Navigating Differentiation under Constraint: Armenia and the Politics of External Differentiated Integration at the intersection of EU Enlargement and the ENP

This paper contributes to the emergent scholarship on European Union (EU) external differentiated integration (EDI) at the intersection of EU enlargement and the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). It examines the drivers shaping Armenia’s engagement with EDI, understood as the selective and sector-specific participation of non-EU member states in EU policies. Positioned at the intersection of competing integration projects, most notably the EU and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Armenia – participating in the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) and being subjected to the ENP – represents a critical case for understanding how small states navigate competing regional integration and cooperation frameworks. The paper argues that Armenia’s engagement in EDI is driven by a combination of geopolitical constraints, security dependence, economic cost–benefit calculations, and domestic political considerations. On the one hand, structural factors such as unresolved conflict, reliance on presumptive external security guarantors, and asymmetric power relations limit Armenia’s capacity to pursue deep and autonomous forms of integration beyond its formal EAEU membership. On the other hand, Armenia engages, or seeks to engage, in selective EU rules-taking where EDI allows it to reap functional benefits without incurring prohibitive geopolitical or institutional costs. The paper thus aims to shed light on how sectoral compatibility, flexibility of sectoral integration, and the absence of binding sovereignty transfer commitments increase (the likelihood of) Armenian engagement in EDI, while exclusivity clauses, regulatory incompatibility, and perceived security trade-offs discourage participation. By focusing on Armenia, the paper contributes to the broader literature on differentiated integration beyond the EU, demonstrating how EU neighbours that are not (yet) aspiring to EU membership, use differentiation strategically to balance competing integration regimes under conditions of geopolitical vulnerability.