Paper Titles & Abstracts

The EU's enlargements of 2004 and 2007 signified a project without precedent, the expansion to the East being a manifestation of the EU's foreign policy. After gaining full membership, the new Central and Eastern European EU members also tried to shape the Union's foreign policy, seeking to implement their preferences in the setting of the external policy making agenda of the Union. The aim of this paper is to decipher the impact of some of these countries on shaping the EU's border policy towards the post-Soviet space. The study consists of two parts: the first one analyses the influence of the 2004 enlargement and especially the role of Poland and Lithuania in framing the Union's border policy towards Kaliningrad, indirectly disclosing the EU-Russia relations, and the second one examines the role played by Romania in the Moldova-EU border relations and Moldova's potential EU membership. In the Kaliningrad-Poland-Lithuania-EU nexus, special attention will be paid to the current European regulation on a visa-free travel zone, while the Moldovan-Romanian-EU direction will reveal the secrets of the EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and of the Moldovan-Romanian cross-border relations beginning with the granting of the Romanian citizenship and with the regulation of the border traffic. These case studies will help us not only to become familiar with the influence of the Central and Eastern European EU members on the EU's border policy towards the post-Soviet space, but they will also reveal both the "hard" and "soft" practices used by the Union, trying to reconcile its realist based state-centric, exclusionary model of border practice with the necessity to develop an inclusionary approach based on cooperation with those who were left outside.