Abstract
The Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative with the Eastern neighbors of the European Union, including Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Belarus, was introduced by Polish and Swedish diplomats in June 2008 and published in a communiqué of the European Commission in December 2008. Since then, there has been a launch of a qualitatively new form of cooperation for all sides, officially starting in May 2009 with the EaP Summit in Prague. The EaP initiative is aimed to ‘create necessary conditions for the facilitation of political association and further economic integration between the European Union and interested country partners’. Within the EaP initiative, the Eastern neighbors of the EU formed a so-called ‘own club’ in order to strengthen the neighborhood policy of the EU. Geopolitical claims about EU integration were based on the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and its financial component—the European Neighborhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI).
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Notes
- 1.
Joint Declaration of the Prague Eastern Partnership Summit, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/er/107589.pdf
- 2.
‘Taking stock of the European Neighbourhood Policy’, European Commission communication COM (2010) 207, May 12, 2010.
- 3.
The name ‘Euromaidan’ became widely used because the initial intention and reason for starting the protests was the decision of the government to stop the European integration process just before the EaP Summit in Vilnius in November 2013 and to begin accession to the ‘Eurasian Union’ instead. However, European integration did not remain the core reasoning of Euromaidan. Other reasons were mentioned by its active participants as the major ones to make them protest—for the details of the survey conducted in December 2013 among Euromaidan active participants, see the publication of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, the think tank that conducted a survey together with KIIS, http://www.dif.org.ua/ua/publications/gromadska-dumka/evrorotestu.htm.
- 4.
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a peaceful uprising of the citizenry that began as a protest against the falsification of presidential election results, and evolved into a mass expression of discontent with the country’s political leadership. In December 2004, street protests forced the incumbent regime to agree to hold a repeat vote and, in January 2005, Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate, was elected as president. His opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, came to office a few years later, in 2010, being prime minister in 2006–2010 (with some breaks) during Yushchenko’s presidency.
- 5.
Several research institutions conducted public opinion polls on the EU integration issues. The KIIS databank provides comparable survey data for 2002–2013; some think tanks and non-governmental organizations also initiated opinion polls to define key directions for further activities within the EU-integration support growth among Ukrainians (i.e. NGO ‘Centre UA’ with the support of PACT/UNITER initiative by USAID).
- 6.
Regular ‘Omnibus’ surveys by KIIS and by other research companies were conducted on nationally representative samples, excluding the Autonomous Republic of Crimea due to the annexation of its territory in March 2014 by the foreign military.
- 7.
This question was asked with regard to the accession of Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the EU in 2004.
- 8.
According to a GfK Ukraine survey for PACT/UNITER in June 2013 (N = 1270). The set of questions about EU integration was elaborated by the NGO Centre UA. Fieldwork was conducted in June 2013; 1270 respondents were surveyed in person; the sample is nationally representative.
- 9.
GfK Ukraine survey for PACT/UNITER.
- 10.
GfK Ukraine survey for PACT/UNITER.
- 11.
The Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) is a program of the Eurasia Partnership Foundation supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is a network of resource, research and training centers established in 2003 in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia with the goal of strengthening social science research and public policy analysis in the region. More about CRRC can be found at: http://www.crrccenters.org/; the public opinion polls’ results can be found at: http://www.epfound.ge/english/current-programs-activities/european-integration/public-opinion-polls/public-opinion-polls-.html; and a further resource with online survey data is: http://caucasusbarometer.org/en/
- 12.
CRRC nationally representative survey in August 2009, N = 1683.
- 13.
- 14.
The survey data were collected during July–August 2014 in personal interviews with a nationwide representative sample of 3338 respondents. The survey was initiated by the NDI, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and conducted by CRRC Georgia.
- 15.
For more details, please see the EaP Index website: http://www.eap-index.eu.
- 16.
INOGATE is the international energy cooperation program between the European Union and the EU neighboring states.
- 17.
- 18.
For a detailed description of the methodology of EaP Index calculation, see the EaP Index website: http://www.eap-index.eu/methodology.
- 19.
In Ukraine, the civil society activists of the NGO Centre UA, European Program, have launched a specially designed instrument for such monitoring called the Agreement Navigator. Its purpose is to report on the efforts of the Ukrainian government to change national legislation in compliance with the Association Agreement demands. The progress can be traced online by the public: http://www.eurointegration.com.ua/navigator/.
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Kostiuchenko, T., Akulenko, L. (2016). The EaP Achievements in Ukraine and Georgia: Public Opinion vs. Institutional Changes. In: Bruns, B., Happ, D., Zichner, H. (eds) European Neighbourhood Policy. New Geographies of Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-69504-1_6
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