This book offers a strikingly new perspective on EU enlargement. Basing his findings on substantial empirical evidence, Zielonka presents a carefully argued account of the kind of political entity the European Union is becoming, with particular reference to recent enlargement.

A Brookings Institution Press and Scuola Superiore della Pubblica Amministrazione (SSPA) publication As the European Union tries to increase both its visibility and its impact on the world stage, it cannot overlook the fact that until now enlargement has formed its most successful foreign policy. But is the EU's enlargement strategy still relevant today? Have the economic crisis and the speculative attack on the euro made the enlargement policy more uncertain? In The Frontiers of Europe, an international cast of leading experts and policymakers examine the EU's prospective borders from new perspectives. Indeed, the frontiers of Europe are as much a matter of values and the EU's international credibility as they are a matter of geographic definition. The contributors highlight the considerable yet different interests of the United States and Russia in the EU's enlargement strategy, paying special attention to the likely effects on the future of U.S.-EU relations. This comprehensive volume focuses not only on the European Union's outward expansion, but also on the internal dynamics within EU states and those states' abilities to deal with pressing issues such as terrorism, immigration, internal crime, and energy security. The EU must prioritize stability in both its enlargement strategy and its relations with the broader international neighborhood. The book raises a note of caution, however: as governance challenges increase, the EU's attention increasingly draws inward, thus diminishing its soft power. The Frontiers of Europe is important reading for anyone trying to understand the current geopolitical landscape of Europe and what it means for the rest of the world.

Since May 2004 the European Union borders countries that have not yet accomplished their transformation process or are still struggling for stability. These countries are now the neighbours of the European Union, but are they also candidates for accession? The European Neighbourhood policy is a policy that explicitly excludes the possibility of accession. However, possible future membership is the strongest implicit argument for pushing the new neighbours towards reform. How does the European Union deal with its new neighbours and how do they deal with the European Union? What plans and programs of cooperation exist? What prospects and risks does the new neighbourhood imply? Are there further attempts of cooperation and European integration besides these at the EU-level? The authors try to answer these questions by providing a critical perspective of the EU policy, regional overviews, and country reports from Eastern and South Eastern Europe.

This book presents a new approach to studying the European Union’s regional and global relevance. It recasts into a dynamic perspective the three most significant systemic processes that define the EU as a regionalist project: its enlargement, neighborhood, and mega-regional policies. The book argues that these processes collectively demonstrate a dynamic shift of the core tenets of European regionalism from an inward-looking process of region building to an open, selective system of global interactions.

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars around an important question: how has migration changed in Europe as the European Union has enlarged, and what are the consequences for countries (and for migrants themselves) inside and outside of these redrawn jurisdictional and territorial borders? By addressing this question the book contributes to three current debates with respect to EU migration management: 1) that recent developments in EU migration management represent a profound spatial and organizational reconfiguration of the regional governance of migration, 2) the trend towards the externalization or subcontracting of migration control and, 3) how the implications of Europe’s changing immigration policy are increasingly felt across the European neighborhood and beyond. Based on new empirical research, the authors in this collection explore these three processes and their consequences for both member and non-member EU states, for migrants themselves, and for migration systems in the region. The collection indicates that despite the rhetoric of social and spatial integration across the EU region, as one wall has come down, new walls have gone up as novel migration and security policy frameworks have been erected – making European immigration more complex, and potentially more influential beyond the EU zone, than ever.

Approaches democratization of the European neighbourhood from two sides, first exploring developments in the states themselves and then examining what the European Union has been doing to promote the process.