 I started to, as it were, negotiate my talk with the institute. The emphasis was very much on how has the Arab Spring really shaped the neighborhood policy. And we started, if you want, negotiating my talk. Well, even before the Commission came out with its big new strategy paper in May last year. So in many ways, I mean, it's quite amazing to see how an area of policy that, in many ways, I personally thought was not exactly a boom area where you could really make a mark and get famous. How that really has bounced back over the last year, also I would say. So from this perspective, the idea of having a talk about rethinking the E&P, in many ways, is more relevant today, I think, than it was a year ago. But I also think it's very much to the credit of this institute that we basically started thinking about this a year ago when it wasn't really quite clear whether that would be a talk that would at all be relevant. So the take that I'm going to have on rethinking the E&P is really, in many ways, is sort of partly a historical account of where the E&P has come from, all the way to where it is now and where one might think or hope or wish that it should be going. So it's not going to be a very academic paper in the sense that I'll bore you with all kinds of theories of neo-institutionalism and functionalism and how it came about. Another one that sort of starts from the observation that, in many ways, I mean the E&P started out very much as an alternative to enlargement as a policy back in 2002, 2003 when the idea was born. But in my view has developed to this day in not exactly a fundamentally different direction, but certainly into a direction where I would describe the E&P now much more as a sort of regional, foreign and security policy with a particular emphasis on security. Now this is where it's a little bit academic and being sort of at least partially a full-time professor as well. I have to give sort of some more conceptual grounding to what I'm going to talk about. So I want to say one or two things about this very idea of security and security policy in the beginning because this is really where I think a lot of how we understand where the E&P is today and where it's likely to go I think has to be tied in with this idea of security and also what it means in EU and in an E&P context. So I think it's very obvious that security is a key interest and purpose for the European Union and we are talking really here about security in the sense for the EU as a collective of its member states and citizens. So there's no doubt in my mind that this is one of the key purposes of the European Union. But what does security actually mean from an EU or E&P perspective? I think here I sort of generally also in my teaching use a definition that defines security as a low probability of damage to acquired values. So the things that you value are relatively unlikely to get harmed or damaged. If that's the case then you can say that you live in a secure environment or that you have a certain degree of security. And that's all very well but the challenge of course is to keep that analytically meaningful so that not everything is security, that not every sphere of life, every policy area then suddenly becomes somehow related to security and security policy. I mean that doesn't make a lot of sense either academically analytically or from a policy perspective. The question then of course is what values does the EU have and yes I mean there's no question the EU community of values and it's in all the treaties and Article 2 of the consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union states that the EU's values are respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human and minority rights. Now I think that's fairly basic in the sense that I don't think many people would dispute that these are both important values but also values which the EU generally seeks to uphold. Now where it becomes interesting in the context of the EMP of course is that the EMP does have this vision as it is frequently referred to of a ring of countries around the EU that share these fundamental values of the EU and even today with all the hopes that one might pin onto the Arab Spring, if you remember the values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law and so on, it is not easy to see how this vision of a ring of friends around the EU who share all of these values and hold them in as high a regard as the EU can really be accomplished. So the EMP in the same breath basically that it says this is what we want also acknowledges that there is of course as they put it in one of the early documents there is variation in the degree of commitment to these common values in the partner countries for the EMP. So from that perspective there's already attention I think within the EMP from the perspective of the values that the EU seeks to promote and the values that it assumes are essential to sort of create this situation of security for the EU and the relative likelihood of these values being shared in the immediate neighborhood. So what however also is very clear in all the EU policy documents not just on EMP but more generally also is that the EU increasingly has seen certainly over the past 10 years its own security very much linked to stability in the neighborhood then by extension is often seen as sort of a function of how well these values that the EU has are actually being implemented there. So there's a I think an underlying assumption here that if only these countries around the EU would share and respect the same values as we do then everything would be stable and if everything is stable then the EU would