Lost between democratic and positive peace: a critical assessment of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Over the last 20 years, the European Union (EU) has promoted democracy and the rule of law in its neighbourhood, failing to achieve significant results. While the causes of this failure have been openly debated in the literature, the EU has recently changed its foreign policy focus from democracy promotion to resilience, a paradigm shift that is even more apparent both in the European Global Strategy (2016) and in the Strategic Compass (2022). Using a preliminary document analysis, we show that the European Neighbourhood Policy can be better understood through the concept of positive peace, arguing that the literature in this field may shed new light not only on the ENP itself, but also on the reasons for its failure. More specifically, we argue that – far from being interested only in the democratization of its neighbours – the ENP aimed at spreading the European zone of peace (i.e., human development and security community); not only this strategy was too ambitious, but it incurred also in some trade-offs that the EU could hardly manage. In doing so, we propose a distinction between policy instruments aimed at fostering positive peace, and desirable outcomes that those instruments should achieve.