Beyond Fortress Europe. Unbounding European Normative Power and the Neighbourhood Policy

Abstract

The article critically scrutinizes the geographical assumptions which pervade most accounts of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Both the policy's proponents and opponents often rely on a too restrictive inside/outside distinction and do not properly acknowledge the peculiar territorialities which ‘EU'rope projects within and beyond its borders. While this limit has at times been perpetrated in scholarly debates on the topic, this article presents a review of recent research which, from different disciplinary backgrounds, converges in proposing more decentered and ‘unbounded’ perspectives for inquiring into EU's approach towards its neighbouring countries. EU external policies are a peculiar assemblage of inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and securitization, approximation and distantiation which cannot be properly captured by metaphors such as that of the “wider Europe” or “fortress Europe”. We discuss recent perspectives about European normative power, external governance and Europeanization, policy transfer and diffusion which show how regionalization and bordering processes are neither contradictory nor divergent but proceed side‐by‐side in an attempt to construct a selective, fragmented and mobile EU external frontier. These perspectives are crucial for renovating our understanding of EU's external relations and the Neighbourhood Policy both theoretically and methodologically, particularly in light of the EU's decreasing leverage and ongoing transformations in ‘EU'rope and its neighbourhood.

Non‐governmental/civil society organisations and the European Union‐externalisation of migration management in Tunisia and Egypt

“…First, the paper shows that state authorities in countries of transit and origin are not passive objects of Europeanisation: “the agency of the Europeanised” (Celata & Coletti, 2016, p. 19) is also important. Moreover, the “Europeanised” do not only react to initiatives of their European counterparts, for example, by delaying ad libitum the adoption of asylum laws to oppose the externalisation of asylum.…”

“…By focusing on diverse non-state actors, and by drawing on ethnographic research in two North African countries, the paper also tries to adopt a less univocal, state-centric, and European perspective, thus addressing recent calls to avoid Euro-centrism in the study of externalisation and EU-neighbourhood policy (Bürkner & Scott, 2018;Casas-Cortés & Cobarrubias, 2019;Celata & Coletti, 2016;Üstübici, Stock, & Schultz, 2019-2020Gaibazzi, Bellagamba, & Dünnwald, 2017b;Genç, Heck, & Hess, 2018;_ Işleyen, 2018b;Tazzioli, 2015). Indeed, EU-externalisation "is not a smooth top-down process" (Bartels, 2018, p. 64) and "cannot be understood entirely in terms of an old style geopolitics of dominance" (Collyer, 2016, p. 610).…”

Bordering imaginaries and the everyday construction of the Mediterranean neighbourhood: Introduction to the special issue

“…A widely discussed weakness of EU relations with its neighbouring countries is without doubt its Eurocentric bias (Celata and Coletti, 2016). Such bias permeates both normative and critical debates and obscures the fact that the EU itself is being shaped by its neighbours (Browning and Chistou, 2010;Morozov and Rumelili, 2012).…”

“…The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), in particular, has been the object of vast debate since its launch. It continues to be so because of the deteriorating geopolitical context along the Mediterranean shores and in Eastern Europe and because ENP is a test-bed for the EU as a global actor (Celata and Coletti, 2016;Scott et al, 2018). Scholars of political geography, in particular, have been close observers -and critics -of the EU's emerging geopolitics of regional cooperation (Bachmann and Sidaway, 2009;Browning and Joenniemi, 2008;Klinke, 2012;Kuus, 2007).…”

Notes on spatial transformation in post-Cold War Europe and the territory work of the European Union

“…Secondly, the eastern expansion of the EU generated new neighbours. Kuus (2014) The pre-and post-enlargement shaping of a "European neighbourhood" has been a peculiar process of inclusion and exclusion, and cooperation and securitization, as well as bordering and regionalization -a process which cannot be conceptualized in research through simplistic spatial dichotomies such as being either outside and inside the EU (for a useful discussion, see Celata & Coletti, 2016). The different policy transfers and policy diffusions associated with the ENP have rather constructed the EU's neighbourhood as a geopolitical site of learning in which the transformative power of the EU vis-à-vis its outside has been in operation (in the Mediterranean, see e.g.…”