Eastern Partnership Workshop
− 1 min readThe Eastern Partnership (EaP) was founded in 2009 to strengthen the EU’s relations with six partner countries in its eastern neighbourhood (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) and to build a common area of shared democracy, prosperity and stability. However, ten years after its inception, the EaP has only produced mixed results.
On the 6-7 June 2019 - 10 years later - this conference addressed these issues by asking in how far the EaP (in its current form) has achieved a strengthening of relations between the EU and its eastern neighbours, and invited to reflect on what conceptual and policy tools are required in the future to define the EU’s relations with the six EaP countries. A special emphasis was placed on how (or whether?) to reconcile seemingly conflicting policy paradigms, such as the promotion of ‘values’, such as democracy, human rights and civil society versus ‘pragmatic’ policy based on ensuring stability, tensions between normative/utilitarian principles and geopolitical and geo-economic interests.
Giselle Bosse and Andrea Ott gathered scholars from all over Europe in a two-days workshop to provide a holistic and interdisciplinary analysis of the EaP. Panels focused on (i) the existing legal and institutional framework(s), as well as financial instruments and their suitability for the challenges faced by the EU in the future; (ii) the policy dimensions of the EaP, (iii) concrete bilateral relations and perspectives from the EaP countries and (iv) critical reflections on security and geopolitics, including policy recommendations.