The Eastern Partnership Programme: Is Pragmatic Regional Functionalism Working for a Contemporary Political Empire?

Abstract

t Focusing on the Eastern Partnership Programme (EPP), this paper ponders on discerning a principal reason because of which the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was not able to help the EU in establishing and running a proper strategic framework where the entity could feel confident and secure, comfortably ‘communicating’ with its immediate neighbourhood in the European East. The article represents an interpretational type of theoretical analysis and argues that pure political driving forces of desirable cooperational or confrontational activities dramatically affect the outcome. This paper claims that the EPP’s ‘innate’ functional nature has been clashing with the EU’s status of a de facto contemporary political empire, and the situation has eventually resulted in the selfadmitted necessity for the EU to comprehensively revise the ENP/EPP. The argument here is as follows: being a function-driven entity presumes relative freedom in making choices; being an empire leaves an entity with no other choice but to ‘behave’ like an empire in terms of expanding further into its periphery.