The Arab Spring, the Eurozone Crisis and the Neighbourhood: A Region in Flux

The year 2011 was momentous in the European Union’s neighbourhood. Struggling to deal with the effects of the eurozone crisis and with the European External Action Service (EEAS) in the process of being established, the Union was confronted with one of its greatest foreign policy challenges yet: the popular uprisings in its southern neighbourhood. The EU’s efforts concentrated on providing a new response to these events through a revised European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and supporting the international efforts in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. However, the EU was criticized once again for its failure to act forcefully and coherently during the Libyan crisis. Meanwhile, developments in the east and particularly in Belarus and Ukraine also provided evidence of the limited effectiveness of the ENP, with democratic reforms stalling in most of the region. The EU’s enlargement policy made some progress with the closure of accession negotiations with Croatia, but the usual problems (bilateral disputes, ethno-nationalism and corruption) remained. To be sure, Croatian accession was one of the few success stories in 2011. It was even more remarkable considering that 2011 marked 20 years since the declaration of independence of Croatia and the start of the war in the country. However, the signing of the Accession Treaty was largely forgotten during the European Council in December because of the eurozone crisis and the United Kingdom’s position on the Fiscal Compact. Notwithstanding this success, the EU was unable to have a distinct impact in its neighbourhood because of a combination of factors: the sovereign debt crisis, institutional problems linked to the implementation of the EEAS and a lack of consensus among its Member States. This article first provides an overview of the impact of the eurozone crisis on the EU’s neighbourhood policies and the enlargement process. The crisis raises important challenges not just for the EU itself, but also for the candidate countries and EU neighbours. It also risks undermining one of the cornerstones of EU foreign policy: conditionality. Second, the article examines the role of the newly established EEAS in dealing with the political and security challenges coming from the neighbourhood. As will be shown below, the picture here is mixed. The EEAS was able to achieve some successes in the Balkans, where the EU can hold out the prospect of membership; however, it failed to deliver in the ENP region during its first year of operation. The article then moves on to discuss developments in the EU’s neighbourhood – in particular, in relation to the Arab Spring, eastern Europe and the enlargement process. Just as the EU had to respond to unprecedented popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the tendency in the JCMS 2012 Volume 50 Annual Review pp. 147–161 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5965.2012.02278.x bs_bs_banner