Commentary
EAP 2030
Think Tank
Western Balkans Futures
Where to Next, Western Balkans?
18 May 2022
What could happen to the European Union’s Eastern neighbourhood in the decade to come? Will it be abandoned and forgotten if Europe strikes a new deal with Russia, dividing up the spheres of influence? Or could the societies of the six post-Soviet Eastern Partnership states awaken and bring forth radical political and economic reform with the help of the EU?
In May 2019 the Eastern Partnership, the European Union’s most ambitious neighbourhood policy project, celebrated its tenth anniversary.
Several months later, Visegrad Insight assembled a team of experts from the six EaP countries who met in Warsaw, Tbilisi and Prague to develop Eastern European Futures, four Eastern Partnership scenarios for the next decade.
The EaP story started when the EU’s ‘big bang’ enlargements in 2004 and 2007 shifted the borders of the European project to the East creating a new zone of “shared neighbourhood” between the Union and Russia. These post-Soviet countries presented the EU with both opportunities and challenges.