Abstract
This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger.
The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2002–2003, was presented as the EU’s way of responding to the Eastern neighbours’ desires for closer ties to the Union. The policy ignored, however, that if such desires did exist they were aimed at full EU membership, rather than at mere neighbourliness. Indeed, the EU’s insistence that the ENP entailed neither a promise of, nor a definite ruling out of, membership, meant that the policy caught the eastern neighbours in a continuous state of ambivalent liminality. This article argues that this ambiguity at the heart of the policy is linked to the rather self-congratulatory idea of EUrope as “the club everybody wants to join,” and thus to a distinction between those who were European (the EU) and those who were inscribed with a desire for becoming European (the neighbours). The neighbours were defined not by their own position but by their desire for the privileged position of the articulating (EUropean) subject. The ENP’s function of arresting the neighbours in a liminal position might as such be understood as a way of continually reproducing and displaying their desire for Europe, a desire which could then be imitated also in the disenchanted populations of the EU itself.
Introduction
The question of the continent’s eastern border has traditionally vexed most ideas about Europe. Whereas, to the south and west, Europe seemed “naturally” bordered by significant bodies of water, the Eurasian landmass offered no such features. However, in the decades after the Second World War as European integration was initiated and got off the ground, this intractable cultural conundrum of Europe’s eastern limit was seemingly cancelled out by the political reality of the Iron Curtain. The process of “uniting Europe” thus became de facto a Western European project. When, in Article 237 of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, it was stipulated that “any European State may apply to become a member of the Community” this implicit requirement of “Europeanness” was therefore a much less controversial proposition than became the case later. Indeed, one might say that the Cold War served to obscure the fact that this requirement was all but meaningless when it could not rely on a clearly defined idea of which Europe it was referring to. As the Cold War ended and most of the former communist countries in Eastern Europe developed ambitions to work towards EC/EU membership, this ambiguity at the heart of European integration re-emerged in force, because it meant, by implication, that to be denied the (even long-term) political prospect of joining the Union was to be denied the cultural character of Europeanness. The institutional and political process of actually achieving accession was of course relatively well defined, and eventually formalised in the so-called Copenhagen Criteria (1993)—but even being allowed to initiate this process of reform and evaluation still required that one was already accepted as “a European country” beforehand. Morocco was made to realise this when its application for candidate status in 1989 was summarily rejected on the basis that it was not located in Europe. 1 The extension of candidate status to the so-called Central and Eastern European countries, which eventually joined in 2004, did of course do nothing to resolve the issue, it only moved it further eastwards; as soon as these Eastern European countries were granted the stamp of “Europeaness,” discussion ensued about the identity of their eastern neighbours, most notably Ukraine. The EU had—perhaps initially somewhat absentmindedly—appropriated for itself the privilege of defining not just its own territorial extent but also the extent of the cultural entity “Europe” to which it referred. It was now confronting the consequences.
In parallel with the enlargement of 2004, the so-called European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was launched in order to attempt to handle this reopened question of the EU’s (and thus by implication Europe’s) ultimate eastern border. In its basic content, it was a policy which would borrow much of the logic of conditionality from the enlargement process, and as such offer closer economic, diplomatic, and political relations with the EU in exchange for domestic reforms aimed at “Europeanising” both the economies and political systems of the neighbours, thereby bringing them into line with much of EU’s acquis communautaire, and more generally with its idea of “European values.” But it was also a policy which simultaneously offered “neighbourhood” as something distinctly conceptually different from candidacy, and it thus implicitly entailed—however much this was covered over in the rhetoric surrounding it—a negative verdict on the “Europeanness” of those included in it.
The ENP has been one of the most highly profiled and publicised policies of the EU in the decade since the enlargement of 2004. It has been rhetorically embellished and presented to the European public as a new “grand project” for the Union. Of course it is fully possible to discern a number of very real geopolitical priorities and ambitions “behind” the rhetoric. The ENP has become increasingly entangled with a number of more covert security, energy, and immigration agendas. But my ambition here is to examine the ENP in its role in offering a certain kind of discourse about European identity, about who is to be considered European and what this means. I approach the ENP, in other words, not so much with an interest in its concrete instruments, implementation, and effects on the European neighbours but more with a focus on how it serves to offer an image of the EU worth identifying with.
