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Despite growing scholarly interest in the EU's flagship policy towards its Eastern and Southern neighbours, serious attempts at theory-building on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) have been largely absent from the academic debate. This book aims at contributing to fill this research gap in a three-fold manner: first and foremost it aims at theorizing the ENP as such, explaining the origins, development and effectiveness of this policy. Building on this effort, it also pursues the broader objective of addressing certain shortcomings in EU external relations theory, and even beyond, in International Relations theory. Finally, it aspires to provide new insights for European policy-makers. It is one of the first volumes to provide different theoretical perspectives on the ENP by revisiting and building bridges between mainstream and critical theories, stimulating academic and policy debates and thus setting a novel, less EU-centric research agenda. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in EU external relations, EU foreign policy, the European Neighbourhood Policy, and more broadly in European Union Politics and International Relations. --

The debate about the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has, in essence, been about borders and bordering. Such departures could contribute — and often do so — to a rather fixed geopolitical vision of what the EU is about and how it aims to run and to organize the broader European space. However, this article aims to retain space for viewing the ENP as a developmental and somewhat fluid process. A conceptual framework, based on outlining three geopolitical models and a series of different geopolitical strategies employed by the EU in regard to its borders, is hence employed in order to be able to tell a more dynamic story regarding the developing nature of the ENP and the EU's evolving nature more generally. The complexity traced informs us that various geostrategies may be held at the same time at the external border. Moreover, the dominance of one geostrategy may be replaced by another or a different combination of them with regard to the same neighbourhood. It is, more generally, argued that if anything it is precisely this dynamism that should be championed as a valuable resource, avoiding the tendency to close off options through the reification of particular visions of the nature of the EU and its borders.

The debate about the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has, in essence, been about borders and bordering. Such departures often contribute to rather fixed geopolitical visions of what the EU is about and how it aims at running and organising the broader European space. In contrast, this paper aims at retaining space for viewing the ENP as a developmental and somewhat fluid process. A conceptual framework, based on the outlining of three geopolitical models and a series of different geostrategies employed by the EU in regard to its borders, is hence utilized in order to tell a more dynamic story regarding the developing nature of the ENP and the EU's evolving nature more generally. The complexity traced informs that various geostrategies may be held at the same time at the external border. Moreover, the dominance of one geostrategy may be replaced by another or a different combination of them with regard to the same neighbourhood. It is, more generally, argued that if anything it is precisely this dynamism that should be championed as a valuable resource and as such avoiding the tendency to close off options through the reification of particular visions of the nature of the EU and ist borders.

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. Adapted from the source document.