Search

Editorial of issue # 8-9 / 2022-2023

Передмова

This article examines the extent of the practice of resilience in the process of the implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA). Also, it analyses the main legislative and institutional tools promoting resilience of Ukraine’s market integration with the EU. Two cases are considered in this study. The first case is the launch of negotiations on the EU-Ukraine Agreement on Conformity and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA). The second case is an EU-Ukraine Trade Dispute on Export Woods Ban. In both cases the EU institutions and Ukraine display a high degree of flexibility to pursue a policy of resilience to achieve a high degree of EU Internal Market rapprochement. In the case of Ukraine, the institutional mechanism of the EU-Ukraine AA remains unused as a forum to discuss effectively and to find solutions for impeding problems in the bilateral cooperation agenda. Therefore, a coherent, transparent, and effective institutional cooperation framework in the bilateral EU-Ukraine relations is still needed.

This article investigates the complex problems arising from the discrepancy of traditional liberal crisis response approaches in the new type of complex emergencies. Based on the in-depth empirical analysis, it examines the EU role in addressing security sector reforms, humanitarian assistance and warfare in Libya and Ukraine, two key EU neighboring countries with ongoing military conflicts. It is argued that the observed over-emphasis on state-centric stabilization measures, with its main focus on formal state structures, fails to deal with the hybrid dynamics of conflict and peacebuilding in both countries. It is suggested that to shape comprehensive crisis response in an unstable neighborhood a multi-layered perspectives approach to security, sensitive to plural agencies and informal rules, should be developed both outside and within EU borders.

This article analyses the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (EU-Ukraine AA). It argues that this new legal framework, which has the objective to establish a unique form of political association and economic integration, is characterized by three specific features: comprehensiveness, complexity and conditionality. After a brief background of the EU-Ukraine relations, the following aspects are scrutinized: legal basis and objectives, institutional framework and mechanisms of enhanced conditionality, and legislative approximation. In addition, constitutional challenges for the effective implementation of the EU-Ukraine AA are discussed. Based upon a comparison with other EU external agreements, it is demonstrated that the EU-Ukraine AA is an innovative legal instrument providing for a new type of integration without membership.