Paper Titles & Abstracts

In spite of its substantial budget, the shared development policy of the EU is not considered as a key element of the European integration. However, it is a case of extreme heterogeneity among member states, especially since some of them started or restarted their development cooperation programmes only on the eve of the 2004 and 2007 enlargements. Previous research has shown that Europeanisation of development policy of the 'new' member states can be labelled as shallow. Moreover, the newcomers were successful in pushing for diverging aid targets by 2015 as a key part of EU soft law in the area, which institutionalised a double-speed development policy. More recently, the debt crisis in the Southern dimension of the EU has led to further differentiation in the performance of the member states. By scrutinising the adoption of hard and soft law and the various initiatives of the European Commission and the member states, this paper starts by applying the key concepts of differentiation such as double- and multi-speed Europe and variable geometry at institutional and implementation levels and it tests their relevance in the field of EU development policy. The factors that lead to the differentiation of the EU development policy are analysed as well as the consequences for the future of the Union at large.