EU foreign policy is based upon a complex system of differentiated relationships with other countries. The neighbours of the EU belong to one of the most privileged category of relationships but even there one can spot distinctions between different sub-groups, such as European non-EU countries, European Neighbourhood Policy countries, candidate and future enlargement countries, etc. This paper focuses on the discursive construction of neighbours in the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) from the EU perspective.
The ENP has been in force since 2004 and during this decade it has shaped EU’s relations with its neighbours to a significant extent. Not only has this policy provided a platform for conducting mutual relations, but it has also put neighbours on a distinctive level in the extensive foreign policy framework of the EU. At the same time, the ENP has been subjected to criticism regarding several aspects of the policy. Some of the most repeated criticisms include conflicting objectives and inconsistent implementation of the policy across countries and issue areas. As the ENP provides only rather general or even vague guidelines about conducting relations with neighbours, this has brought along a diverse range of explanations when trying to interpret the EU’s chosen course of action in specific cases regarding the neighbourhood. While ENP is an umbrella policy which applies to all neighbours in the same way, there are plenty of examples to be found where the EU does not treat the neighbours equally. While differentiation has been a part of the ENP since the very beginning, the EU’s vision of developing relations based on “progress in meeting the agreed priorities” has always remained ambiguous.
The paper looks into EU discourses towards its neighbourhood. It argues that several competing discourses can be observed with regard to neighbourhood countries, and this can offer an alternative explanation to the EU’s policy of differentiation between neighbours. The paper, theoretically informed by discourse historical analysis, argues that by mapping the EU discourses between 2004-2014, the neighbouring countries are attributed a specific discursive image by the EU. The paper uses corpus linguistics to analyse the ENP-related materials produced by EU institutions throughout the ten years of ENP’s existence to present the development of ENP discourses. This analysis is complemented by a lengthy discourse historical analysis of specific EU texts to illustrate the key turning points in the ENP.