be secure. And I'll come back to some problems that exist obviously in this respect later on. So from a rethinking perspective of the EMP then we're thinking it as from where it started alternative to enlargement to the direction where I think it's heading a regional foreign and security policy. I think there are three different considerations that one can make. The first one is if you want to rethink EMP we could rethink the policy process. So how is the policy actually being made? That would be very much sort of a look at the EU institutions and who shapes which policy and who votes on what and who gets out all the strategy documents and who puts the money behind them and so on and so forth. And that is certainly a valid perspective but I'm not an EU institutionalist from this perspective. So I sometimes struggle even to understand what all the different parts of the EU are doing and how they are involved with a particular policy. What I'm more interested in is actually picking up at the time when the policy process in terms of producing an outcome, sort of generating a policy is done. And then my interest is in how these outcomes, the policies that the Commission or the Council produce, how they actually translate into specific impacts. So how then does actually something change on the ground which of course in the case of the EMP means to what extent do the policies that the EU has actually generate the impacts in the sense of getting people to value the same things that we do and sort of structure their states and societies in a way that there is respect for dignity, freedom, democracy and so on and so forth. So I think in that perspective my rethinking if you want of EMP is very much focused on this nexus between outcomes and impact. So what policies does the EU generate and how likely or what track record do they have in generating the desirable impacts that the EU expects from its policy. So in order to do that I sort of want to start out looking very briefly at EMP as it was created sort of in the early phase, roughly between 2002 and 2006 as really an alternative to enlargement. So 2002 the Copenhagen Council finalizes what comes to be known as the Big Bang enlargement and at the same time also says well we kind of need to think what we do with the other countries that are not part of the enlargement and also don't have an enlargement perspective and so how will the EU relate to them in the future. And it does so very much with this perspective that you then find in the 2003 wider Europe communication from the Commission that basically says well the EU can only be secure if its neighborhood is stable. So very much a driving force behind the sort of early thoughts on neighborhood policy was that we need to create a credible alternative to enlargement that will keep these other countries if you want reasonably happy so that they don't become hostile to the EU but at the same time we still have this vision that these are also countries that sort of share some of our values and actually implement them in their own states and societies. So what happens then as a sort of result of the Copenhagen Council meeting in 2002 is that sort of over the next year or two there are some quite significant changes to the original design of E&P. So the first one is that 2003 at the Tysaloniki Council the rest on Balkans are firmly taken out of the emerging neighborhood policy by giving them a very clear enlargement perspective. Also very early on in the documents on neighborhood policies there is this idea that Russia should be covered by this policy as well but you have an EU Russia summit in St. Petersburg late in 2003 where Russia basically says well very kind of you but thank you we don't want to be the same as everybody else we want to have our own special relationship privileged partnership. So Russia is also out of the E&P from late 2003 onwards but then you could almost say somehow the EU had this vision that there need to be a certain number of countries in the E&P so they then decide in 2004 that actually the countries of the South Caucasus which even by the most sort of forward-looking designs would still be about five to six hundred miles away from any real borders of the EU they then are actually incorporated in the E&P so that by the time that the E&P strategy paper in 2004 is published you basically have a set of countries that cover all the southern and eastern Mediterranean countries part of the original Barcelona process that dates back to 1995 you have the so-called Western NIS countries, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine and you have the three countries in the South Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia now all of this of course already gives you a good flavor of all the various security challenges that these countries of course bring with them and with which the E&P somehow will have to deal but if you want the links with the security that are there in the early stages of the E&P which don't make it a security policy yet per se but which I think are then eventually themes that are developed more thoroughly and more credibly I think over the following half decade first of all that I think there is a very clear but relatively implicit vision here that giving these countries a credible alternative to enlargement is vital for their stability and hence for EU security but also you find a number of specific references in the 2004 E&P strategy paper that make reference to the 2003 European security strategy that raise foreign and security policy issues as part of a political dialogue and even go as far as saying that some of the E&P partner countries