Partners and neighbours: a CFSP for a wider Europe

This Chaillot Paper is the product of collegial reflection by the EUISS’s research team. The effects of the current enlargement process are already making themselves felt in not only the internal but also the external policies of the widening Union. New borders and neighbours are bringing new challenges while reconfiguring old ones. This new reality requires more than just additions to existing policies: the entire neighbourhood, or proximity, policy of the enlarged EU will have to be reassessed and reformulated. First, enlargement itself – for long the most successful security policy of the EC/EU – may be reaching its geographical and functional limits. For the Union, the main problem will become how to exert influence on its neighbours comparable to that exerted in the past decade on the Central and East Europeans without offering the prospect of membership linked to strict ‘conditionality’. Belonging to ‘Europe’ and joining ‘EU Europe’ are distinct conditions and processes that may overlap and even coincide eventually but may have to remain separate in the short term.