The Eastern Partnership at 10: achievements, challenges and prospects

“Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure, nor so free”, reads the opening accord of the 2003 European Security Strategy. This optimism could not be more in contrast with the current diagnosis of a “more connected, contested and complex world”. The emergence of an ‘arc of instability’ beyond the EU’s borders has overshadowed the original aspiration of being surrounded by a “ring of well-governed friends”, i.e. the stated objective of the 2004 European Neighbourhood Policy. Increasing turmoil in the Eastern and Southern Neighbourhood has undermined the Union’s normative ambitions in these territories, where the promotion of democracy and good governance turned out to be a more complex endeavour than expected. In parallel, the EU’s ‘uncontested’ power of attraction in the neighbourhood has declined. In 2014, the American political scientist Walter R. Mead took Russia’s annexation of Crimea as an occasion to claim that “geopolitics is returning”. As such, competitive multipolarity confronts the institutionally post-modern Europe, whose model has already been put into question at the internal level. In this context, a sincere assessment of the first decade of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) needs to take into account the aforementioned factors as well as the peculiar developments in the EU’s Eastern neighbouring countries, with the aim of charting a constructive way forward.