could very well be included in certain CFSP and ESDP missions that the EU might launch or perform from time to time but what is very clear and this is sort of my final point on this the early E&P is much more clearly not enlargement so the alternative to enlargement then it is sort of foreign and security policy or certainly it is very clearly not yet a real foreign and security policy then between 2006 and 2010 I would say there is sort of a transition phase in which to some extent I think the E&P still is but it is very much sort of at the end of it and coming out of a transition phase which I think make it much more clearly a foreign and security policy now this phase basically ends strictly speaking only in 2011 and clearly this year is probably the most significant year for the E&P since 2003-2004 it is significant in two ways on the one hand never ever not even in 2003 or 2004 has the EU produced so many strategy documents on the E&P this year alone in the first five months you have four commission strategy papers on the E&P but also and that's perhaps more important and chose the commitment that the EU has found again I would say to the E&P is that was only last week that the draft proposals from the commission came out for the E&P budget for the period 2014 to 2020 and they actually and you really have to also see that in the context of the current financial crisis they propose a 40% increase in funding for the E&P compared to the previous period raising the total budget that in all likelihood will be available to a little bit over 18 billion euros so now that could pay off quite a lot of debt if you want in a number of countries so and I think in one way the ground for these changes including those that are incorporated in the new strategy documents was partly prepared between 2006 and 2010 but the ground that was prepared I think really seemed to take the E&P in a very different direction by the end of 2010 which was basically a direction of focusing on the so-called eastern partnership rather than what I think is now probably the more obvious direction in which it's going namely towards the south and the southern neighborhood so just very briefly on sort of what happened between 2006 and early this year there were two reviews out on the E&P in 2006 and 2007 which don't really do much in terms of enhancing security as a theme in the E&P but they certainly affirm that this is one of the purposes of the E&P namely to increase EU security by means of more stability within the neighborhood countries more significantly and I think this is the real sort of substantive change that we see in the E&P between 2006 and 2010 is the development of the eastern partnership 2008-2009 so it started as a conceptual as a strategic development in 2008 cancer meeting in June and then obviously accelerated as a result of the war between Russia and Georgia in August and then you have the fabulous launch of the eastern partnership at the Prague Summit in 2009 in May but the launch of the eastern partnership I think also highlights another important dimension in the way in which the E&P has developed and that I think is the much keener appreciation of the need for a regional differentiation that comes with the E&P so initially it was sort of this sort of one policy catch 16 different countries and it's all really figured out in bilateral relations with relatively or comparatively little money being spent on regional and intra-regional cooperation that very much changes with the onset of the eastern partnership and even more so I think what you actually find with the eastern partnership is also intra-regional differentiation which comes I think sort of in the first half of 2010 when it becomes very obvious that yes eastern partnership is great but Moldova and Ukraine are in a very different place than Armenia and Azerbaijan not to mention countries like Georgia and Belarus so intra-regional differentiation begins to I think take or gain traction in particular within the development of the eastern partnership also there's quite a lot of effort and thought goes into implementation reports that come out in 2009 and 2010 and these basically highlight also the progress that the eastern partnership has made particular in relation to Ukraine and Moldova and Moldova from a security perspective is also interesting in the sense that the EU finally sort of from 2009 onwards increasingly I think over 2010 2011 also becomes much more engaged in the conflict in Transnistria one of the so-called frozen conflicts in the former Soviet Union so by the end of 2010 basically all the signs are there that if the ENP is to have a future if it is ever going to be a sustainable success at all then it will be in the eastern partnership but then of course sort of there is a real world outside of Brussels of course and I don't mean that in a sort of pejorative way and that real world somehow seems to have decided that actually things are going to happen now in the so-called southern dimension of the European neighborhood and suddenly we have the Arab Spring and well I don't think anybody can claim that they predicted that or that they could have known that and that they have always told us that that's where things are going to go and the Arab Spring really I think is a major impetus for a reinvigoration of the European neighborhood policy and it very much I think directs the main effort and focus of the ENP probably for years to come towards the southern neighborhood despite the fact that there is another eastern partnership summit in Warsaw at the end of September but I think you really have to be a very keen EU watcher and eastern