It is necessary, then, to say something more about how the ENP produces “Europe” as a bordered entity able to serve as a stable referent for identification.
The ENP as a Border Policy
At its core the ENP constructed a border, quite simply because it articulated a differentiated mental geography, in that it separated the space of the EU’s Europe from that of the neighbours. And no border can be legitimate or meaningful if it is not accompanied by an articulation of the identities of the entities which it separates, and thereby of the differences which seemingly justify the separation. 2 Identity and bordering are, as such, two sides of the same coin; one does not precede or ground the other, rather both emerge simultaneously and are inextricably linked in the same discursive practice. The construction of difference is integral to articulating identity, and the articulation of new differences or borders does not simply draw on or follow from already existing identities, but rearticulates, reiterates, and indeed reconstructs them. The drawing of a border is a creative act, the very gesture of separation changing or altering that which is thus differentiated. 3
As such, separating the neighbours from Europe inevitably entailed a statement on their identity as well as on that of the Europe of which they were no longer to be a part. Indeed the choice of the concept of neighbour as the central one is telling. Although not by any means a strictly derogative term, neighbour does connote a certain externality; it designates a relationship of proximity, but manifestly not one of cohabitation. 4 It should also be noted that the preferred metaphor for the Central and Eastern European Enlargement was already, at the inception of the ENP, established as that of a “family reunion.” 5 Measured against the idea of “family,” to be neighbours certainly connotes a much more peripheral and less congenial relation. Indeed the choice of neighbourhood as the central metaphor through which to conceptualise the Union’s relationship to those adjacent countries, which were not offered the prospect of candidacy, was by no means coincidental. In fact, the policy initiative had the early working title of a “Wider Europe,” which obviously carries a completely different connotation about the “Europeanness” of its target.
This conceptual change was linked to the fact that the very geography of the neighbourhood—that is, which countries were to be included in this category—actually developed rapidly in the early stages of the policy’s formulation.
When the idea of a joint European proximity policy was first suggested, in a letter from the British foreign secretary Jack Straw to the Spanish EU presidency in April 2002, it concerned all the (future) eastern neighbours: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Russia. This was still the group of countries to be considered when the Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, and the High Representative of the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, further developed the idea for the Council under the heading “Wider Europe.” 6 However, when the idea was approved by the European Council on December 2002, it had—apparently as a consequence of the concerns of Southern European member states about preserving a balance between the “southern” and “eastern” dimensions of the Union 7 —also come to include the countries of the southern Mediterranean. In the first fully elaborated attempt at formulating what was now the European Neighbourhood Policy—in March 2003 8 —it was made clear that this initiative would target the countries bordering the Union or candidate countries by land or sea, and the neighbourhood therefore stretched from and included Russia in the northeast to Morocco in the southwest. Following the Georgian revolution, the Southern Caucasus countries of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia were also included as of June 2004, 9 the argument being that they shared a sea border with two future members, Romania and Bulgaria.
To many, the geography of the proposed neighbourhood clearly communicated that those neighbours (e.g., Ukraine) that had entertained hopes that the neighbourhood might be “a waiting room for the waiting room,” 10 that is, a category for “pre-candidate countries,” had been mistaken. The composition of the group of countries included in the ENP in 2003 certainly did little to make it look like a club for those next in line to join. Not only did it include Russia—already then a very unlikely future candidate—but also Morocco which, as mentioned, was the only country ever to have been denied candidacy with the fundamental argument that it was not European. 11 And not only were the soon to be members of Central and Eastern Europe exempted from the neighbourhood but so were countries whose accession perspectives seemed to have stalled (e.g., Turkey) or only to be relevant in the long or very long run (e.g. Albania). If one had hopes one day to join the Union, this was not the club to be made part of. Indeed, to both scholars and politicians, it seemed as though “the Union has sent clear signals concerning its final borders” 12 and separated accordingly those that were or would be part of “EUrope” from those that would have to be content with being European neighbours—or more precisely, neighbours to Europe.
