The European Neighbourhood Policy, Region-Building and Bordering

The chapter presents a review of the European Neighbourhood Policy’s diversified aims and of its realizations. In light of the main criticisms that authors and experts have expressed towards the EU’s attempts to extend its “normative power” beyond its external borders, the chapter presents an assessment of the ENP’s goals and narratives with a specific focus on its diversified regional strategies and on the perspectives for a multi-level governance of the policy. The aim is to show how the ENP is not a unitary but fragmented and controversial strategy: bordering and cross-bordering, homogenisations and differentiations, centrifugal and centripetal forces proceed side-by-side. Grasping the variety of these apparently contradictory forces, it is argued, is more useful in understanding the Neighbourhood Policy rather than referring to simple and ‘territorial’ metaphors such as “wider Europe”, on the one hand, or “fortress Europe” on the other.