Moderating Expectations about the Eastern Partnership

In the next decade of the Eastern Partnership, the EU and its Eastern neighbours can be brought closer together but it is also not unlikely we will be witnessing an emergence of a new civilisational wall across the Eastern border of the EU.

The European Union’s next-door neighbour Belarus has been embroiled in pro-democracy protests since August 2020 when its authoritarian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka blatantly falsified the election. Ever since the authoritarian grip of Lukashenka’s regime has been tightening to the point of surreal absurdity marked by the prosecution of snowmen-making or singing in public.

The EU’s reaction to these developments could be judged as slow and insufficient. Only in October 2020 – almost three months after the fraudulent election – the EU agreed to impose (rather light) sanctions on Lukashenka’s regime. Meanwhile, the material support for Belarus’s struggling civil society has been constrained by the EU’s own bureaucratic rules.

The events in Belarus and the generally unstable condition of the EU Eastern neighbourhood have been the main reasons why some commentators have argued that Eastern Partnership (EaP) – the flagship initiative of the European Union towards six countries of the EU Eastern neighbourhood: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, has been a failure.