European Union Security by Steve Marsh & Wyn Rees

Author:Steve Marsh & Wyn Rees [Marsh, Steve & Rees, Wyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136631016
Google: oXupAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17548965
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

The division of Europe: outer Europe

Granting the Western Balkans a membership perspective, together with impending enlargement to the CEECs, put considerable pressure upon the Union to identify and devise coherent and comprehensive policies towards the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkan periphery. In 2002 the European Commission called for a policy towards ‘all our neighbours’.77 In 2003 it released its Communication on ‘Wider Europe’, which was designed to set out a strengthened framework for the Union's relations ‘with those neighbouring countries that do not currently have the perspective of membership of the EU.’78 It seemed in this document that the key identifier of the EU's Eastern European was prospective shared borders. Hence the Eastern perspective of what would become the ENP included only Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. Russia rejected participation in favour of its strategic partnership framework and the Southern Caucasus were dismissed on account of their location.

However, the following year Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were raised from a footnote in the ‘Wider Europe’ communication to full partners in ENP. This set new operational limits at least of what the EU regarded as Eastern Europe. The border rationale for including the Southern Caucasus, though, was less obvious and consistent. Georgia shares a border with the EU only by dint of the Black Sea. Armenia's shared border status is contingent upon Turkey becoming a full Member of the EU. And Azerbaijan's claim is still more tenuous, being based potentially on its land-locked exclave of Nakhchivan having a 9 km border with Turkey. Moreover, not all of Turkey's other neighbours were included in ENP.

Evidently more than geography ultimately defined the EU's revised conception of Eastern Europe, and for that matter membership of ENP. Politics played an important, if inconsistent, part. Political sanction helps explain the exclusion of Turkey's neighbours Iraq and Iran from ENP, though this was muddied by the inclusion of Syria and Belarus from which the EU currently withholds active ENP membership for political reasons. The shaping of the EU's Eastern Europe has also been influenced by EU Member States championing different countries in the Caucasus and by external pressure. For instance, Georgia's case for inclusion undoubtedly benefited from American support, its aspirations to be part of Euro-Atlantic structures and from the Rose Revolution which increased pressure upon the EU to do something to assist Tbilisi's consolidation of democracy.

However, security considerations perhaps most influenced the inclusion of the Southern Caucasus in ENP. The ESS foregrounded security concerns in the region in 2003 and recommended more active EU involvement in addressing them. Frozen conflicts in South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia, as the Commission prophetically noted in December 2006, demonstrated ‘that the conditions for peaceful coexistence remain to be established, both between some of our neighbours and with other key countries.’79 The following year, elaborating upon why the EU ‘has a direct interest in working with partners to promote their resolution’, the Commission emphasised that these conflicts undermined efforts to promote political reform and economic development in the neighbourhood and affected

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