Michal Natorski

Elena Korosteleva

Licínia Simão

The EU continuously searches for more effective policy towards its eastern neighbourhood, which is reflected in the on-going adaptation of its existing approaches, discourses and policy strategies to the new challenges of its external environment. In order to understand the complexity and limitations of the EU framework under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership Initiative (EaP) – that is, to consider the interface between policy instruments, institutional structures, and multiple agents – one needs to adopt an original analytical perspective of practices to comprehensively assess the policies’ outcomes. This volume therefore offers an examination of social practices as implemented through the use of policy instruments and subsequently embedded into the existing/emergent social structures which shape and determine the EU-neighbours’ relations. To gauge success of the ENP in the eastern region, the manuscript pulls together a rich collection of geographical and thematic case-studies, joined by the overarching conceptual framework of practices. This study’s principal aims are to discern patterns of social practices which guide agents’ interactions in different policy areas; to explore the origin and effect of these practices (the role of dominant discourses, logistical imbalances, deliberate strategies, etc.); and to explicate the nature of the emerging social structures being established in the eastern region. This approach is distinctive from other constructivist undertakings as it allows to synergise the meanings of social actions (through the focus on agents and instruments), and their structural extensions (through the focus on emergent structures) across geo- and bio-political localities of the EU and its eastern neighbourhood. This book was published a sa special issue of East European Politics.

The practices perspective

EU Policies in the Eastern Neighbourhood

Benedetta Voltolini

Colin Hay

This book elucidates the link between the politics of a now seemingly permanent crisis in Europe and the politicisation of European integration. Looking at the epistemic dimension of crises, it suggests that the way in which a crisis is framed and contested determines its potential impact on the level of politicisation of European integration. Europe is more challenged and contested today than it has even been, facing crisis of an almost existential kind. Yet, political crises are manufactured and narrated, so Europe has the possibility to intervene and ‘bring about her recovery’, instead of letting these crises prove terminal. This book explores the political process in and through which certain events come to be framed as constitutive of a moment that requires a decisive intervention. It shows that crises require a double framing: a situation needs to be identified as one of crisis in the first place and, subsequently, the nature and character of the crisis need to be specified. By examining a wide range of policy areas, the book demonstrates that framing of crises, i.e., identifying one situation both as a crisis and a crisis of a particular kind, contributes to the politicisation (or depoliticisation) of the process of European integration. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issue of Journal of European Integration.

Michal Natorski

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