EU’s up-and-coming neighbourhood

By Stanley Crossick

Date: 29/04/04

THE start of May marks the end of the process of enlargement for the ten new member states, but not for the EU, which continues to prepare for the next expansion.

Bulgaria and Romania are slated for membership in 2007. A decision will be taken in December 2004 whether to open accession negotiations with Turkey. Meanwhile, Croatia is set to get the go-ahead to start accession talks in June, after the European Commission announced last week that Zagreb is fit to negotiate its EU entry. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has also applied to join the EU and other ex-Yugoslav states are likely to follow.

On 1 May, the EU will have a new neighbourhood. It is sensible, therefore, that it focuses on its new eastern neighbours as well as the Mediterranean region. This was foreseen by the European Commission in March 2003, when it adopted a communication on its new Wider Europe-Neighbourhood Policy, setting out a framework for relations over the coming decade with the eastern and southern neighbouring countries which do not currently have a perspective of EU membership.

This includes all the countries which form part of the European-Mediterranean partnership under the Barcelona Process (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine Authority, Syria and Tunisia) together with Belarus, Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

A decision has yet to be taken on the relationship of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to the neighbourhood policy. The only countries otherwise excluded are the candidate countries Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, applicant Croatia and FYROM, the Western Balkans (which have their own Stabilization and Association Agreements with the EU) and Iceland, Norway and Switzerland (members of EFTA, the European Free Trade Agreement).

Although countries are grouped together in these various initiatives, relations are always governed by bilateral dealings between the Union and individual states: there is no multilateral framework and the patchwork of Association Agreements and Partnership Cooperation Agreements, as well as the Barcelona Process, will continue.

No decision has yet been made as to whether there should be a single model or template for each country, whether this model should have different steps (levels, generations, modules) or whether each plan should be tailored to the circumstances and expectations of each partner. However, the objective is clearly to encourage political and economic reform so as to promote peace, security, stability and sustainable development. All action plans will incorporate conditionality and benchmarking.

Effect of the Union's policies:

At the Copenhagen summit in December 2002, the EU heads of state and government emphasized the importance of the Union's determination to avoid drawing new dividing lines in Europe, and to promote stability and prosperity within and beyond its new borders. The negative impact on neighbouring countries of the new, less permeable external EU frontier needs to be minimised. Their stability and prosperity is inextricably linked to the Union's.

However, a few questions ought to be raised, concerning the EU's neighbourhood policy. Firstly, it is difficult to understand why there is a Barcelona Process and also a neighbourhood policy addressing the same Mediterranean countries plus four eastern European states, that could just as easily sit within a wider Europe policy.

Second, while an effective neighbourhood policy will be costly, important benefits will flow to the EU as a result of increasing the prosperity, democracy and security of these countries, and reducing the cost of tackling refugees, illegal activities and instability in the Union's backyard. However, no additional expenditure is planned for 2004-06 and the period beyond 2007 is a hostage to the fortune of the 2007-13 budget - the debate on which has only started.

Effective implementation will suffer from a number of difficulties: insufficient coordination between overlapping geographic policy areas, lack of sufficient finance and, above all, a continued bilateral approach.

There is also serious doubt as to how conditionality will be applied. Although the EU claims to attach importance to the respect of democratic and human rights principles by the countries it has partnerships with, it does not always react to cases of flagrant breaches of such conditions. After all, the Union did not protest against the military coup d'état in Algeria in 1992, which followed the victory in the first round of free elections by the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), although the North African country is bound to respect these conditions under the Barcelona Process.

Recommendations:

The following set of ten overarching objectives and principles could usefully underpin the EU's overall engagement with its entire neighbourhood:

• To promote, through partnership, a common zone of peace, prosperity and progress;
• to make resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict a priority;
• to engage in a long-term sustained manner;
• to strengthen political dialogue;
• to promote democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law;
• to promote action and cooperation on terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and nuclear non-proliferation;
• to support internally driven economic, political and social reforms through engagement with state and civil society actors;
• to promote enhanced security dialogue;
• to modernize the regulatory environment and liberalize import and export trade; and
• to cooperate closely with the UN, US and other external actors in pursuit of these goals.

A more visionary strategy would have been to create a European Neighbourhood Area (ENA), along the lines of the European Economic Area, to bring together the EU with the countries in its vicinity. Those subsequently meeting the criteria for EU membership would then leave the ENA, following a much more simplified negotiation as result of ENA membership. This phasing could well have been a better solution than the "big bang" enlargement and, indeed, ongoing accession negotiations for many years to come. Unfortunately, it is now too late to create such a forum.

• Stanley Crossick is the director and founding chairman of the Brussels-based think tank The European Policy Centre.

Article is part of a European Voice Special Report on EU Enlargement, and considers the EU's preparations for its next expansion.