Failure, Farrago or Fiasco? Reviewing the European Neighbourhood Policy

Fiascos are strangely compelling. They are to be avoided at all costs, and yet are viciously, even gleefully seized upon by key actors when they do occur. Their complex and polyvalent causes however, are not generally the stuff of intense evaluation. This paper argues that foreign policy fiascos engender agendas, outputs and outcomes which are riddled with blameworthy failures and decision-making errors. The bulk of studies around the success or failure of EU foreign policy initiatives draw inspiration from foreign policy analysis (FPA). Such analyses often lack the depth that the public policy analysis (PPA) toolkit can offer in terms of actors, instruments, procedures and beliefs (Exadaktylos 2012, 2015; Exadaktylos and Lynggaard 2017). As such creating typologies and criteria to evaluate success or failure becomes methodologically difficult. Inspired by deductive approaches drawn from FPA and folding into the picture the inductive methods of PPA, the paper examines the case of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Despite the ambition of the ENP as an EU foreign policy plan, there have been marginal wins that have been heavily outnumbered by substantive, repetitive and humiliating public losses (Hadfield et al. 2017; Bouris and Schumacher 2017). The question then becomes how do we assess success, failure or halfway-completed goals of the ENP? The paper breaks down the ENP into smaller episodes allowing for the process tracing of initiatives, supplemented by interviews of key EU stakeholders, and using the PPA toolkit to classify initiatives and explain their outcomes.