Assessing the ENP
With crisis in the neighbourhood directly impacting on the EU like never before, is the new European Neighbourhood Policy able to keep up?
On Wednesday, Federica Mogherini and Commissioner Johannes Hahn released a joint Communication on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) Review. Listening was a Europe whose attention was understandably elsewhere in the wake of the Paris attacks, with an ongoing refugee crisis to deal with, which is itself fast becoming a footnote to the more dominant fear of terrorism in some member states.
But the ENP is a tool intricately linked with both these more immediate concerns of migration and security, and if the new set of policies that emerges after the review are worth their salt, ought to have serious implications for both. In May 2015, we published ‘Europe’s Neighbourhood: Crisis as the new normal’ setting out some lines of thought on where the ENP review should go.
On this basis how did yesterday’s communication shape up?
To take our final recommendation first: that ‘No decisions on the ENP review should be taken ahead of the