This book looks both backward and forward with regard to the European Union’s political strategies towards its neighbouring countries. By bringing together the perspectives of critical geopolitics, policy studies and border studies, it presents a comprehensive review of the European Neighbourhood Policy and how it impacts the ongoing construction of the EU’s external frontiers. Is the EU committed to promoting integration in a ‘wider’ European space, or is a “fortress Europe” emerging where the strengthening of internal cohesion is coupled with the militarisation of its external borders? The book aims to problematize this question by showing how the EU’s external policies are based on a mixture of openness and closure, inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and securitisation. The European Neighbourhood Policy is a controversial strategy where regionalization and bordering, homogenisations and differentiations, centrifugal and centripetal forces proceed side-by-side, in an explicit attempt to construct a selective, mobile and fragmented border. A specific focus is devoted to the diversity of geo-strategies the EU is pursuing in its neighbouring countries and regions, macro-regional strategies and cross-border cooperation initiatives as new scales of cooperation, and the role of other global players.

The Routledge Handbook on the European Neighbourhood Policy provides a comprehensive overview of the EU’s most important foreign policy instrument, provided by leading experts in the field. Coherently structured and adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this handbook covers the most important themes, developments and dynamics in the EU’s neighbourhood policy framework through a series of cutting-edge contributions. With chapters from a substantial number of scholars who have been influential in shaping the study of the ENP, this handbook serves to encourage debates which will hopefully produce more conceptual as well as neighbourhood-specific perspectives leading to enriching future studies on the EU’s policies towards its neighbourhood. It will be a key reference point both for advanced-level students, scholars and professionals developing knowledge in the fields of EU/European Studies, European Foreign Policy Analysis, Area studies, EU law, and more broadly in political economy, political science, comparative politics and international relations.

The idealism that engendered the European ​​Neighbourhood Policy in 2004, later codified in the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, has since been reviewed to adapt to the turbulence that has befallen the EU and its neighbourhood. The ENP is now little more than an elegantly crafted fig leaf that purports to take a soft power approach to the EU’s outer periphery, argues the author, but in effect it inclines more towards Realpolitik. By prioritising security interests over liberal values in increasingly transactional partnerships, the EU is atomising relations with its neighbouring countries. And without the political will and a strategic vision to guide relations with the neighbours of the EU’s neighbours, the ENP remains in suspended animation.

This collective volume draws on the themes of intersectionality and overlapping policy universes to examine and evaluate the shifting functions, frames and multiple actors and instruments of an ongoing and revitalized cooperation in EU external migration and asylum policies with third states. The contributions are based on problem-driven research and seek to develop bottom-up, policy-oriented solutions, while taking into account global, EU-based and local perspectives, and the shifting universes of EU migration, border and asylum policies. In 15 chapters, we explore the multifaceted dimensions of the EU external migration policy and its evolution in the post-crisis, geopolitical environment of the Global Compacts.

This book examines the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in the context of internal functions performed with regard to the European Union (EU) political system and its key actors. It argues that the ENP has been formulated not only in reaction to external challenges and threats, but also in response to EU internal legitimacy needs at systemic, institutional and actor level. Looking beyond governance approaches and the power of norms, this book follows a sociological approach to the politics of legitimation. Using Bourdieu's field theory, it bridges the rationalist-constructivist divide inherent in much of ENP scholarship. While analyzing articulations of EU institutions in terms of narrative production, reproduction and reconstruction, it sheds valuable light on where the conflicting goals, ambiguity and incoherence stem from. By highlighting Developing Nations' responses and usages of ENP narratives for domestic and international legitimacy-seeking, the book calls for a more outside-in perspective on EU foreign policy. With the European integration project being increasingly contested, both internally and externally, this book provides a timely focus on the topic of legitimation and delegitimation dynamics with regard to EU foreign policy. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration and EU foreign policy, and, more broadly, EU Studies and International Relations.

The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has evolved into one of the European Union's major foreign policy instruments and received considerable attention. However, other EU neighbourhood policies, and their relevance for the ENP, also require examination. The Arab uprisings, civil wars in Libya and Syria, the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula have all brought the institutional design and tools of the ENP into question and a comparative perspective is crucial to understand EU neighbourhood policies in a wider sense. This timely book puts the ENP into context by exploring the major challenges and key lessons of the EU's other policy frameworks with neighbouring countries. Mapping the EU's bi-lateral and multilateral neighbourhood relations in comparison to the ENP and investigating the major challenges faced, it provides a comprehensive, up-to-date view of the EU's relations with its neighbours. Focusing on current affairs and future challenges, the comparison with the ENP and the lessons to be drawn, generate novel insights into the EU's closest external relations. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars studying European Politics, policies and comparative politics.

Focussing European borders: The book provides insight into a variety of changes in the nature of borders in Europe and its neighborhood from various disciplinary perspectives. Special attention is paid to the history and contemporary dynamics at Polish and German borders. Of particular interest are the creation of Euroregions, mutual perceptions of Poles and Germans at the border, EU Regional Policy, media debates on the extension of the Schengen area. Analysis of cross-border mobility between Abkhazia and Georgia or the impact of Israel's »Security Fence« to Palestine on society complement the focus on Europe with a wider view.