The EU is actively engaged in cooperation with external regional groupings, organizations, and functional initiatives. Moreover, the promotion of regional cooperation is stated as one of the key objectives of EU foreign policy. Support for external regionalism is believed to stem from the very nature of the EU as one of the first and by far the most successful regional integration project in the world. In the academic literature, it is commonly accepted that the EU exerts influence – both direct and indirect – on other regional initiatives, determining their institutional set-up and policy approaches through the export of its model of regional integration. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence that any such diffusion of the EU model to external regional organizations does take place.
The proposed paper will critically assess the role played by the EU in sparking and shaping regional cooperation beyond its borders. It will, first, explore what exactly the EU seeks to promote when engaging in cooperation with other regional groupings: its model (what kind of a model), regional cooperation as such, or its rules and regulatory order. Second, the paper will investigate under which conditions the EU succeeds in promoting different kinds of rules and institutional arrangements to external regional groupings. In so doing, the paper will disaggregate a synthetic notion of a single EU model of regional integration into several sets of templates that only loosely fit together. It will thus challenge the implied expectation that the EU’s promotion of regional integration should produce EU replicas in other parts of the world. The paper will argue that the adoption of EU templates occurs in a pick-and-choose manner: specific properties of EU integration are borrowed selectively rather than in the entirety of the ‘EU model’. Empirically, the paper will be based on the analysis of the EU’s impact on about 20 sub-regional initiatives in the wide neighbourhood of the EU: East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union, and Northern Africa in the period from the mid-1990s to 2010.
