When two halves don’t make a whole

Turf war shows deeper problems with the EU’s neighbourhood policy.

Europe’s attitude to its southern neighbours has rarely come under such intense scrutiny as in the first few months of this year. The events unfolding in north Africa and the Middle East have made a review of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which had already been scheduled, particularly pertinent. 

But publication of the European Commission’s assessment of the ENP and suggestions for reform, which had been expected next week, has been delayed. One of the reasons is a turf war between Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for the neighbourhood, and Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

The inter-institutional tussle concerned the extent to which aid to north Africa and eastern Europe should be tied to democratic reform. That is an important question in light of the democratic revolutions that have swept through north Africa and the Middle East, and the backsliding on democracy that is currently under way across the EU’s eastern neighbourhood, from Ukraine and Belarus to Azerbaijan (with Moldova a rare bright spot). Füle’s answer – “differentiation”, which means that countries will receive more aid for more reform – is solid.

The delay, which seems likely to be only a matter of weeks, is no bad thing: better to get the policy right than to rush it out. But the bigger question that Füle, Ashton and the member states ought to tackle concerns the very nature of the ENP. Does it make sense to have a single policy that embraces both the southern and the eastern neighbourhood? Is there a good reason to lump the two regions together, or does that simply reflect the EU’s institutional set-up?

There is no evidence that the current review will address, or even acknowledge, that question. Füle should grab the opportunity to propose bold change. The policy has in its current form failed to deliver, and part of that failure stems from its pretence that eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean suffer from the same illness and need the same medicine, in slightly different doses.

In effect, there are already two neighbourhood policies: the countries of the east may be a very long way from joining the EU – but they do, in principle, have a membership prospect, despite the EU’s bizarre reticence to say so. (This is one of the sticking points in the association talks currently under way between the EU and Ukraine. Kiev wants the association agreement to include an explicit acknowledgment that it has a prospect of joining the EU, even if the moment of joining may be decades away.) The countries of the southern Mediterranean have no such prospect, not even one measured in decades. This means that the EU’s soft power falls flat, reducing the ENP to a piggy-bank for government programmes. In the east, the EU’s power of attraction is directly proportionate to the various countries’ wish to join, with Georgia and Moldova leading the pack and Azerbaijan and Belarus – in very different ways – remaining aloof.

The Mediterranean Union, a vanity project of Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, has fallen flat. It has played no role whatsoever in the democratic revolutions in the Arab world, and its close association with France – principal backer of Tunisia’s rotten regime, which was the first to fall – and with Egypt has discredited it in the eyes of many Arab democrats. But the Mediterranean Union has had one salutary effect – to prompt Sweden and Poland to come up with the Eastern Partnership. Until now, the EU has insisted that this does not put in question the unity of the Neighbourhood Policy. The time has come to face the fact that it does – and to welcome the ENP’s split in two.

The quarrel between Füle and Ashton is a symptom of a deeper incoherence inside the ENP, and of the EU’s inability to recognise it. If the two fall out over a point which, although important, does not touch the ENP’s core, how will they ever correct the policy’s design flaws?

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