Integration without Europeanisation: Ukraine and its policy towards the European Union

Abstract

This paper examines the progress of, and conditions for, Europeanisation in one of the EU's new neighbours to the East. Since the late 1990s under Leonid Kuchma's presidency, Ukraine regularly expressed its willingness to participate in European integration via membership of the European Union. Yet these foreign policy declarations have not been accompanied by the necessary acceleration of domestic reforms. The paper argues that Ukraine has sought integration with the EU but without undergoing Europeanisation-extensive change to institutions and policies at the domestic level in line with EU's more or less explicit 'normative targets'. This is despite the fact that this is a model of proven utility as evidenced by its implementation in East-Central European states.

The paper aims to explain why the progress of Ukraine's integration with the EU has been confined to foreign policy declarations by exploring: first, the role of sources of Ukraine's policy towards the EU both at the elite and mass levels; and second, the reasons for Ukraine's inability to enact the 'European choice' in domestic reforms. Finally, the conditions under which a shift from declarations to actual Europeanisation in post-Soviet non-EU countries might occur will be identified by extrapolating from insights drawn from the literature on the EU's eastern enlargement in the context of the EU's new European Neighbourhood Policy.