Re-Evaluating the EU’s Engagement with its Eastern Neighbourhood: A Relationality Perspective

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The call to re-evaluate the EU’s foreign policy engagement from the perspective of relationality is becoming commonplace. However, we still lack conceptual clarity on the notions of relation(s) and relationality. This article argues that to better understand relationality in International Relations and EU studies, we should conceptually differentiate between the two frames of reference – the conceptualisation of relationality grounded in positivist thinking and the conceptualisation of relationality anchored in complexity-thinking. Drawing on the Relational Sociology, particularly, critical realism by Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer, we further operationalise relationality and highlight three relational modes of me-ness, thee-ness and we-ness. Applying the operationalisation to the EU relations with the six Eastern Partnership states and Russia, we trace the development of the relations and identify relational patterns. We find that the EU and its partners only engaged in hierarchical transactional-logic relations, being unable to develop what Donati and Archer call a genuine we-relation. Our findings also point to the fact that the positivist-based interpretation of relationality has prevailed, with the EU’s unsuccessful attempts to adapt its mode of relational engagement to the world of complexity.