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Explaining EU Eastern Partnership Failure: Impediments to Policy Learning

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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.

Contents

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 This paper incorporates and builds upon the author’s earlier unpublished work, “Development of the European Neighbourhood Programme in the South Caucasus” (presented to a UACES/British Academy Workshop on the ENP, University of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.

Posted in Conference Papers, Domestic & Reform, Integration-Cooperation, Keynote Speeches, Policy Analyses, Strategic Overviews Tagged , , , , , , , , , permalink

About Robert M. Cutler

Dr. Robert M. Cutler is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of European, Russian & Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.Sc.), Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies (Gallatin Fellow) and The University of Michigan (Ph.D.), and has held research and teaching appointments at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland and Russia. During a dozen years exclusively in universities, in three different countries, he taught 14 different subjects in international relations, comparative politics and political philosophy, at all levels from introductory undergraduate to graduate research seminar. He then expanded into policy analysis and consulting, foremost as an Energy Security and Geo-economics Specialist now covering the whole of Eurasia with a special focus on Central, South, and Southwest Asia, with a secondary focus on Europe, Russia, and China. He consults to international institutions, think tanks, governments and the private sector, with experience over the entire range of skills involving negotiation and strategy, planning and execution, design and implementation, and evaluation and instruction; and on topics from international energy security and geo-economics to Caspian Sea region investment advice to human and minority rights (including immigration/asylum applications to the U.S. and Canada) to the organizational design of international institutions. Besides producing the whole portfolio of scholarly, policy, and public-intellectual information products and maintaining a strong online presence, he has won numerous competitive research grants and fellowships, serving also on a half-dozen academic-journal and policy-review editorial boards in addition to executive committees of professional scholarly and policy research organizations.

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