partnership watcher to actually have noticed that among all the other things that were going on especially because the end of September was of course also quite significant in terms of events in Libya that captured far more attention than the summit in Warsaw so in May 2011 we get a new communication from the commission boldly entitled a new response to changing neighborhood which is basically sort of a review and a new strategy if you want for the European neighborhood policy and there's an interesting genesis to that document it was basically commissioned if you want back in 2010 basically to see well where is the ENP now that the Lisbon Treaty is in place with all the institutional changes and where does it fit and what does it do not least also in the sense that sort of as an interesting institutional piece of trivia ENP started out as part of the portfolio of the then commissioner for external relations and neighborhood policy in the first Baroso administration Mrs. Ferrero Waldner but then with the creation of the new post of the higher representative of the union and foreign and foreign security affairs post now held by Baroness Ashton there is no DG relax in this sense anymore so neighborhood policy is then attached to enlargement so you could almost say it's come full circle from being an alternative to enlargement to sitting more or less comfortably in the same portfolio as enlargement policy now held by the Czech Commissioner Stefan Fühler so by leaving that aside basically you have the 2010 regular review of the ENP which was meant to produce a new strategy anyway and then on top of that you get the Arab Spring so there is real need real requirement for the ENP actually to take care of two important changes one the institutional changes that happen post Lisbon implementation and second this really tremendous and momentous change that happens across the southern eastern Mediterranean in the course of the Arab Spring of course it takes the commission a little while to do that so we actually only have this new response communication by the end of May 2011 but before then there are actually already indications that sort of things really are moving very significantly towards the south because there are two prior papers one at least in terms of publication only predates the new response communication by a day but the other one comes out in March and the two new ENP related strategy documents are entirely focused on the southern Mediterranean one is the so-called dialogue for migration, mobility and security and the other one is the partnership for democracy and shared prosperity now in all of these you have a much more significant emphasis on political cooperation which is sort of a, well you could almost say a euphemism for cooperation between the EU and partner countries on matters of security and conflict resolution and even though the new response communication tries to cover eastern partnership as well as the southern dimension a lot of what is being said in particular in respect to security and conflict really is very much geared towards the southern dimension and I mean this in many ways is not particularly surprising in the sense that there is of course an enormous amount of security related problems in the southern neighbourhood and these are partially problems that predate the Arab Spring so it's not to say that the Arab Spring caused all kinds of problems that were never there before and that it was a beautifully stable if not particularly democratic region before but the other important aspect to bear in mind is that of course there are two types of security challenges in the southern neighbourhood one is problems within the southern neighbourhood that primarily affect the countries there themselves their stability, their future prospects and then there is a second category of security challenges which in many ways are symptoms of the former but they are much of much greater interest from an EU security perspective so just to illustrate that briefly I mean the problems in the southern neighbourhood itself many of which as I said predate the Arab Spring include quite a number of latent or unresolved conflicts between states that primarily evolve around borders in the Middle East say between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon a lot of communal sectarian, secessionist conflicts and civil wars including the on of power struggles that you have in Lebanon, in the Palestinian territories the self-determination struggle in western Sahara, Morocco here involved obviously there is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is part of a which happens in the much broader regional setting of the Arab-Israeli conflict in which the EU of course plays some kind of role through its membership in the Middle East quartet and then on top of all of that, as if that wasn't enough yet you also get a lot of problems that are triggered by the Arab Spring so I'm not just thinking here that we have the violent toppling of Gaddafi in Libya the continuing problems in Egypt, the problems in Syria but also I think there is a large measure of unpredictability still here so I'm still not entirely convinced that whenever we come to the end of the Arab Spring we really will have democratic countries there or countries that make things better for a large number of their citizens so it's the element of uncertainty I think that is quite disconcerting here now all of that, you could say well that's a regional problem I mean you have these things going on elsewhere and they are not immediately seen as a security threat for the EU the problem however is that in many ways this local