"Is the eastern enlargement of Europe over?"

-Hello, Yann Richard.

-Hello.

-You are a professor of geography

at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

In this same university, you are head of the department of geography

and you specialize in the territorial dynamics

of the European Union as well as in the spacialization

of territorial issues of the European Union as an actor

in international relations. Many things happened in 2015 and 2016.

I would like you to explain here if the enlargement dynamics

is still going on or not.

You remember that, in May 2015, there was, in Riga,

the capital of Latvia, a summit with the 28 member states

of the European Union as well as the 6 countries of what is called

the Eastern Partnership of the European Union: Ukraine,

Moldavia, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

There, Angela Merkel declared that, "The Eastern Partnership

is not an instrument of enlargement of the European Union,

it is an instrument to get closer to the European Union."

What is the difference between enlarging and getting closer?

Does it mean that the European Union will not be enlarged anymore?

Is it over?

-It is a Byzantine-like difference.

What Angela Merkel said can be interpreted in different ways

by the members states but also by countries eligible

to the European Neighborhood Policy.

Quite simply, we can answer in 4 or 5 points.

First, we can say that facts prove Angela Merkel right.

Remember that the European Neighborhood Policy

was invented in 2003.

It was launched on January 1st 2004 and, since then, no country eligible

to the European Neighborhood Policy has become an official

candidate country to the European Union.

And no official candidate country is, or has been, a country eligible

to the European Neighborhood Policy.

So, de facto, there has always been a distinction

between those two categories of countries.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental ambiguity.

It is original, we can even say of genetic origin,

in the European Neighborhood Policy.

It has been elaborated, this has been well studied

by many specialists in international relations, by civil servants

who were in charge of the enlargement policy at the end of the 1990s,

beginning of the 2000s.

This explains why we can find in the strategic texts

of the European Neighborhood Policy, in particular in the 2003 version,

expressions that can be found in the texts that defined

the enlargement policy of the European Union.

So there is some sort of confusion between both registers.

Furthermore, there are internal ambiguities since some member states

of the European Union consider that the Eastern Partnership,

launched in Prague in 2009, is a prelude to eastern neighbors

becoming part of the European Union.

Therefore, countries such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Baltic countries,

Poland and even Sweden to some extent, consider that any country eligible

to the ENP in the eastern neighborhood

is a future member of the European Union.

On this matter, we can remember what the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs

declared a few years ago, Mr. Sikorski.

He said, "To the south, we have neighbors to Europe,

to the east we have European neighbors."

So there is an internal ambiguity in the European Union

since other countries such as France, Spain, Portugal,

do not wish it to be a prelude to membership.

More generally, we can conclude with this, it is clear

that this statement from Angela Merkel shows a change in tone and, maybe,

in attitude for the European Union regarding the Eastern Partnership

and regarding the Russian issue.

At the Vilnius summit in 2013,

the Europeans had a rather aggressive position.

The subtext was, "You will see what happens.

Countries eligible to the Eastern Partnership will get closer and closer

to the European Union."

This was a prelude to the conflict which broke out in Ukraine.

This Ukrainian conflict is a conflict

between two regional integration projects

that are politically and technically incompatible.

-You mean an integration project of Ukraine

in a great Euro-Russian zone?

-Indeed.

-This is called "Eurasia", right? Or the integration project of Ukraine

in something that is far more complex and deep called the European Union?

-Exactly. Here are two projects that are technically incompatible.

Recently, President Hollande himself said that

it is no longer out of the question for a country eligible

to the Neighborhood Policy to keep strong relations with Russia.

So we went from a political position saying, "It is this or that",

to, "It can be this and that."

So there is here a change in the general tone.

Finally, the ambiguities of the European Neighborhood Policy

are a more general sign of the inability of the European Union

to build a foreign policy.

For the moment, we have not made the qualitative jump

into an integration approach towards a common European policy,

fully integrated and supranational in terms of external relations.

-Thank you very much, Yann Richard.

Yann Richard - Is the enlargement of Eastern Europe completed?

Geopolitics of Europe

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