After Just One Year, Are The Wheels Coming Off The EUs Eastern Partnership?
BRUSSELS — A year after its celebrated inception, the European Union’s Eastern Partnership for Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan has sunk into the kind of obscurity that tends to envelop unloved EU projects. The inaugural summit was held in Prague on May 7, 2009, amid fanfare, promises, and high expectations. A follow-up meeting of EU and partner-country foreign ministers was held in December. But since then, the bloc’s deepening economic malaise now appears to have suffocated whatever impetus the process had left. Intended to provide a regional, multilateral dimension to the longer-established European Neighborhood Policy, the Eastern Partnership has not delivered any visible added value for either the EU or the countries themselves. The main avenue for contacts and cooperation is still provided via another channel — association agreement talks between each of the countries and the EU. The association agreement sets the bar at nothing more than “political a
