European Neighbourhood Policy, Post-normativity, and Pragmatism

This article offers a comparative analysis of the European Union (EU)’s agreements and institutional links with Jordan and Lebanon within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This article suggests that the ENP agreements can be termed pragmatic bilateralism, claiming that the EU has altered its foreign policy agenda from a policy with an emphasis on democracy promotion to a post-normative and pragmatic, bilateral agenda.

Drawing on a neoinstitutionalist framework (focusing on ‘rules, routines, norms and identities’), this article argues that the different conditions for the relations between the EU and Jordan and Lebanon, respectively, in principle should have consequences in the sense that the EU would be expected not to implement similar policies or engage the two Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regimes in a similar manner. However, the complexity of the scenarios in Jordan and Lebanon in combination with the regional and international dimensions of the recent situation in the Middle East instead leads the EU to pursue post-normative and pragmatic policies characterized by more or less identical wording and non-committal goals. A certain uniformity of the EU’s ENP agreements can thus be explained by a deliberate vagueness, emphasizing the pragmatism of the EU’s ENP policies.