Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper scrutinises the EU performance towards its Eastern and Southern neighbourhood from an institutional and process-orientated perspective. It asks in what manner the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as strategic and integrated framework allows the EU and its member states to develop and pursue a strategic, coherent and efficient foreign policy towards those neighbours. The internal aim of the ENP at its set-up in 2003/04 had been to provide one single framework to harmonise and coordinate all policies of the EU and its member states towards this diverse set of countries, in order to achieve synergies and added-value as well as reaching the long-term objective of a unitary international actor. The paper evaluates the ENP as a framework for this relationship in regard of its internal governance achievements within the last 10 years, taking into account as well the latest strategic review in 2010/11. In contrast to the currently dominant academic research on the ENP the paper uses process-orientated indicators such as strategic decision-making and coherence (quality of output) instead of impact on the ground in third countries (outcome). By doing so the paper aims at evaluating the quality of the policy processes pursued within the complex institutional setting of the ENP and at showing how those processes over time have been smoothed out and improved