The Place of European Neighbourhood Policy in the EU External Governance: A Sustainable Partnership Model?

The deepening of European Union integration led to the “externalities of EU integration” (Lavenex and Ucarer, 2002) which created the debates and research on EU external governance mechanisms. The increasing interdependence between the EU and the third countries especially with regard to soft security issues such as irregular migration creates the need for a more innovative and efficient external governance model adapting to rapid changes and transformations both in the targeted regions in EU foreign policy and in the issues creating interdependency (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, 2009).

European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) offering the neighbouring regions deeper integration without full membership is a significant part of EU external governance mechanism which could create a model for deepening relations with other countries.  However ENP has been in times of crisis and in need for an urgent and deep revision due to the vastly changing political landscape in the neighbouring regions of the EU and lack of rule adoption especially in political conditionality matters. In a period of the dilemma between norm-based and interest-based policies in EU external relations, the consultation process for revising the ENP in 2015 created an opportunity for improving the efficiency of external governance mechanism in the ENP. This paper aims to analyse the lessons driven from the inadequate conditionality mechanism in the ENP and evaluate the sustainability of the newly developed approach. These lessons will be reflected on EU’s external governance mechanisms towards other third countries in an external governance model of concentric circles in this paper.