventually become “members” of the EU, obviously over a long period of time. Special relationships would be designed with a view to the gradual enlargement of the EU to the best-performing countries in the neighbourhood and their gradual integration in the Union's institutions. But membership would be variable in the sense that acceding countries would be excluded from certain institutions or policies during transition periods of varying lengths. Even more radically, the idea of variable transition periods could be extended beyond issues such as Schengen or EMU to cover most areas of integration.
To be sure, this type of status would go well beyond special relationship and require yet another amendment to the founding treaties. Bringing in significant numbers of big and small countries as “variable transition members” will mean redrawing the balance of voting power in the Council amongst the Member States, with all the concomitant political challenges that such a change implies.
European partnership area
Our final scenario borrows from the second but extends and deepens the logic of polity building and “status decentring”. To some extent, we might hearken back to the idea of a European confederation proposed in 1990 by then French President Mitterrand. This path would consist in the building of a new set of institutions bringing together all EU and ENP countries. It could provide the backbone of a special relationship with the neighbourhood as a whole rather than solely with individual countries. In some sense, such a multilateral body would be a continuation of the EMP community but with a broader geographical scope. And, more importantly, it would entail a radical decentring of special relationships away from the EU-oriented notion of neighbourhood and the institutional management carried out by Brussels. As a polity in its own right, the European partnership area could have its own council of ministers (with a secretariat), 5 sectoral ministers’ forums, expert bodies and a parliamentary assembly.
The first-ever meeting of ministers from the EU and the neighbourhood countries took place on 3 September 2007 in Brussels. This forum is likely to be institutionalised in the future.
Some will argue that the problem with this scenario based on multilateralism is the danger of returning to the lowest-common-denominator approach of the Barcelona Process. To tackle this problem, the arrangement could continue to be based, as with the other scenarios, on some form of concentric circles and differentiation between the partners. At the end of the day, economic integration, even in the context of a multilateral European partnership area, would likely reflect the acquis and not another body of standards jointly crafted by the partners. But policy emphasis, working methods and above all status would be partially freed from the logic of convergence. Such a de-linkage might be especially appealing, given the EU's Member States’ varied approaches to many of the challenges of our time, from social integration to biological ethics. In a world of subsidiarity, there is not always an “EU standard” to converge to. A regional polity straddling the neighbourhood area could nevertheless be underpinned by multilateral trade liberalisation. The wide membership of the group would make unlikely the pursuit of a comprehensive free trade agenda leading to a demand for differentiation from the more advanced ENP countries. This might mean that, in order to bring them on board in such a multilateral community-building project, the EU would have to introduce instruments allowing for deeper integration at the bilateral level, including tailor-made trade agreements, mutual recognition, harmonisation and capacity building. This in turn would not be as problematic as it sounds if the new area was not to be “beyond the borders” in the EU sense.
In the end, providing neighbours with a status that is different from membership or even quasi-membership would likely help the Union's pursuit of internal consolidation and external relevance, even at the price of marginalising the current European Neighbourhood Policy.
Footnotes