Oral presentation of the paper, “How the EU’s Learning Deficits Created Eastern Partnership Failure: A Complex-Systems Explanation of Political Failure,” to the Conference Security in the European Union and its Neighbourhood: Challenges and Policy Responses, University of Dundee, 15-16 June 2015.

Explaining EU Eastern Partnership Failure

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Abstract

The paper applies complex-systems analysis to the understanding and criticism of the development of the European Neighbourhood Programme (ENP), with special attention to the Eastern Partnership (EaP). Using the emergence-autopoiesis-coherence framework inherent in the evolution of complex adaptive systems, it traces the origins and distinctive characteristics of the EaP back to the ENP and the latter’s development and specialisation of tasks in the South Caucasus in particular, taking account also of the pre-history of the ENP in that region through the conclusion of Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCAs) and other instruments. The paper analyses the evolution of the ENP in the South Caucasus programmatically, including a content-analysis of bilateral EU Action Plans that takes account of such documents as having been produced by specialised bureaucratic procedures. Such textual analysis is naturally put into parallel with an assessment of actual EU policy towards the countries concerned individually as well as the regional neighbourhood. This paper incorporates and builds upon the author’s earlier unpublished work, “Development of the European Neighbourhood Programme in the South Caucasus” (presented to a UACES/British Academy Workshop on the ENP, University of Nottingham, 2007). On the scientific basis of the study of complex adaptive systems, It draws conclusions systematically critical of the formulation, content and implementation of initiatives up until the present, often characterised by a cycle where overambitiousness succeeds timidity, and success is blocked by the failure to ground the EU’s policies in a geophysical (i.e. economic, political and geographic together)analysis of its interests and associated capabilities.