News about Russia’s possible invasion of Ukraine and its provocations in the Donbas region have been hitting the headlines of world top newspapers since autumn 2021. What is the role of the EU in the current crisis? How has the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement helped improve Ukraine’s resilience amid hybrid and immediate military threats? And why is the 2022 crisis so different from the one in 2014? Find answers to all these questions in the blog post by the “Lowering the Bar” project’s Post-Doc Maryna Rabinovych, published with the EUROPP blog at the London School of Economics.
Dr. Maryna Rabinovych and Dr. Anne Pintsch worked together towards a book chapter “EU Differentiated Integration as a Tangible: Internal and External Dimensions” published with the Routledge Handbook of European Integrations, edited by Thomas Hoerber, Gabriel Weber and Ignazio Cabras. The Handbook offers a comprehensive coverage of various aspects of European integration, including the ones “usually neglected or excluded in European integration collections”. Such aspects relate to, for instance, football, tourism, Erasmus, as well as artificial intelligence, transport and energy. Moreover, the Handbook is marked by an insight into tangible benefits European integration has brought about, and this is where the Project Team’s chapter on differentiated integration comes into play.
The contribution explains tangible benefits, intangibles and challenges associated with a broad range of differentiated integration structures both within the EU itself (e.g., enhanced cooperation between Member States) and the ones also involving third states, such as Eastern Neighbours. It is demonstrated that the Association Agreements with Eastern Neighbours create valuable tangibles for the EU in terms of trade liberalization, sectoral cooperation and political dialogue. Strong association relations with third countries also help the Union to increase its visibility and reach in numerous policy domains, such as development and conflict management. Nevertheless, Member States’ divergent geopolitical interests and EU foreign policy’s contestation represent crucial challenges to the further advancement of the EU-Neighbours relations. Differentiation, nevertheless, remains a crucial aspect of European integration, requiring careful management and nuanced research for it to continue producing tangibles, rather than mushrooming challenges.
The Report, published in terms of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine program at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, presents novel data on Russia’s “passportization” and the voting by the residents of the the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” These data provides a nuanced insight into the political preferences of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics’ ” residents and the role the engagement of the Donbas residents into voting has played for the Duma elections. Moreover, amidst Russia’s current military build-up close to Ukrainian borders, the Report illustrates how “passportization” paves the way for the combination of the conventional and hybrid aggression vis-à-vis Ukraine. It offers several policy recommendations for the Ukrainian government and the international community to address “passportization” as a form of hybrid aggression.
her paper titled Compliance Mechanisms in the EU “Development and “Integration without Membership” Association Agreements: A Quest for Commitment and Ownership at the PLURICOURTS Research Conference on Compliance Mechanisms at the University of Oslo’s Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order. The key objective behind her paper is to explore why the EU may prefer to use informal mechanisms, rather than formal ones when addressing the instances of partners’ non-compliance with their obligations under Association Agreements with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia (integration without membership context), and Latin America and the Caribbean (development cooperation context). It is shown that in both contexts, the EU’s preference forto informal mechanisms is primarily driven by its aspiration to promote partner countries’ commitment to and ownership of AAs through cooperation and assistance, rather than make them comply through formal mechanisms, such as dispute resolution or various forms of sanctions. It is, however, emphasized that if the non-compliance matter severely violates the EU’s or Member States’ interests, the EU may prefer to use a formal compliance mechanism. To ask for a draft paper, please contact Dr. Maryna Rabinovych, maryna.rabinovych@uia.no.
More information about the conference can be found under this link.
