Abstract

Gone are the heady days of a ‘ring of friends’, inspired by the goals of fostering stability, security and prosperity in a shared neighbourhood. Despite low-level ‘positive developments’ in a few of the countries of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), the general trend is a problematic one. As the European Union’s (EU’s) report of 2015 concedes, ‘conflict, rising extremism and terrorism, human rights violations and other challenges to international law, and economic upheaval’ have produced a series of regional disturbances that have shaken the ENP to its core, in terms of both its cause and its consequences (European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy 2015: 2). Seen as ‘idealistic in its conception as it was timid and insufficient in its implementation’, the ENP has emerged as a poorly crafted EU foreign policy, and the EU itself culpable of having ‘greatly overestimated its own influence and underestimated the structural problems and risks in its neighbourhood’ (Lehne 2015).