The European Union's ‘Potential We’ between Acceptance and Contestation: Assessing the Positioning of Six Eastern Partnership Countries*
Journal: JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies
Year: 2020

Abstract The present contribution analyses the European neighbourhood policy and the Eastern Partnership (EaP), which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2019, from the perspective of social identity theory. It is argued that the evolution of both the European neighbourhood policy and the EaP corresponds to the emergence of a distinct EU identity: its ‘potential we’, which has been defying the Russian ‘significant we’ extended to the EaP states. Drawing on the framing analysis of strategic docum