instability the change, the uncertainty, the violence and all of the other aspects connected with that they of course sort of constitute security challenges to the EU because they give rise to other dynamics that are seen as very clear and immediate security threats to the EU so things like illegal migration, transnational organized crime international terrorism, supply and transit dimensions for European energy security and regardless of how strong, how much, how causal you see the link between instability and these more immediate security concerns that the EU has they are certainly there in all the documents that the EU sort of drafts on these issues produces, puts out as strategies so in this sense they are certainly in appreciation that again as I think confirmed by some of the events that we have seen since the onset of the Arab Spring over the past year or so that stability in the neighborhood in this case the southern neighborhood but also of course by extension countries covered by the eastern partnership that stability there is really crucial for EU security now you could argue well that's not exactly new or surprising and the EU should have been thinking about this before and you could argue yes they have been thinking about this before therefore that might actually explain that there isn't really that much new in terms of policies in the so-called new response to a changing neighborhood yeah if you were really sort of harsh you would say well there is sort of some cosmetic changes some things are more emphasized other things are less emphasized so in many ways I think there is a lot of old wine in new bottles as the EU in many ways reaffirms its commitment to a set of policies that do not exactly have a stellar track record in actually delivering the kind of impact that the EU wants so after 10 years of E&P you could basically ask well where is this ring of countries around the EU that actually share our values and if it's not there then well maybe the policies that we have produced as part of the E&P are not exactly worth recycling and putting another 18 billion euros into them for the next seven years however I think there is one genuinely new element that comes out of the new response communication this is a commitment to an enhanced EU support for implementation of settlements so basically what in other language you would call post-conflict reconstruction or post-conflict state building or something like that and I think this is actually at least potentially very promising in two perspectives the first one is that obviously the EU is really not very good at the hard side of CSDP so it simply doesn't do particularly well for a whole number of reasons on military security issues military missions and so on and so forth so well they need something else to do if they really want to create I think stability I think the case of Libya and the rather embarrassing well saga of the EU's military operation there which never happened I think is testament to that but the other end perhaps more optimistic way of sort of putting some faith into EU's stabilization state building efforts is actually that the EU does have significant experience and success in what in EU language would be civilian crisis management operations so yes you might say the Balkans are not exactly a success story but on and off I mean the EU has managed to keep the region reasonably stable for the past 15, 16 years it has had quite a lot of other successes in places much farther away I mean Arche in East Timor is a good example here so from this perspective I think there is certainly some hope that if the EU were to focus on what you might call sort of soft security issues post-conflict state building which will be very very relevant in particular in this other neighborhood if you look at cases like Libya what might come of Syria significant questions still to be answered by Egypt who knows where Algeria will be heading and so on and so forth so there is actually a real impetus I think to refocus on the E&P and to give the E&P as a policy that the EU has at least some benefit of doubt this is not to say that there aren't quite significant problems that obviously remain and I want to sort of conclude by outlining some of the problems but also as I always try to end on an optimistic note and highlight the great opportunities that come so what are the problems? I see them and again I'm not an EU institution watcher I look more at outcomes and impact there are four problems the first one is that for all intents and purposes the EU still has not found an effective common voice on foreign and security policy across member states and institutions so there is still a lot of well it's either smallest common denominator which is often enough embarrassing or it's a lot of infighting both between member states and institutions but also among them I think there is another problem related in particular in the context of E&P and this is that very often the internal security agenda of the EU dominates and that in many ways means that the EU is much more willing and to some extent much more effective of treating symptoms so illegal migration, organized crime and so on and so forth rather than developing a comprehensive strategy that would actually aim at the causes of these problems so again I mean it's from if we see for a second the EU as a sort of regular state actor I mean that's normal, I mean states focus on their own interests and if they can achieve their interests by just sort of dealing with symptoms of particular problems then that's what they do not least in a time of financial austerity the third problem is that the EU's