For the last 20 years the geographic vicinity of the European Union has turned from sphere of inexorable Europeanization to an area beset by intractable disaccords. The EU’s demands for liberal transformation is triggering illiberal contestation. This not only hampers enlargement and the stabilization of the neighbourhood but challenges the EU’s external security. While often perceived as an irrational rejection of the promises for peace and stability created by rules, institutions and markets and an outdated adherence to blunt power-politics, this attitude hampers developing a deeper understanding of the attractiveness of illiberalism outside the EU’s borders, but also how alliances are forged with actors inside the EU.
The interest of the project is on how the EU has become a struggling liberal actor in a vicinity where liberalism seems to have lost its gloss and to point to the dialectics between the EU’s role as a promoter of a liberal order and its engagement in geo-political competition.
Doris Wydra
Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies
Mönchsberg 2
5020 Salzburg