The Revised European Neighborhood Policy: European Union's Credibility-Expectations Gap

The urgency of strengthening the EU’s foreign policy and effectively engaging in the neighboring regions has led the EU to launch the review of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) in 2015. The crisis-driven push resulted in a shift in the ENP focus, away from political and economic transformation of neighbours towards a cooperation framework aimed at stabilization of the neighborhood. However, the revised ENP has so far been unsuccessful in achieving its stated objectives. Why has the revised European Neighborhood Policy failed to address the EU’s challenges in the neighborhood?

Utilizing role theory, the paper claims that divergent EU’s role perceptions between the EU and its neighbors has led to EU’s credibility-expectations gap and undermined the effectiveness of EU role performance in the neighborhood. The paper argues that the EU’s credibility-expectations gap has been conditioned by the mismatch between the EU’s commitments and EU role expectations held by neighbors, discrepancy of perceptions in EU’s conflict resolution and security provider role, and EU’s recurrent failure to reshape its prescribed role. The ENP literature has so far been focused on capability-expectations gap of the EU’s actorness in the neighborhood. The credibility dimension of EU actorness, shaped by externally held views and expectations, has been neglected. The ensuing research aims to address this gap. In the concluding section, the paper discusses the possibility of association fatigue in the EU’s eastern neighbors due to the ENP’s credibility-expectations gap and provides policy recommendations.