If the neighbours were, as such, at least implicitly designated as non-Europeans, then they were in some aspects of the ENP also more manifestly “Othered.” The ENP undeniably entailed a strong security dimension, which tended to relate to the border drawn, as one meant to keep certain practices and actors out, and as such conceptualised the “neighbouring” space beyond this border as the site from which potential threats towards the EU could arise. 13 Already, from its inception, the ENP was a policy partly born from the concern that after the Central and Eastern European enlargements “we will be getting nearer to zones of present or recent instability,” as the Commissioner for Enlargement put it in 2004. 14 Indeed, in Patten and Solana’s first formulation of the ideas behind what would become the ENP, it was emphasised that such a policy should aim to prevent a “negative spill-over on the Union.” 15 And perhaps most clearly of all, the EU’s common Security Strategy of 2003 warned that “neighbours who are engaged in violent conflict, weak states where organised crime flourishes, dysfunctional societies or exploding population growth on its border all pose problems for Europe.” 16 The neighbours, in a sense, found themselves not only geographically marginalised, but normatively evaluated as potentially dangerous spaces. Thus the ENP did, to some extent, entail a securitization of the Union’s external borders and positioned the neighbours not just as non-European outsiders but as a security problem and a potential threat to those inside. 17 According to Thomas Diez, this reactivated one of the inherent paradoxes of EU foreign policy, namely, that while the internal borders through integration are increasingly becoming “softer,” almost to the point of disappearing, at the same time the common external borders are becoming “harder,” both in terms of differentiating “Europeans” from the rest and in terms of securitising these borders as the first and last lines of defence against threats from the outside. 18 Bahar Rumelli, in similar vein, notes that even if the EU’s internal borders appear to be thoroughly post-modern (i.e., permeable and fluid), the external ones remain, in many cases, distinctly “hard” and modern. 19 The security choice one faced in the ENP was believed to be between “exporting stability” or “importing instability.” 20 This “security export” was often connected with the ambition to extend “European values.” In Commission President Prodi’s words, the ENP quite simply aimed “to extend to this neighbouring region a set of principles, values and standards which define the very essence of the European Union” 21 and reflected the fact that “we Europeans earnestly hope that these universal values can be shared by all our neighbours and partners, however diverse their cultures and traditions.” 22
And yet, already, here, the internal inconsistency of the ENP is beginning to shine through. At the conceptual, geographical, and security level, it seemed to be an exercise in exclusion, a policy which did indeed separate Europe from a fundamentally different and even potentially threatening outside. But the fact is that the manifest content and ambition of the policy was to a large extent drawn up wholesale from the process of enlargement. 23 It was, as I will turn to below, a policy which, when it came to content, envisaged not the exclusion and distancing of a threatening Eastern and Southern periphery but, conversely, the transformational remaking of the neighbours in the EU’s image.
Civilising the Neighbourhood
The essence of the ENP is that it “seeks to promote commitment to shared values” and that “the level of the EU’s ambition in developing links with each partner through the ENP will take into account the extent to which common values are effectively shared.” 24 Through mechanisms of conditionality, the neighbours were supposed to be made to implement not just EUropean-style institutions of good governance and a liberal market economy, not just to commit to sizable parts of the EU’s acquis communautaire, but to internalise the very European values which serve as the symbolic heart of the EU and of its understanding of what it means to be European.
