How the EU should help its neighbours By Heather Grabbe ★ The EU is trying to offer its neighbours alternatives to membership that will help them to become more stable, secure and prosperous. But unless the Union gives much stronger incentives to the neighbouring countries, its policy will have little effect. ★ The EU should grant its neighbours greater access to its huge internal market – including agriculture – and easier passage for travellers across its borders. But it should also set clearer and more consistent conditions for countries to gain these benefits.
The EU has had huge success in using its enlargement process to help ten Central and East European countries along the path to becoming stable democracies and successful market economies. Can it do the same for its neighbours, such as Ukraine and Algeria? The outlook is much bleaker for the countries on the EU’s eastern and southern borders. They are less motivated to adopt EU norms and standards. Russia is now much more likely to object to the EU increasing its influence in former Soviet countries than it was in the 1990s. And the EU is not offering the new neighbours the huge incentive of membership, at least for the time being.
Moldova and Ukraine later this year. The draft action plans suggest that the EU will be vague on many of the key areas that neighbouring countries are really interested in – such as easier access to visas. But if the action plans are insubstantial, they will have little effect, just like the various partnership and cooperation agreements the EU has signed with these countries over the years. This policy brief sets out ideas on how the EU could improve its neighbourhood policy, particularly by providing more specific incentives for its neighbours to reform. Neighbours but not members
But the EU needs to help these countries, for its own sake as well as theirs. If neighbouring countries slide further into poverty and instability, they will threaten the Union with problems like organised crime, trafficking and illegal migration. The EU needs to give its neighbours strong incentives to help them to become constructive partners instead of sources of bad news. The European Commission published proposals for a ‘European Neighbourhood Policy’ in May 2004. The document largely consists of general principles, and the Commission promises to provide the substantive details in ‘action plans’ for each country, starting with
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The Commission hopes that its new policy will stop neighbouring countries from demanding promises of membership for a while. The policy is also intended to reassure current member-states that the Union will not go on enlarging indefinitely. It offers countries a process of integration that does not prejudge which of them might someday join the EU. The EU is right not to rule out membership forever, given that it might eventually offer accession to countries like Ukraine and Moldova. However, the Union needs to deepen its integration with its neighbours politically and economically, regardless of the membership question.
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