Laure DELCOUR

Armenia is one of the four members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which was formally established at the beginning of 2015. Laure Delcour and Kataryna Wolczuk write that pressure from Russia following Armenia’s growing engagement with the EU left the country with little choice but to sign up to the Eurasian Economic Union. However they argue that Armenia’s continued interest in pursuing cooperation with the EU will represent an important test-case for the co-existence between the EU and the EEU in the post-Soviet space.

Over the past year, ‘modernisation’ has emerged as a buzzword in the EU-Russia partnership, apparently giving flesh to a relationship that was largely said to be stalling before a new initiative, the Partnership for Modernisation, was launched in June 2010. The rationale for this project is similar to that underpinning the EU-Russia strategic partnership: a combination of strong interdependence and high complementarity between partners.

Le conflit russo-géorgien d’août 2008 n’a duré que quelques jours, mais il a surpris et mobilisé la scène internationale à tel point qu’il a été évoqué comme une « petite guerre qui a remué le monde ». Ce chapitre a pour but d’identifier le rôle joué par la France et l’Allemagne, d’analyser leurs interactions et de repérer l’éventuelle mobilisation des structures franco-allemandes lors de ce conflit. Il s’agira d’essayer de répondre plus précisément aux questions suivantes : les tensions, pui..

The literature on the European Union's influence in its Eastern neighbourhood has tended to focus on EU-level policies and prioritise EU-related variables. This book seeks to overcome this EU-centric approach by connecting EU policy transfer to the domestic and regional environment in which it unfolds. It looks at the way in which the EU seeks to influence domestic change in the post-Soviet countries participating in the European Neighbourhood Policy/Eastern Partnership and domestic receptivity to EU policies and templates. It seeks to disentangle the various dynamics behind domestic change (or lack thereof) in Eastern Partnership countries, including EU policy mechanisms, domestic elites' preferences and strategies, regional interdependences and Russia's policies. Based upon extensive empirical investigation on EU policies in four countries: Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – and in two pivotal policy sectors – the book provides systematic and nuanced understanding of complex forces at work in the policy transfer process. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations , European studies, democratization studies, and East European Politics and area studies, particularly post-Soviet/Eurasian studies.

Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) are a cornerstone of the Deep and Comprehensive Free-Trade Areas (DCFTAs) negotiated between the European Union (EU) and Eastern European Neighborhood Countries (NCs) under the Eastern Partnership. These are expected to eliminate quotas as well as both tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade, thus improving the existing export opportunities for food and feed products from Ukraine, Moldova, and South Caucasus countries. However, NCs face multifaceted challenges in meeting the stringent EU regulatory and administrative requirements in the SPS area. Domestically, in light of Soviet legacies (including a food safety system which deeply differed from WTO-compliant standards), approximation with EU SPS standards requires massive reforms and involve high costs for partner countries – to be borne not only by state authorities but also private businesses. Yet reforms to comply with EU demands are also closely intertwined with regional interdependencies and Russia’s bilateral and multilateral policies. The article scrutinizes the interplay between domestic preferences, EU demands for reform and Russia’s policies. It points to a complex and multifaceted relationship between engagement into a macro-level regional framework and shifting sectoral compliance patterns. The paper highlights disjunctures between sector-specific compliance processes with EU demands, on the one hand, and macro-level relations between these countries and the EU and Russia on the other. As the article argues, this is because external actors’ policies are filtered by domestic interests, preferences, and practices. Ultimately, these shape the adoption and application of external templates.

Abstract: While the initial Commission Communication on Wider Europe (March 2003) did not include Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan in the forthcoming policy for the EU's new neighbourhood, the Southern Caucasus region has now gained considerable attention in ...

This special issue is the second of its kind in the current policy of the European Political Economy Review (EPER) and it aims to investigate actual issues in the field of European studies. It explores the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as a test of the European ...

The European Neighbourhood Policy has, from its very beginning, seized the attention of scholars and has remained high ever since on the academic agenda. Among the large number of publications al-ready produced, many have analyzed ENP objectives, methods and influence through ...

ABSTRACT Whilst 1989 is widely acknowledged as a watershed in international relations, it is also regarded as the major upheaval in the course of European integration since its very beginning in the 1950’s. The nature of this regard, however, has overwhelmingly been univocal. It is based upon two intermingled assertions which emerged as early as 1989 and which have been broadly shared ever since by policy-makers and academics. The first argument claims that the collapse of the communist system puts an end to the division of Europe which arose after World War II. The second (and interconnected), interpretation claims that the European Union - at that time, still the European Economic Community - is the natural institutional receptacle for this return of former communist countries to Europe. As a result, the relationship between 1989 and the EU is commonly considered as a one-way process, with communism being finally "dissolved" into EU integration. In other words, the processes through which the EU (either during the accession process or through other policies) has changed Central and Eastern European countries have been extensively studied. However, the impact of 1989 on Europe and the influence of former communist countries on the EU need to be further explored. The paper questions the widely accepted unambiguous character of the relationship between 1989 and European integration. Through highlighting and discussing several dialectical trends, it highlights multifaceted and open processes which call for re-assessing the impact of 1989 on Europe and the way the European Union has "managed" 1989.