The EU's Norm-Sharing in Institution Building in EAP Countries: A Structure versus Process Analysis

The paper addresses the apparent disconnect between the structural and process aspects of civil crisis management modern, democratic institution building in the EU’s policies towards the Eastern Partnership countries. While the analysis finds that the EaP process and structure performances are relatively correlated and balanced, the EU’s EaP average performance in civil crisis management norm-sharing and actual reform is only minor, indicating little, unsubstantial progress in most relevant indicators measured in a modified 2x2 table. Moreover, there are major differences between the EU’s performance across the EaP partner countries, i.e. Armenia and Georgia are best performers; Ukraine’s performance is the lowest, while Azerbaijan and the Republic of Moldova have average performances. While the European Affairs and IR theory would predict otherwise, the paper shows that norm-sharing can be an effective tool of EU foreign policy even in contested-statehood contexts, like Armenia-Azerbaijan. But as the paper indicates, the EU’s performance may not necessarily be equal among the target countries or constant in time for a host of reasons discussed in the paper – resilience being perhaps the most important.