Building regional stability through cross-border cooperation Changing spatial imaginaries and sovereignty concepts of EU neighbourhood policies

• Published in: The EU's Eastern Neighbourhood pp. 19 - 35
• Main Author: Liikanen, Ilkka
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2016
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Distinct International Actors; Young Man; Cbc; ENP; EU Common Foreign Policy; EU's Eastern Neighbourhood; cross-border cooperation; EU Russia Relation; TACIS Cbc; Sovereignty Concepts; Yuri Andrukhovych; European Neighbourhood Policy; EaP; Normative Soft Power; INTERREG Programme; EU's Neighbourhood; economic progress; Spatial Imagery; European Commission 2004c; Lisbon Treaty; Wider Europe; Card; EU External Relation; European community; security policies; INTERREG Iii; regional development; Discursive Europeanisation; INTERREG programmes; External Borders; Cbc Programme
• ISBN: 9780415722865; 1138477699; 9781138477698; 0415722861
• DOI: 10.4324/9781315858036-3

This chapter studies the role of the EU as an international actor by analysing the spatial imageries and sovereignty concepts applied in EU policies of cross-border cooperation (CBC). The analysis is built on a close reading of the EU's CBC programmes, from the early INTERREG programmes to documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and present-day formulations of common foreign and security policies. CBC and cohesion policies are discussed in a shared European frame but common Europeanness is above all emphasised in the context of building a stronger European Community understood in apolitical terms as a frame for economic progress and regional development. With the Lisbon Treaty establishing the political union in 2009 and the formulation of EU common foreign policies, tasks of earlier CBC policies have been completed to a large extent. The introduction of the concept of European Neighbourhood brought a new layer to the sovereignty-challenging policy definition of earlier CBC programmes. This chapter supports the idea that Ukraine can serve as a perfect model for studying the concept of borderland in terms of a particular historical, cultural and geographic meso-region and confirms the validity of this approach. In many ways, Ukraine's space and its perceptions need be explained by the very nature of the huge Eurasian landmass stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Ukrainian lands always played the role of a periphery in the polyethnic states whose centres of influence were located beyond Ukrainian territory: Vilnius, Warsaw, Istanbul, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vienna and Berlin. The successive symbolic and political configurations of what came to be the present-day Ukrainian national space each added additional layers, resulting in an ever more complex cultural heterogeneity. The Soviet era has not only consolidated the boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic founded in 1922 but also preserved Ukraine's earlier multifaceted historical and cultural legacy.