Professor Tobias SCHUMACHER, Chairholder of the European Neighbourhood Policy Chair at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, just published a chapter entitled "Differentiation in EU-Neighbourhood Relations" in the latest Euromed Survey of Experts and Actors, published annually by the Barcelona-based European Institute on the Mediterranean (IEMed).
The chapter provides a concise overview of the evolution of differentiation in EU-neighbourhood relations and argues that, although differentiation has also been put at the core of the newly revised ENP of 2015, doubts as to how seriously it will be implemented in practice are in order. Given the way the EU and its Member States have pursued the ENP throughout the last 13 years, systematically undermining the principle of differentiation, it is difficult to see this seemingly established practice change in the near future. In fact, the emphasis of the 2015 ENP on transactional cooperation and its objective to focus on thematic frameworks in policy areas such as migration, energy and security, in conjunction with its explicit recognition that for some neighbours past editions of the ENP have been “too prescriptive”, indicate that the democratic governance and human rights acquis in EU-neighbourhood relations is bound to degenerate further.
The chapter can be accessed here.