ENP Governance in the Mediterranean: Old Wine in New Wineskins?

This paper scrutinizes EU external governance in Mediterranean countries as a novel form of association. Starting from the institutional set up of the ENP, it scrutinises how far ENP cooperation with the Mediterranean departs from earlier cooperation under the Barcelona process and constitutes a deeper level of association. In order to analyse this, the paper takes a comparative perspective and analyses how far the institutional set up and the substance of cooperation with two Mediterranean countries, Morocco and Tunisia, is comparable to that with the Eastern neighbours under the ENP (esp. Ukraine and Moldova), or even the model of the European Economic Area which has officially inspired the ENP. Shifting from an institutional comparison of these different forms of association at the macro level to their micro-foundations within individual policy areas, it analyses the emergence and functioning of external governance in the following policy areas: justice and home affairs, energy, environment, transport, and research and development. The comparative framework shall allow to investigate not only the dynamics behind EU-neighbourhood relations, but also to look more closely at the tension between European influence as "normative power" and interest-led foreign policy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]