Paper Titles & Abstracts

The Eastern Partnership is an initiative that is particularly important for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe due to their geographic location, historical connections and political ties with the Eastern neighbourhood of the EU. However, in reality the CEE countries have been far from unified regarding the details of both the elaboration and the concrete functioning of the Eastern Partnership. Hence, the paper aims at fulfilling a double goal. First, it intends to examine the original ambitions of the four Visegrad countries during the creation of the Eastern partnership, e.g. their role in developing the projects and making the original idea to be an EU policy. Second, the paper also aims at exploring the current activities of the four Visegrad countries inside the EU in connection with the Eastern Partnership: what are the current priority regions and policy fields, and how do they evaluate the results of the project after three years. Here an outlook will be provided also to the coordinated Visegrad-level activities inside the EU. The final, concluding part will focus on the comparison of the original EaP related ambitions of the CEE countries and the current situation, trying also to explain the reasons of the changes in the individual EaP policies of the Visegrad countries inside the EU.