Drawing the Neighbours Closer … to What?
| Author | Oriol Costa,Anna Herranz,Esther Barbé,Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués,Michal Natorski,Maria A. Sabiote |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836709344423 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Drawing the Neighbours Closer … to What?
Explaining Emerging Patterns of Policy Convergence
between the EU and its Neighbours
ESTHER BARBÉ, ORIOL COSTA,
ANNA HERRANZ, ELISABETH
JOHANSSON-NOGUÉS, MICHAL NATORSKI
AND MARIA A. SABIOTE
ABSTRACT
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) launched in 2004 was
purposefully conceived as a strategy to encourage neighbours’ approxi-
mation with the European Union (EU). This aim by the EU to extend
its own system of rules beyond member states has become the focal
point of the literature on the EU’s relations with neighbours. In this
article, however, we aim to broaden the scope of the analysis of the
EU’s role as it pursues policy convergence in the ENP area. More speci-
fically, we argue that the convergence processes can be established on
a basis other than EU’s norms, namely, international and bilaterally
developed norms. Building on this three-fold distinction, we propose
a model explaining how and when policy convergence is more likely
to happen on the basis of every one of these norms. The model takes
into account three variables: the structure of incentives between the
EU and its neighbours, mutual perceptions of legitimacy and intra-EU
coherence. Based on a number of empirical examples, we illustrate that
EU-based convergence is less predominant in EU’s relations with its
neighbours than it is usually portrayed in the literature.
Keywords: EU foreign policy; European neighbourhood policy;
Europeanization; external governance
Introduction
One of the principal features of the European Neighbourhood Policy
(ENP) which would cause as much expectation as controversy at the policy’s
launch in 2004 was the European Union’s (EU) offer to would-be ENP
partners to share ‘everything but institutions’ (Prodi, 2002) in return for
their ‘legislative and regulatory approximation’ with the Union (European
Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association
Vol. 44(4): 378–399. © NISA 2009 www.nisanet.org
SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC
www.sagepublications.com
0010-8367. DOI: 10.1177/0010836709344423
BARBÉ ET AL.: DRAWING THE NEIGHBOURS CLOSER 379
Commission, 2004: 15). The policy harmonization process thus inevitably
seemed to point to a situation in which the future ENP partners were to
be encouraged to adopt EU-specific norms, rules and standards. For this
reason, it is perhaps not surprising that many scholarly studies on the ENP
have centred on what is perceived as a tendency for the EU to reproduce
its integration experience and externalize its regulatory structures beyond
its territorial confines (Lavenex, 2004, 2008; Bicchi, 2006; Bauer et al.,
2007; Jünemann and Knodt, 2007; Schimmelfennig, 2007; Lavenex et al.,
2008). Such reproduction of EU norms and rules in countries that have no
accession perspective has not been free of polemics. This has generated a
second mass of (related) literature about whether the Union’s attempt to
inculcate European values and standards on neighbours is necessarily a
good thing for these countries. The EU’s attempt to extend its own norms
and standards beyond its borders has been described by critics as evidence
for the assumption that EU foreign policy vis-à-vis neighbouring countries
is rather to be characterized as dominative or with civilizing ambitions than
as universalistic or cosmopolitan (Bicchi, 2006; Lucarelli, 2007; Merlingen,
2007; Sjursen, 2007). As the state of the art of any literature is always much
more nuanced than brief portrayals of it, the caveat must be made that both
within these approaches and beyond them a significant number of authors
have dealt with the issue of the adequacy and effectiveness of EU strategies
in terms of its mechanisms, facilitating conditions or relative success or
failure. However, the assumption that the EU promotes its own system of
rules abroad has been pervasive in the ENP literature.
The present article ventures beyond these debates and reveals a more
nuanced picture of the EU as it pursues policy convergence in the ENP
area.1 To our mind, while the Union encourages its partners to harmonize
their policies with the EU in a number of fields, policy convergence pro-
cesses are much less dominated by EU rules and norms than meets the
eye. We argue that EU rules are only one out of three sets of standards
at the heart of such convergence, the other two being international and
bilaterally agreed-upon norms and rules. Moreover, this article also aims to
broaden the research agenda by exploring policy convergence conceptually.
For this reason, we propose a model explaining how and when the policy
convergence processes are likely to take on one shape or the other. More
specifically, it is argued that the processes of policy convergence are related
to (a) the structure of incentives between the EU and its neighbours,
(b) mutual perceptions of legitimacy, and (c) intra-EU coherence. We argue
that these are the principal variables explaining why the policy convergence
process brings the EU and its neighbours up to par on the basis of EU,
international or bilateral specific norms.
The article proceeds as follows. The first section reviews the literature
on the relationship between the EU and its neighbouring countries, and
justifies the need to draw a broader picture of policy convergence, so that
it is less focused on the externalization of the EU governance system.
The next section outlines the above noted three types of convergence pro-
cesses and our independent variables (incentives, legitimacy and intra-
EU coherence). The final section explores the relationship between the
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