Brussels is Speaking: The Adverse Speech Geo-Politics of the European Union Towards its Neighbours

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was presented as the EU's strategic response in order to deal with the new situation following the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. According to the EU, these changing circumstances have led to new rationales: 1) coping with its new external borders and neighbours and 2), finding a solution for a further enlargement problem. Both rationales are drawn out of strategic interest avoiding potentially damaging consequences on stability and development. Moreover, new inducements for multilevel cooperation were seen as necessary in order to ‘include’ the neighbouring states and create a prosperous and stable ‘Ring of friends’. The ENP has the objective to contribute to internal transformation and to further the process of ‘Europeanisation’. Europeanisation is explained by the EU as a normative process of sharing European values made concrete through policies of conditionality and socialisation of neighbouring states. This process of expanding ‘Europeanisation’ beyond the EU borders is inspired by an ambiguous and conflicting geopolitics that the EU applies as a strategic instrument. Most notably, this is emphasised by the fact that the ENP on the one hand creates an image of an inferior neighbour that urgently needs to move towards European standards and on the other hand produces a speech politics of mutuality and dialogue.

Through the study of EU speeches, communications and documents, we will argue that the rationales behind the ENP suggest a closure of the European Union and allow for neo-colonial interpretations by which pre-defined policies are to be accepted and pre-defined European values are seen as superior to neighbouring local values. This development is both undesirable and harmful. Europe is increasingly re-created as a bounded political entity institutionalised through hierarchical treaties and acts with friends, special friends, and reluctant, unwilling neighbours. In doing so, the EU faces a significant chance of alienating its neighbours and damaging cultures and societies by asymmetrical imperial power-policies based on self-created values. Paradoxically then, ENP that was set up to create good neighbours, risks producing what it wishes to protect from, angry neighbours.     

Assignment of Weights to the Member States of the European Union in Order to Model Their Relative Power Positions

Relative power of the member states of the European Union is expressed by weights assigned to the states on the basis of five criteria: population, gross domestic product, national area, political stability, and contributions to the European culture and civilization. The underlying idea is that ratios of these weights should approximate ratios of the five corresponding indicators. In addition, relative power can be moderated when the large member states save their power for issues about which they care more, and it can be amplified when the large states coordinate their efforts in order to dominate a coalition of smaller states. The results of the analysis are used to sketch a power distribution in the enlarged European Union.