capacity for developing and implementing an effective security policy, foreign security policy if you want remains underdeveloped certainly in terms of human capacity both in Brussels and in the delegations and if you look at the European external action service it's basically full of bureaucrats people who switched over from the commission to the EAS not diplomats so people who can design a program and who can run projects and who can fill in forms and tick boxes and make sure that everything goes according to process but who don't always have sort of the political sense or sensitivities for a particular situation and there are very very few people in the EAS in Brussels let alone in the delegation who even have sort of a particular while training in say conflict or security issues so I think that's a real human capacity problem and the final problem is and I say that as somebody who's generally very pro-EU there's a real disconnect between rhetoric and reality so the EU always postulates this link based on its own history that as long as everybody has reasonable levels of democracy and economic development everything is just going to be fine so the all persuasive power of offering countries help with their democratization and help with their economic development in order to create prosperity that that somehow automatically takes care of all kinds of security challenges of all kinds of causes of instability I think this is something that the EU or the people in the EU really have convinced themselves of but it doesn't work like that in reality not least in the sense that it just takes much more time if this link really is there for this link to materialize and just very often don't have this amount of time and if you look at how rapidly some of the situations in the Arab Spring actually escalated into very serious violence and arguably we had a civil war in Libya and we may have yet another one and we probably have a civil war in Syria ongoing at this very moment as well you can't just wait for countries to sort of redesign their institutions make them more democratic get enough economic growth going so that everybody has a reasonable standard of living by that time I mean people have died in their probably hundreds of thousands so in this sense I think believing in this link between democracy, prosperity and security, stability it doesn't make up for the lack of a much more comprehensive and at times heart-hitting security policy and by the same token the mechanism that the EU now emphasizes even more strongly mechanism of conditionality to say well unless you democratize we won't give you money to do this, that and the other may just not be the mechanism to deliver the kind of stability that the EU wants in order to be more secure let alone create its lovely ring of friends now having said all of these bad things about the EU and its approach let me finish with three opportunities that I see here and why I think that the EU is right to reinvest itself in the neighborhood policy and not just in the south but also in the east I think the first one is that the Arab Spring for all the problems for all the misgivings that one might have with it at the moment it still does offer an unprecedented opportunity for the region of the southern and eastern Mediterranean to actually embark on the kind of change that might eventually see countries there not necessarily an entire region but countries there that share some of the core values that the EU actually has and it's also important with all the differences that do exist to bear in mind that this is in many ways not that dissimilar from the events that happened post 1989 in central and eastern Europe yet it's different scale, it's different culture all kinds of other differences here but nonetheless I think if 1989 tells us something then it is actually that yes change can happen who would have thought and I'm East German myself so I would not have thought even in May 1989 that a year later we would have social economic and currency union with West Germany and a couple of months after that be part of reuniting Germany so change is possible from that perspective there is definitely an opportunity here second point, second opportunity is that the E&P in the past has proven quite flexible and adaptable it is well funded 18. some odd billion for the next seven years that's actually quite a big chunk of money but it also I think benefits from the post Lisbon institutional changes within the EU that I think will certainly are conducive to a more effective security policy foreign security policy and the final point I want to end with is that we have to remember that dictatorships are defeated in the streets and on the battlefield but the feed of dictatorship of one dictatorship does not immediately mean that you automatically get a democratic system and to build the kind of stable democratic prosperous states that the EU envisages in its neighborhood policy these are actually tasks that require a very very different skill set from the one that NATO for example offers and I personally believe if there is a kind of policy or set of policy we will see tools out there that can potentially deliver building or can deliver on building stable democratic prosperous states after dictatorships then it probably is the E&P and from that perspective I think we really should give the E&P the benefit of the doubt and keep our fingers crossed that in the end we will in some point in the future have a ring of countries around the EU that share our values and objectives and on that really happy note right in time for the holidays thank you very much for your patience with me