The European Union’s Eastern Partnership: between realism and disillusion

Abstrakt: The European Union’s Eastern policy has been modified continually in the 21st century because the European Neighbourhood Policy, the framework for its activities towards its neighbours, is an ineffective tool. Faced with the low efficient activities, the EU authorities and the individual Member States have been coming up with new initiatives aimed at making the operations more productive. This is exemplified by the Black Sea Synergy and the Eastern Partnership projects managed by the Eastern neighbours and the Union for the Mediterranean pertaining to the states of the Southern neighbourhood. The Eastern Partnership is becoming an increasingly recognisable sign of the EU’s activities in Eastern Europe. The Partnership is a young policy, still under implementation. Its eff ective implementation requires all of the 27 EU Member States and the 6 states embraced by the policy to cooperate. During its Presidency of the EU in the second half of 2011, Poland strove to make the Eastern Partnership the main objective of the East European and South Caucasian policy. As it turned out, certain international events precluded the EaP from becoming the key issue under the Polish Presidency, and the state of the affairs behind the Eastern border of the EU also seems to indicate that this initiative is waning for perceiving it as a project of a little impact.