Responsive Tenets of EU's Foreign Policy in Southeastern Europe through the Lens of Subregionalism and Interregionalism

The wider Black Sea area is the scene where the European Union (EU) is involved in bilateral and multilateral cooperation. The EU, as one of several present and actively involved powers, implements its foreign policy towards the region through three channels: (1) European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), (2) Black Sea Synergy (BSS), and (3) the Eastern Partnership (EaP). However, the Black Sea regionalisation process or the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) is also influenced by other core actors in the region. This is due to the fact that the BSEC is a Turkish initiative in an area which is also considered to be in Russia’s sphere of influence. Moreover, the region covers the Southern and Eastern Neighbourhood of the EU, which has proactively been bidding for a core role. The manner in which three core actors exercise and exert their foreign and security policies appears to differ significantly: coercive for Russia, persuasive for the EU and ambivalent (or ambivertive) for Turkey. Using interviews, official documents and personal observation, this paper will explain how the complex relationships between the three core powers inform the interregionalism and subregionalism. It will particularly analyse the varieties of contestation patterns in EU foreign policy and explain the extent to which EU’s foreign policy in bilateral and multilateral cooperation has been shaped by the behavior and aspirations of various institutional and state actors in Southeastern Europe.