Beyond the Warsaw Summit: Prospects for the Eastern Partnership
Beyond the Warsaw Summit: Prospects for the Eastern Partnership

Summary/Abstract: The Eastern Partnership (EaP) was established in May 2009 with the aim of rendering the EU neighbourhood policy better equipped and more attractive to the six states of Eastern Europe.1 The initiative was also, in essence, a recognition that the countries of the region were not evolving into democratic states, replete with functioning market economies, as envisaged in the original European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) blueprint. It is arguably the case that the EU overestimated the extent to which the states of Eastern Europe were capable of successfully pursuing a reform trajectory comparable to that followed by the states of Central Europe in the 1990s. Finally, an objective of EaP was to re-balance the ENP after the creation of the southwards-facing Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) in 2008. Though the launch event at the Prague summit in May 2009 was in the end a rather understated affair, the policy itself was widely accepted by EU members, not least because of the effective diplomacy carried out by its co-creators, Rados³aw Sikorski and Carl Bildt, who managed to build a strong consensus around the initiative, unlike the mayhem which had surrounded the UfM a year earlier.

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