Today's Neighbours, Tomorrow's Partners: Managing the Neighbourhood in Post-Enlargement Europe

The European Neighbourhood Policy reflects a greater European willingness to be involved in the resolution of conflicts and the spread of stability and prosperity beyond the immediate geographical boundaries of the present European Union. It is also regarded as a useful tool for the EU to project its soft power to a vast area encompassing Eastern Europe, the Southern Caucasus, North Africa and the Middle East. As such, it is an ambitious policy framework aiming to address the EU's strategic objectives, to tackle the challenges it faces and reap the benefits of closer political and economic ties with its neighbours.

Given that the ENP has an evolutionary character and that there is strong consensus among the EU member states to strengthen the policy, the paper aims to offer some ideas. First, it argues that the policy becomes more plausible if a special emphasis is put on the principle of differentiation and European neighbours and non-European partners are decoupled. Inferring from that, granting Most Favoured Nation (MFN) Status to EU's Eastern European neighbours (principally to Ukraine) is proposed. Then, it suggests that being complementary to the ENP's bilateral approach, more emphasis should be given to regional cooperation and multilateral frameworks.

In the meantime, the success of the ENP in providing the EU the necessary means for an effective management of the post-enlargement neighbourhood, Eastern Europe in particular, very much depends on how the EU is going to steer and shape this policy.

About the author

Emel G. Oktay was Senior Research Fellow in the Clingendael European Studies Programme between October 2005 and September 2007. She was Senior Researcher and Head of Balkan and Cyprus Studies at the Eurasian Centre for Strategic Studies (ASAM), an Ankara based think-tank. She is the author of a book titled The Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution and Britain's Role in Shaping Western Policy and has also published several articles on Balkan and Black Sea politics in national and international journals and books. She currently works as Assistant Professor of International Relations at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey.

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