From neighbourhood policy to enlargement policy, explaining the change of policy frames after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February to June 2022)

Our paper intends to explain why and how the framing of the relationship between the EU and its Eastern neighbours (Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova) has so rapidly changed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even though the EU had repeatedly denied the Eastern Partnership countries the prospect of joining the club (Wolczuk, 2017), less than 120 days after these countries submitted their membership applications to the EU, the European Council decided to grant Ukraine and Moldova official candidate status. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has undoubtedly triggered such a policy frame shift from ‘neighbours’ to ‘candidate countries’. However, we argue in this paper that this policy framing change is not solely attributable to this exogenous shock. Hence, the war against Ukraine has acted as a catalyst for the blurring of those two distinct policy frames (‘enlargement’ and ‘neighbourhood’), a process that had begun well before 2022. Indeed, between 2013 and 2022, the distinction between enlargement policy and the European Neighbourhood Policy tended to blur. The enlargement policy had entered a period of stalling (Guevara-Braun, 2024, doctoral thesis) during which candidate countries would lose hope of ever entering the EU, while ENP countries were getting offered ‘everything but the institutions’ (R. Prodi) and were bound by often more ambitious DCFTAs than candidate countries’ SAAs (Steinbach, 2024). Similarly, months before the Russian invasion, the EaP countries had begun to lobby for EU membership (Politico, 30/11/2021). While recent studies have explored the transformative effects of the Russian invasion on enlargement policy (Anghel, Džankić, 2023; Brandt, 2024), the geopolitisation of enlargement (Anghel, 2025), or the EU's capacity to react to Russia – theorised as the effect of the EU's protean power (Pomorska et al., 2025; Casier, 2025) –, there is still no research questioning the interplay of “enlargement” and “neighbourhood”, understood as policy frames and categories of public action. To explain this change of policy frame, our paper investigates the historical coevolution of the categories of ‘enlargement’ and ‘neighbourhood’ in official discourses. We apply discourse analysis and policy framing analysis to EU and EaP representatives' speeches from the 2010s and beyond. We then empirically survey the actors who have participated in this reframing with qualitative semi-structured interviews. We explore the preferences, interests, values and identities of diplomats (from the EU, EU member states and candidate countries) and EU civil servants with regard to enlargement policy and ENP. We will test three hypotheses: i) the change of policy frame is imposed by a pressure from the Ukrainian executive combined to the pressure of a transnational emotional community (Gürkan, 2024); ii) enlarging to neighbours is an old policy solution revived from the dustbin (Cohen et al., 1972) in response to an emergency (Kreuder-Sonnen, White, 2022); iii) the extension of the category of “enlargement” is a rhetorical (Hunter et al., 2025) and symbolic reaction towards Russia, without any direct concrete consequences (Jones et al., 2021).