Does Religion Matter? the EU Enlargement and Neighborhood in Polish and European Foreign Policy

The end of Cold War limited a significance of the ideological and political divisions in the world and put more stress on the cultural and identitarian differences and as a result also on religious factors. This is specifically visible in foreign policy of those actors that identify themselves also in religious terms. It is because foreign policy has always been profoundly interconnected with the collective self-understanding of a group.

The main aim of the paper is to analyse how in the Polish foreign policy religious arguments are utilised in the context of the European Union and its external actions. The European Foreign Policy (EFP) is a policy that defines the EU actorness outside. It also – through enlargement – draws new borders of a community and brings newcomers to a common political house. The EU’s activities in the world ultimately influence the collective identity of Europeans. The newcomers form Central and Eastern Europe enforced religious and cultural arguments and justifications used in the discourse on EFP. Therefore the interest of the paper is how the justifications given for EFP toward selected regions and countries (especially Turkey and East European countries) shed light on the specific constructions of defining who Europeans are and demarcating clear borders with those perceived as non-European. The paper will analyse the debates in the Polish Parliament and Polish MEPs activities in the European Parliament (EP) between 2004-2014.