Crisis-Induced EU Actorness in the South Caucasus: From External Governance to Mediation, Energy Statecraft, and Monitoring (Pre-2020–2025)

This paper studies how and why the European Union’s role in the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) has evolved from predominantly “soft” external governance to a more explicitly geopolitical and security-relevant posture following two shocks: the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Historically, EU engagement was structured through the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership, privileging political association, economic integration, and rule-of-law and governance reforms, while avoiding a direct security-provider role and operating without a credible membership horizon. Over time, this posture increasingly reflected “principled pragmatism” and a resilience agenda designed to manage instability rather than resolve core security dilemmas. Methodologically, the paper employs a qualitative, three-phase comparative process-tracing design (pre-2020; 2020–2021; 2022–2025) across the three country tracks. It triangulates (1) six in-depth semi-structured expert interviews with practitioners and analysts working on EU external action and South Caucasus security; (2) systematic document analysis of EU institutional outputs (European Council/Council conclusions, EEAS/Commission communications, partnership frameworks, mission mandates); and (3) structured qualitative content analysis and thematic coding to track shifts in official framing (values, resilience, stability), instrument choice (conditionality, economic statecraft, mediation, monitoring), and sequencing across cases. Interview-based causal claims are tested against the documentary record to strengthen inference and reduce single-source bias. The findings identify a stepwise escalation of EU actorness, after the 2020 war, the EU moved beyond primarily normative-economic tools and assumed a more direct mediation posture, hosting high-level meetings, brokering confidence-building steps, and linking post-war stabilization to connectivity and investment incentives. After 2022, the EU’s engagement deepened further through energy diplomacy with Azerbaijan aimed at reducing reliance on Russian gas and through an unprecedented on-the-ground monitoring footprint in Armenia, reflecting a more operational security presence. Yet this geopolitical turn heightens a recurring credibility dilemma: balancing strategic interests (energy, corridors, limiting Russian influence) with normative commitments on governance and human rights. The paper’s contribution is a mechanism-based account of “crisis-induced EU actorness” in contested neighbourhoods, specifying when shocks generate both the political demand and the strategic opportunity for the EU to shift from governance instruments toward security-relevant action and where leverage remains structurally bounded.