Scholars such as
This imagery of Europe benevolently extending its universal values to the outside world tied the ENP into a wider discourse about Europe as a specific kind of future global player. This notion was a core idea for former Commission President Prodi who on several occasions—and often linked to the ENP—argued that Europe was “a unique model in the world” 27 and that it was therefore “our duty to offer our experience and the model we have developed over half a century of life together, for the sake of peace and reconciliation in other parts of the world.” 28 Europe as such emerges as “a force for stability throughout the world” 29 and is sorely needed in this capacity because “sadly, as we all know, the world is badly in need of a force for peace and solidarity such as ours.” 30 As several scholars have noted, 31 there is an echo of the colonial notion of the “mission civilisatrice” in such self-aggrandisements; and among others, Bo Stråth has also identified this in the discourse of enlargement that he summarily rejects as “nothing other than a reworking of the white man’s burden discourse.” 32 This is surely going too far, but it is undeniable that the relationship to the neighbours, even if no longer strictly one of overt exclusion, is articulated as expressing an asymmetrical distribution of “experience” which could be said to mirror earlier notions of differences in civilizational “stages.” 33 As such the underlying coloniality of a cognitive map inhabited by inferiorised Others which Böröcz early on saw as underpinning aspects of EU Enlargement discourse, is also to be found here. 34 Clearly, the EU is positioned as the subject of a knowledge that can and should be delivered to non-European Others. This is not, in other words, the language of intercultural exchange between communities with different historical experiences, but rather a notion of a singular historical insight achieved (only) by and in Europe, and now to be extended to and imitated by those outside. It is—as Merje Kuus has argued regarding Enlargement and NATO expansion—a framework and a relationship which is imagined as one of “teaching” and “learning” through which receiving subjects might hope to “relocate” from Europe’s East to “Europe Proper.” 35 A full analysis of the implied mission civilisatrice embedded in the ENP cannot be undertaken here, 36 and it thus suffices to point out that the best testimony to its presence might be the fact that it was immediately noticed by the biggest member of the new neighbourhood. As soon as the ENP had been formally announced in late 2002 and early 2003, Russia announced its unwillingness to participate on the same level as the other neighbours. And already at the 2003 St. Petersburg Summit, the result was a joint decision to develop the so-called “EU-Russian strategic relationship” through the creation of four “common spaces,” distinct from the framework of the ENP vis-à-vis the other neighbours. 37 Russia would be “attached to the ENP, but not included with the rest.” 38 As Michelle Pace points out, the very shift in wording from a “policy” conducted by one part in relation to the other, to “spaces” in which cooperation would ensue, revealed that what most offended the Russians was not the concrete content of the ENP (much of which—with the notable exception of the elements of conditionality—was reproduced in the new strategic partnership) but that it envisaged a subject–object, rather than a subject–subject, relationship. 39 Furthermore, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Vladimir Chizhov, openly insisted that Russia “must be considered as an equal partner and not as the object of a civilising influence exercised by other countries or groups of states,” 40 and he rejected “Brussels’ insistence on progressive engagement through convergence with the EU’s normative agenda as a kind of Pax Romana in which policy is imposed by a ‘metropolis’ on the ‘provinces.’” 41 As Hiski Haukkala further points out, Chizhov also resented the grouping of Russia with the rest of the neighbourhood, reminding everybody of the salient differences by portraying the ENP as “an attempt to reduce to the least common denominator groups of countries and individual states that are very different in their level of development and that, in addition to this, have different objectives with respect to the EU itself.” 42 Russia, in other words, had no intention of being “civilised” by the EU along with the other neighbours.
The idea of a foreign policy which entails the extension of one’s values of peace, democracy, justice etc. has of course long been a core part of the EU discourse about its so-called “role in the world.” Academically, this idea has perhaps been most forcefully formulated in Ian Manner’s notion of the EU as a “Normative Power,”
43
which he has more recently applied to the ENP.
