InvigoratEU investigates how European policies towards the Western Balkans and Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova need to be transformed to ensure the resilience of Europe.
Resilience is generally defined as the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises. Additionally, the EU and its neighbourhood are closely interconnected, leading to the stipulation that both must prepare for unknown risks to ensure resilience of Europe as a whole.
Current debates on enlargement and neighbourhood policies further inform the project’s research design: As such, it includes the more traditional modernisation logic that looks at ways to induce deep reform processes in candidate countries for stabilization purposes and to ensure they are capable of effectively implementing the EU’s rules, standards and policies.
However, amid geopolitical challenges, it is becoming harder for the EU’s modernisation policies to have their desired impact. Hence, it is seen that the EU has shifted its focus to the defence of the political and economic autonomy of Europe by ways of security/military capacity-building, security cooperation and increased connectivity. This geopolitical logic prevails in current policy discussions.
Synergies between both logics further inform the discourse of and on enlargement: The geopolitical lens not only serves to situate enlargement in a context of instability, external threats and increasing risks, but also changes how, with which strategies and to what avail modernisation strategies are undertaken.
Throughout the project, resilience will be investigated through a combination of both logics, including the following elements: democratisation, social cohesion and institutional stability, integrated and regional security, strategic autonomy, trans-geographic connectivity, also of critical infrastructures, and military capacity-building and cooperation.
The Analytical Glossary further defines the project’s key terminologies.
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