Beyond Fortress Europe. Unbounding European Normative Power and the Neighbourhood Policy

The article critically scrutinizes the geographical assumptions which pervade most accounts of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Both the policy's proponents and opponents often rely on a too restrictive inside/outside distinction and do not properly acknowledge the peculiar territorialities which 'EU'rope projects within and beyond its borders. While this limit has at times been perpetrated in scholarly debates on the topic, this article presents a review of recent research which, from different disciplinary backgrounds, converges in proposing more decentered and 'unbounded' perspectives for inquiring into EU's approach towards its neighbouring countries. EU external policies are a peculiar assemblage of inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and securitization, approximation and distantiation which cannot be properly captured by metaphors such as that of the "wider Europe" or "fortress Europe". We discuss recent perspectives about European normative power, external governance and Europeanization, policy transfer and diffusion which show how regionalization and bordering processes are neither contradictory nor divergent but proceed side-by-side in an attempt to construct a selective, fragmented and mobile EU external frontier. These perspectives are crucial for renovating our understanding of EU's external relations and the Neighbourhood Policy both theoretically and methodologically, particularly in light of the EU's decreasing leverage and ongoing transformations in 'EU'rope and its neighbourhood.