44
But the extent of the “value transfer” envisaged in the ENP, its close resemblance to the enlargement process, and finally Russia’s manifest rejection of such advances could, nonetheless, not help but aggravate a fundamental inconsistency of the policy, namely, the question of how one could deny (even if only implicitly) the “Europeanness” of the neighbours (in the policy’s conceptual choices and geographical extent), while simultaneously forcefully engaging in seemingly making them “good Europeans” (through the policy’s envisaged transfer of institutions and values). It once again begged the question of the waiting room, that is whether one could “graduate” from the neighbourhood to Europe itself, and thus at a deeper level the fundamental question of whether the neighbourhood was really a final and negative verdict on the “Europeanness” of those countries. Actually, Prodi already, at a very early point, attempted to sidestep this whole issue. Refusing to answer directly whether the invention of the neighbourhood in fact meant the end of any hopes that the neighbours might harbour as to future membership prospects, he pointed out that “any decision on further EU expansion awaits a debate on the ultimate geographic limits of the Union. This is a debate in which the current candidates must be in a position to play a full role.”
45
Of interest here is not just the somewhat optimistic claim that the final borders of Europe might eventually be decided through a bit of polite and well-organized “debate” but also the fact that even if the issue of “who is European” is, as such, for now left open, it is accompanied by a very definite idea of who has the right to participate in the debate on its resolution. Prodi states that “the debate” will have to wait, because the latest “Europeans” (i.e., the Central and Eastern European candidate countries) have not yet arrived to participate. Thus the implicit assumption is that the first privilege that these countries are afforded, after having been sanctified as “truly European” through their candidate status, is to be allowed a voice in the discussion about the extent of Europe. The neighbours, however, manifestly do not enjoy that privilege; Prodi is not waiting for the Ukrainian delegation to join the debate. Rather they—or their European credentials—are instead the object of the debate. One cannot help but find this strangely reminiscent of the way in which Larry
The Eastern border, which the ENP was supposed to handle and order, has thus remained ambiguous even at the heart of the policy’s own discourse. If the ENP is understood as a discourse, whose function among other things is to offer European citizens an idea of Europe (and of the EU), both consistent and attractive enough to be worth identifying with, then it has fallen somewhat short of the target. It cannot explicitly or with any force give Europe a stable bordered form, because its positing of an (essentially) non-European neighbourhood is immediately undermined by its own ambition to Europeanise the neighbours. And conversely, the “civilising mission” of Europeanising the neighbours is itself undermined by the fact that it can never be concluded, that its objects of attention can never truly “arrive” or “graduate” as Europeans, given their essentially non-European prior categorization as mere neighbours. What the ENP produces then is the neighbours as subjects in a state of limbo, trapped in a perpetually stalled civilising process. Not a “waiting room for the waiting room,” but a waiting room where the queue never moves.
However, what I want to suggest in closing is that this ability to make the neighbours “wait indefinitely at the border” can in fact be understood from a different angle, not simply as a functional defect of the policy but as itself entailing a certain kind of identity-discourse implicitly offering Europe as an object of identification to the EU citizens.
A Desire for Europe
The argument so far, and indeed in most of the academic literature interested in the “identity dimension” of the ENP, has stayed with the traditional approach to borders and their relation to identity construction. This approach regards borders as markers of boundaries between ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and thus connects them to the role that difference plays in constructing identity. Borders in this view signify, above all, the presence of the power to separate, to exclude, to mark a division. This is no doubt both true and central; however, it often obscures the equally important observation that when borders serve to block or resist mobility across them they make visible this potential mobility and the differentiated landscapes of attraction and desire which set it in motion. The border’s fundamental function or ability to keep people out or to keep them waiting to enter is only meaningful if a wish to enter is present in the first place.
Hence we might suggest that being made to wait is to be made to embody, to reveal, and to display one’s desire (to enter), and thus to testify—however unwillingly—to the desirability of that which is presently unavailable. The waiting bodies massed at a border checkpoint signify not only the presence of an authority capable of denying them entry, of making them wait, but also makes visible their desire to enter, and thus the desirability of what resides beyond the border. It is perhaps Jacques Lacan who best understood the curious fact that desire is inherently tied to its own denial, that it is produced in the absence of satisfaction, that to make something desirable is manifestly not to make it available for appropriation. 48
And it is worth attempting to better approach the ENP—which as I have argued is a policy which, even if it can do little else, seems well geared to make people wait—in such terms of desire; that is as a kind political discourse in which the “desirability” of Europe can be forcefully articulated. Such an approach moves beyond the usual focus on difference and exclusion in studies of identity construction, and cuts across a colonial reading of the ENP as a discourse in which the neighbours are subjected to a position of imitating the European subject. It opens up, I think, a new way of thinking about the fundamental dynamics and effects of the ENP as a discourse on European identity, that is, as a set of articulations about Europe and its Others.
