01: The EU and its eastern and southern neighbours: resilience as a strategic priority

This seminar will address and analyse the European Union’s relations with its eastern and southern neighbours and discuss EU-neighbourhood dynamics since 2003/4. Taking into account that the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) – providing the framework in which relations take place – is considered to be the EU’s most important foreign policy approach, the seminar will be embedded in the EU Global Strategy’s (EUGS) objective to building societal and state resilience in the EU neighbourhood. Besides this focus on resilience, both the ENP and the EUGS emphasise flexibility, differentiated bilateralism, local ownership, comprehensiveness and principled pragmatism. The seminar offers a space that takes issue with these objectives and examines and discusses the extent to which they underpin and affect the practical implementation of the ENP and its overarching goal of creating an area of peace, prosperity and stability in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, the Maghreb and the Mashreq. With a view to contextualise the evolution of the focus on resilience in EU foreign policy, the seminar will also provide participants with a critical overview of the origins, structure and objectives of the three editions of the ENP (2003/4; 2011; 2015) and its sub-regional components, i.e. the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). This is complemented by an analysis of some concrete empirical cases from the EU’s eastern and southern neighbourhood that will be linked with contemporary debates on the EU ‘s alleged normative power, its role as a (potential or self-proclaimed) conflict resolution actor, and the politics of Association Agreements.