Very Remote Control: Policing the Outer Perimeter of the Eastern Neighbourhood

Abstract

In an article titled ‘The Frontiers of the European Union: A Geostrategic Perspective’, William Walters argues that Europeanization implies and manages a process of disintegration because it involves the dismantling and reorganization of social and economic relations that constitute the legacy of previous or alternative systems of order (Walters, 2004). This chapter examines the potential of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) to hollow out alternative regional integration projects by reference to several EU initiatives directed at the management of Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. Drawing on interviews, policy documents and official statements in the media, the chapter aims to demonstrate that in three related areas — border demarcation, remote policing, and direct policy export — the neighbourhood initiative seeks to disarticulate the once open and practically unguarded Ukrainian-Russian border from a post-Soviet arrangement conducive to regional integration, and simultaneously to rearticulate it into a security regime centred on the Schengen acquis. The ENP can thus be said to serve a dual function: it not only advances the Union’s security with regard to certain border-related concerns, such as contraband and human trafficking, but also attends to the EU’s wider geopolitical ambition, namely, to establish itself as the core integration project in Europe.