This volume, comprised of original contributions by experienced urban planners and distinguished social scientists, sets forth the accumulated experience directed at improving the quality of life in our cities through neighbourhood programs. Policy issues, housing programs and job development plans, along with organizational innovations aimed at redistribution of power, are described and evaluated.
Despite growing scholarly interest in the EU’s flagship policy towards its Eastern and Southern neighbours, serious attempts at theory-building on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) have been largely absent from the academic debate. This book aims at contributing to fill this research gap in a three-fold manner: first and foremost it aims at theorizing the ENP as such, explaining the origins, development and effectiveness of this policy. Building on this effort, it also pursues the broader objective of addressing certain shortcomings in EU external relations theory, and even beyond, in International Relations theory. Finally, it aspires to provide new insights for European policy-makers. It is one of the first volumes to provide different theoretical perspectives on the ENP by revisiting and building bridges between mainstream and critical theories, stimulating academic and policy debates and thus setting a novel, less EU-centric research agenda. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in EU external relations, EU foreign policy, the European Neighbourhood Policy, and more broadly in European Union Politics and International Relations.
The idealism that engendered the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2004, later codified in the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, has since been reviewed to adapt to the turbulence that has befallen the EU and its neighbourhood. The ENP is now little more than an elegantly crafted fig leaf that purports to take a soft power approach to the EU’s outer periphery, argues the author, but in effect it inclines more towards Realpolitik. By prioritising security interests over liberal values in increasingly transactional partnerships, the EU is atomising relations with its neighbouring countries. And without the political will and a strategic vision to guide relations with the neighbours of the EU’s neighbours, the ENP remains in suspended animation.
Contributors offer new approaches to the study of the European Neighbourhood Policy. While the main emphasis is on the empirical assessment of the impact that the ENP has had to-date and on the factors that have shaped its implementation, it also provides new theoretical and methodological perspectives on how to study this policy area.
Several events in the past few years have dramatically shown how the interests of European citizens are directly affected by the stability, security and prosperity of their neighbouring regions. At the same time, the European Union and its member states face many challenges and dilemmas in designing and pursuing policies that not only effectively promote these interests, but also build stronger partnerships with neighbouring countries based on the values on which the Union is founded. First the Arab revolts and then Russia’s assertiveness in the eastern neighbourhood prompted reviews by the EU of its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), in 2011 and 2015, respectively. These reviews, in turn, have renewed scholarly interest in the ENP. By deliberately focusing on the recent literature (since 2011), this book by CEPS identifies the factors that explain the (lack of) effectiveness and coherence of the ENP. This exercise has resulted in a rich overview of and deep reflection on a wide variety of ENP-related themes, such as conditionality and leverage, the interests vs values dilemma and the role of third parties. The study identifies where there is consensus among scholars and where perspectives and judgements differ. It also identifies important gaps in the literature where further research is needed. This book will be of interest to a wide audience of officials, diplomats, parliamentarians, researchers at think tanks, civil society organisations, university teachers, trainers, students and journalists who want to know more about the challenges and dilemmas arising from the ENP. The work has been carried out by a team of researchers from CEPS in Brussels, with the support of the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
In light of their geographical proximity and crucial strategic importance, the European Union (EU) has long identified cooperation with the countries of the Mediterranean region a central priority of its external relations and has developed a complex set of policies and instruments. Yet, there is a certain academic consensus that EU external policies in the area did not live up to their original expectations, insofar as little progress was made to accomplish the proclaimed goals while the implementation of structural reforms proved to be extremely problematic. These deficiencies in EU Mediterranean policies are symptomatic of what is a greater challenge in EU external policy-making: the struggle for implementation. This book analyses the implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in the Mediterranean, focusing on specific programs financed under the European Neighbourhood Policy Instrument in the years before and after the Arab uprisings. Building on a comparative analysis of two Maghreb countries, Tunisia and Morocco, it provides an in-depth investigation on the role of domestic actors in constraining or providing points of opportunity for the implementation of the ENP. The book presents new empirical data and, by focusing on the role of local actors in the neighbouring countries, it offers interesting insights not only into the ENPI complex processes of implementation, but also on the challenges of the E U in the region and the state of relations with the Southern neighbourhood. Through the prism of the European Neighbourhood Policy, the book provides a window into the internal politics and relevant issues of Maghreb countries. It will therefore be a valuable resource for students and scholars of European and Mediterranean Studies, as well as those interested in EU international relations.
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has evolved into one of the European Union's major foreign policy instruments and received considerable attention. However, other EU neighbourhood policies, and their relevance for the ENP, also require examination. The Arab uprisings, civil wars in Libya and Syria, the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula have all brought the institutional design and tools of the ENP into question and a comparative perspective is crucial to understand EU neighbourhood policies in a wider sense. This timely book puts the ENP into context by exploring the major challenges and key lessons of the EU's other policy frameworks with neighbouring countries. Mapping the EU's bi-lateral and multilateral neighbourhood relations in comparison to the ENP and investigating the major challenges faced, it provides a comprehensive, up-to-date view of the EU's relations with its neighbours. Focusing on current affairs and future challenges, the comparison with the ENP and the lessons to be drawn, generate novel insights into the EU's closest external relations. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars studying European Politics, policies and comparative politics.
The enlarged European Union needs new instruments for exporting stability and change into the fragile regions and countries beyond its borders. That is why the EU is developing and implementing the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP): a strategic concept which is to enhance the Union ́s capability to be a driver of reform - without automatically promising the ""golden carrot"" of membership to the neighbours. This book provides the reader with information on what ENP wants, how it works and what the prospects of the Union ́s cooperation with neighbouring countries are.
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 volume therefore offers an examination of social practices as implemented through the use of policy instruments and subsequently embedded into the existing/emergent social structures which shape and determine the EU-neighbours’ relations. To gauge success of the ENP in the eastern region, the manuscript pulls together a rich collection of geographical and thematic case-studies, joined by the overarching conceptual framework of practices. This study’s principal aims are to discern patterns of social practices which guide agents’ interactions in different policy areas; to explore the origin and effect of these practices (the role of dominant discourses, logistical imbalances, deliberate strategies, etc.); and to explicate the nature of the emerging social structures being established in the eastern region. This approach is distinctive from other constructivist undertakings as it allows to synergise the meanings of social actions (through the focus on agents and instruments), and their structural extensions (through the focus on emergent structures) across geo- and bio-political localities of the EU and its eastern neighbourhood. This book was published a sa special issue of East European Politics.
This book offers a legal analysis of the European Neighbourhood Policy (the ENP) as it applies to developing relations with the EU's neighbours. It explores the legal aspects of this policy, including ENP competence matters, institutional arrangements and substantive policy issues, using international relations theory as the starting point in defining the EU's role as a political actor. The book focuses on the adequacy of the ENP legal framework for transposing the EU's democratic values and upholding its political image. In this connection, the book also features an analysis of EU democratic values as they are intended to be understood by its neighbours. The relevant legal framework of this policy and its implementation in the states of the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) is evaluated, revealing the effects of the ENP in their democratic processes and the shortfalls of the ENP conditionality.
