Governing Europe's Neighbourhood: Partners or Periphery?

This volume examines the role of the European Union in creating a system of governance involving the countries and regions of its new neighbourhood . Enlargement has functioned as one of the EU s most important and effective foreign policy tools, yet the EU is rapidly approaching the limits of its capacity to accept new member states. It therefore must develop ways of extending and preserving the European zone of peace and stability that do not rely on the prospect of membership as a means of influencing the behaviour of non-member countries.A major step in this direction is the EU s new European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The ENP aims to create a ring of well-governed and friendly countries along the EU s eastern, southeastern and southern peripheries. Not the least because it embraces so many diverse countries and regions including the northern African, eastern Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Southern Caucasus regions this is a highly ambitious and unique policy initiative. In short, and with the ENP as a centrepiece, the EU is attempting no less than to determine the cultural, economic and political/administrative boundaries of Europe itself.Although the ENP is presented as a new policy initiative, it is in fact the result of decades of EU experience in facilitating cooperation with non-member states. While numerous studies have examined these individual policies and target countries over the years, this volume situates the EU s current efforts into a broader, analytically-coherent framework, supported by a full range of ENP case studies, to explain whether the ENP represents a truly new approach to regional governance and, if so, what lessons that effort might offer to larger debates about the future of Europe, transatlantic relations and international order.