Bibliotheken Online

Ten Years Eastern Partnership - The EU and its Strategic Dilemma

Johann Wolfschwenger. Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europapolitik - ÖGfE

Buch

englisch

Wolfschwenger, Johann (Verfasser/-in) DNB

ÖGfE Policy Brief

14

ÖGfE

Wien

2019

7 p.

Policy Recommendations

The EU should focus on development aid and continue to re-direct funding to concrete bottom-up democratization.
The Eastern Partnership should be assessed from a holistic perspective, starting with the repercussions stemming from an instable regional security architecture.
Austria and like-minded states should promote a new strategic vision for the Eastern neighbourhood – a vision that aims at emancipating the region from Russia and the EU.

Abstract

10 years after the launch of the Eastern Partnership (EaP), the EU finds itself in a strategic dilemma: On the one hand the ‘European aspirations’ of many of the Eastern partners are the driving force behind their domestic democratic reform process; on the other hand, the very same European course nurtures a climate of geopolitical instability in which a democratic transformation and subsequently EU integration seems hardly possible. It has become obvious that the Kremlin’s policy responses are a significant factor to determine the outcome of EU policies in the neighbourhood. Moreover, the EU is internally divided over the future course of the EaP and the relations with Russia. The loophole to resolve this strategic dilemma is understanding the EaP in its entire complexity as an interplay of geopolitics and domestic politics.

Österreichische Gesellschaft für Europapolitik - ÖGfE

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