The desire of the neighbours is in fact everywhere present in the rhetoric of the ENP. They are forever recounted as longing, hoping, and calling for Europe. Since the entire policy is geared towards handling the ambitions of these countries to become part of the EU—to be accepted as “family”—their desire for Europe is ingrained in its very raison d’être from its inception. That is not to say that it is the neighbours themselves which are most often allowed to articulate this desire. As indicated already in Prodi’s notion of a debate about the limits of Europe—to which only current EU members were invited—the neighbours are by no means always an interlocutor, but rather likely to become the objects of discourses, which do not require or invite their actual participation. As Edward Said 49 has argued, such silencing of the Other was also at the heart of Orientalist imaginaries, however when it comes to the ENP it is often overlooked.
When for example Browning and Christou claim that we must appreciate the fact that constructions of identity through the positing of Otherness—also in the context of the ENP—remain “an intersubjective process where the identified Other has the capacity to impact on how the relationship of otherness is defined,” 50 this assertion seems to rests on an idea of identity as a “recognition game” played with the Other. 51 However in much of the discourses surrounding and producing the ENP, the Other exactly does not pose a challenge to the dominant construction of the relationship, simply because his voice—although seemingly present everywhere—is in fact rarely his own. If—as Merje Kuus brilliantly shows—Eastern European elites can regain a covert agency in relation to EU discourses through the application of what she terms “the ritual of listening to foreigners,” 52 then the preferred (counter) ritual of the EU might be termed that of “speaking for foreigners.” What I have elsewhere called the ventriloquising of the Other’s voice is a pervasive feature of ENP rhetoric and points to the way in which the neighbours’ desire for Europe is constantly imagined and recounted by EU officials speaking to a domestic audience. 53 This indicates a significant point in that we should be careful not to assume that because the neighbours are the principal “Other” they must also be the primary addressee of the ENP’s identity discourse. Rather—in this reading of the ENP—the addressee is always the EU public, and the policy’s “games of recognition and identification” must be understood in this light.
What matters therefore is not so much the few occasions when the neighbours are allowed to speak for themselves (and here typically articulate an attitude to the EU which, even if positive, it is never subservient 54 ), but rather the fact that when these attitudes are instead recounted to the Union’s citizens by EU officials, they are mostly reduced to unconditional declarations of adoration. Solana often speaks of a “demand for Europe,” 55 and Prodi of “the rising expectations and hopes of countries abroad,” 56 elsewhere claiming that “all over the world there are people who see in us a hope for peace and a wise and balanced force.” 57 If the ENP’s internal tension between its borderdrawing implications and its “Europeanising” mission means, as argued above, that the neighbours are caught in a kind of permanent liminality or “waiting room,” then this frame likewise serves as a rhetorical opportunity to articulate or “illustrate” the neighbours’ desire for Europe, and thus to implicitly highlight the apparent attractiveness of this community. In and through their “suspended” desire for more than neighbourhood, the neighbours can as such be made to “corroborate” the EU’s self-image as “the club everybody wants to join.” In this light, the ENP is a kind of identity discourse which does not simply exclude or patronise the neighbours, but which offers up their desire in order to make it visible, referable, and quotable in the “recognition game” or negotiation of identity playing out in the “domestic sphere,” that is, between the EU and its citizens.
