On 1 March, the European Union started free-trade talks with Morocco. It was one of the high points of the past year for the European Union’s relations with its neighbours. But just five days later, some of the warm after-glow faded when four members of the European Parliament were refused entry to Morocco as they sought to reach the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara. Any trade deal negotiated between Morocco and the EU will require endorsement by the Parliament.  

This was only the most recent reminder that the EU’s neighbourhood is littered with seemingly intractable territorial disputes that can snag political and economic relations – just as Western Sahara’s disputed status hampered a fisheries deal with Morocco in 2011.

Of the 12 states active in the EU’s neighbourhood policy, seven have unresolved territorial disputes: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova, Israel and Palestine, and Morocco.

In addition to Morocco, three Arab neighbours are struggling to manage their political revolution or evolution – Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia – and one, Lebanon, is struggling to maintain stability. It would be unrealistic to expect their political leaders to consider any reform agenda agreed with the EU as their first priority. The twelfth country, Ukraine, is torn between the EU and Russia.

So there should be no great sense of surprise that the reports released yesterday (20 March) by the European Commission on relations with the European Union’s southern and eastern neighbours were short on positive news.

The “very mixed picture of progress” – the assessment of a senior EU official – is not for want of money (though cuts are in prospect for 2014-20). The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) had a budget of €12 billion for 2007-13 and in 2012, the Commission managed to release an additional €1bn for the countries that have been most successful in their reforms.

Nor are these countries lacking top-level attention. Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for the neighbourhood, is an incessant traveller.

Most of the states also receive additional, less formalised attention from the EU through three special envoys, one special mission (to address justice issues in Ukraine), and a special adviser (to Georgia, for justice issues).

The challenges

At the operational level, the EU has a strategy in place for the ENP, a set of well-established instruments, and action plans agreed individually with 12 of its neighbours. Moreover, it has a clear and simple guiding mantra: ‘more for more’, the overarching principle following a revamp in 2011 prompted by the Arab uprisings.

The idea is that those countries that do more to consolidate their democracies will get more EU money and assistance.

Fabrizio Tassinari of the Danish Institute for International Studies welcomes some of the effects of the more-for-more approach, but he questions the basis for the policy. “The underlying assumption is that the EU is attractive in itself, which…has not been valid for two or three years now. The assumption that the EU acts as a magnet has to be re-visited.”

“The neighbourhood policy started [in the 1990s]… with the ENP as a substitute for enlargement,” he says. It is now something more nebulous. Amanda Paul of the European Policy Centre says it has no objective. “And if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, you can’t devise the right tools,” she argues.

If the ENP does not offer the prospect of EU membership, what leverage does it have to persuade governments to push through reforms when they encounter political difficulties?

On Azerbaijan, there is a consensus that the EU’s leverage is limited. Oil and gas money mean that Azerbaijan’s leaders had little economic incentive to sign up to the “deep democracy” agenda promoted by the ENP.

Elsewhere, alternative sources of funding can cool a willingness to follow EU prescriptions. “We have our conditions, other Arab countries have theirs, the Chinese have fewer,” is how one EU official puts it.

Ways forward

Tassinari argues that the EU needs “a political narrative to drive it [the ENP] forward”.

EU officials do not feel that operational changes are needed at present; they would prefer to let the revised ENP strategy bed down for a few more years, a senior official said.

There is, however, one area where the EU officials would like a greater role, despite the difficulties, another official says: helping to resolve conflicts in the region.

“Lots of planning is based on an assumption of linear progress and these conflicts are major road-blocks” to such progress, Tassinari says.

“I believe that the EU should play a much more pro-active role in conflict mediation,” says Erwan Fouéré of the Centre for European Policy Studies and a former EU special representative in Macedonia. But the EU has a poor record of helping to resolve territorial disputes – with Cyprus a prime example – or even of forging unified positions. “On this, we are only as strong as the weakest link,” says a senior EU official.

For a sense of the EU’s political direction beyond its eastern borders, everyone is looking to the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius later this year.

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In countries such as Armenia, Paul says that the summit is viewed as a “litmus test”, with civil society – not just leaders – needing “something tangible now”. Fouéré says that the EU’s experience of enlargement shows that the ENP needs “to show dividends, in the form of economic opportunities, visa liberalisation and [overall] stabilisation”.

Progress

On the evidence of this year’s reports, some countries are within reach of two of these dividends. Visa liberalisation is the number-one EU-related issue for electorates in the east – and therefore for their leaders, says a senior EU official. The reports highlight progress toward visa liberalisation made by Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia.

On the trade front, Armenia and Georgia could this year complete talks on ‘deep and comprehensive free-trade agreements’ with the EU, while Tunisia could follow Morocco in starting talks.

Paul warns that the EU needs these trade deals if it is to retain credibility and leverage in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Successes, she says, would strengthen reformists as they prepare to face harder challenges.

To get beyond trade and visas, in the absence of an offer of a grander relationship, the EU will need to reinforce the argument that “governance is good and right per se”, Tassinari says.

This may be a less ambitious and appealing case for the ENP than initially envisaged, but that does not, he suggests, make the policy a failure. Paul agrees. “Even though the going has got tough, the EU needs to stick at it,” she says.