EU's region-building and boundary-drawing policies: the European approach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has more and more assertively endeavored since the early 1990s to design approaches, device instruments and implement policies towards the rest of the world. The development of the EU’s external relations has not only been a consequence of the deepening of its integration but also, a prerequisite for the latter’s further advancement. The EU’s greater role in world affairs has also been brought about by systemic developments such as the break-up of the cold war superpowers’ overlay that was superimposed over the indigenous dynamics of several international regions—and had so far contained the resurfacing and escalation of unresolved local conflicts—and, more recently, the outbreak of the war on international terrorism. The EU’s most elaborated external policies have been primarily concerned with developments in adjacent regions, largely in response to European threat perceptions regarding issues such as conflict spill-over, migration and organized crime. The present paper is accordingly interested in a parallel analysis of the European policies towards two such ‘problematic’ proximate regions, precisely, the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans. As Javier Solana, the EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), has remarked, these two regions deserve the EU’s utmost attention, because their political and economic evolution can have serious implications for European prosperity and even its security. The purpose of this paper is neither to provide a detailed account of every European policy initiative in these two regions, nor to evaluate their effectiveness. The paper instead aims to supplement the content of the mainstream approach to the EU external policies suggesting that the EU’s primary objective is to contribute to the implementation of political and economic reforms, boost economic growth and development and act as a security and stability provider. While all of these objectives indeed form the proclaimed rationale for the elaboration of the EU instruments towards the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans, the