Slavoj Žižek, writing on the eve of the Yugoslav civil war, suggested precisely such a reading of the Western discourse about the post–Cold War democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe: “a year or two ago, western Europe was so fascinated by events in the east, the true object of fascination was the supposed gaze of the east, fascinated by western democracy, still naively believing in it, a kind of ‘subject supposed to believe’—in the east, the west found a sucker still having faith in its values.” 58 And thus—as he added in a later book—“Eastern Europe functions for the West as its Ego-Ideal, the point from which the West sees itself in a likable, idealized form, as worthy of love.” 59 Žižek here draws on the vocabulary through which Lacan linked desire and identity, by claiming that identity is forged not only through one’s own desire to become some idealised version of oneself (which he called the Ideal-Ego), but that this always hinged on an external desire imagined to be coming from the Other in the form of one’s Ego-Ideal: “The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him—which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love.” 60 Thus to identify with something—either individually in terms of a certain idealised version of oneself or collectively as a member of an equally idealised community—needs the support of an imagined outside “gaze,” of an Other whose desire testifies to the desirability of what is identified with. In fact, we might go so far as to claim, with René Girard, that this “outside dimension” of desire is all there is to it. Girard emphasises that desire never springs from the desired object. It is not born from some inherently lovable characteristics in that which is desired. For Girard, desire is instead wholly imitative, we desire on the basis of what others desire; it is in reading and imitating the desires of others that our own appetites and longings takes shape. 61
Identifying as a certain subject or as part of a particular community therefore does not only rest on the differentiating gestures through which one community is distinguished from another. Rather, the process equally entails an imitative reading of the Other’s desire for the community, and the grounding of one’s own adherence to it in the desirability thus testified by the Other’s gaze.
This would mean that the ENP’s endless recounting of the neighbours’ ‘longing’ for Europe, can be understood as the offering up of a desire for Europe coming from the outside, but to be imitated by the inside. Indeed, this covert logic at times shows through, as when Solana remarked that “sometimes, non-Europeans have a better appreciation of what we have achieved in the last 50 years,” 62 or when the Commissioner for External Relations and the European Neighbourhood Policy, Benita Ferrero Waldner, more blatantly claimed that, “the vast majority of people in the world view Europe as a power for good. That is a fact of which we are far too little aware. It should not be the case that our partners are bedazzled by Europe’s success, while Europeans themselves bemoan it.” 63
Thus, in a curious reversal of the immitative logic inherent in the ENP’s civilising mission, it is now the Eastern Europeans who appear as the ‘model’ for imitation. It is their apparently burning desire for Europe which should be imitated in order to produce good loyal EU-citizens (also) on the inside of the Union.
The ENP in this reading—here admittedly only sketched out—serves the EU’s attempts at constructing a European identity—or more precisely at eliciting an identification with Europe—in a more refined and covert way, because its function is not simply to draw borders or postulate hierarchies, but rather to offer disenchanted EU citizens a voice, a gaze, or a view of Europe, with which it appears desirable and worthy of identification, even if one has to leave “EUrope” to find it.
Concluding Remarks
From the beginning, the European Neighbourhood Policy, suffered from an inability to reconcile the clear separation between Europe and the neighbourhood, with its manifest ambition of transferring European values to the neighbourhood. The EU had, with the ENP, produced a major new conceptualization of Europe’s eastern border, but within the framework of the policy this border could curiously be neither affirmed nor denied. If this was indeed Europe’s final eastern border, then why make the neighbours engage in reform processes and conditionality structures reminiscent of enlargement? And if this was not the final border, then with what right were these countries denied the option of an actual candidate track? Beneath these questions lurked the fundamental issue of Europe’s “natural” eastern border, or perhaps more specifically of who had the authority to pin this down. In the end, the ENP remained unclear on the core issue of whether it entailed an outright denial of the eastern neighbours’ “Europeaness” or whether the process of being Europeanized might actually lead to a candidate track.
As such, the ENP seemed to lock the neighbours into a process of perpetual Europeanisation which would never lead to Europe. However, drawing on Lacanian ideas of desire and its imitation, I have suggested that a new perspective might open up. Despite its immediate shortcomings as a discourse on European identity, the ENP did serve as a framework in which incessant attention could be called to the desire of the neighbours for Europe, and thereby offer an Eastern European desire for the European Union, potentially, also to be imitated by its own disenchanted citizens.