Limits of Attraction: The EU's Eastern Border and the European Neighbourhood Policy

The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2002-2003, was presented as the EU's way of responding to the Eastern neighbours' desires for closer ties to the Union. The policy ignored, however, that if such desires did exist they were aimed at full EU membership, rather than at mere neighbourliness. Indeed, the EU's insistence that the ENP entailed neither a promise of, nor a definite ruling out of, membership, meant that the policy caught the eastern neighbours in a continuous state of ambivalent liminality. This article argues that this ambiguity at the heart of the policy is linked to the rather self- congratulatory idea of EUrope as the club everybody wants to join, and thus to a distinction between those who were European (the EU) and those who were inscribed with a desire for becoming European (the neighbours). The neighbours were defined not by their own position but by their desire for the privileged position of the articulating (EUropean) subject. The ENP's function of arresting the neighbours in a liminal position might as such be understood as a way of continually reproducing and displaying their desire for Europe, a desire which could then be imitated also in the disenchanted populations of the EU itself.