European Union and regional order

Abstract

How does the way the EU interacts with difference affect the broader regional order in Europe? How, and under what conditions, can the EU contribute to a successful resolution of conflicts at its external borders? This question carries a lot of policy significance nowadays in EU circles, mainly because the continued existence of such disputes, such as Cyprus, reflects badly on the EU’s stated missions to export peace and become a foreign policy actor in and of its own right (Richmond 2000). The status of conflicts around the external borders of the EU and the role played by the EU in relation to these conflicts have a lot to say about the nature of the collectivity that the EU is set to become. This chapter shows that the EU’s differing institutional/identity relations with various states on its periphery have affected the conflicts on the EU’s external borders in different ways. In this chapter, I will discuss how the EU has impacted three conflicts between member and non-member states situated in different institutional/identity relations with respect to the EU: the Polish-German (prior to 2004 enlargement), Moroccan-Spanish, and Greek-Turkish conflicts.