Professor: Giselle BOSSE Academic Assistant: Charlotte GIAUFFRET
Contact: g.bosse@maastrichtuniversity.nl
This seminar will equip students with a thorough knowledge and a deeper understanding of the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP). The overarching objective is that students acquire the ability to critically assess the EaP in its wider context, by learning to understand and explain the EaP as a phenomenon or symptom of broader historical, political and social processes. In the first part of the seminar, we trace the EaP's origins in its historical context. We examine the EU's relations with the countries participating in the EaP and the Russian Federation after the end of the Cold War, and identify the drivers behind the ENP East/ EaP policies. In the second part of the seminar, students study the goals, instruments and legal base of the EaP policy, and evaluate its impact on a number of key political and economic reform processes in each of the six participating countries. In the third part of the seminar, students acquire a thorough understanding of the peoples' dimension of the EaP, their civil societies, popular movements and shifts in public opinion, as well as the contested nature of national identity, memory and statehood in the post-Soviet space. The focus in the final part of the seminar is on the recent Ukraine conflict: We assess the validity of contradictory accounts of the conflict, compare and contrast the vast array of seemingly irreconcilable explanations of its causes, and evaluate the scale of the unfolding humanitarian emergency on the ground. The seminar ends with a discussion of future scenarios pertaining to the regional relations, geopolitics and diplomacy between the EU/NATO, the countries participating in the EaP, and the Russian Federation.