Word: european
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...they may have had their doubts about EaP even before that. Fabio Liberti, a European affairs and security expert with the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris, notes that the calls to push the E.U.'s influence eastward was devised by certain member states - above all Poland and Sweden - to counterbalance the Mediterranean Union that Sarkozy initiated last year to reach out to Europe's southern neighbors. Even that, Liberti says, was fueled by France, Italy, Spain and Greece trying to shift the E.U.'s center of gravity back towards the middle of the continent after the fall...
...course, it probably didn't help the officials who gathered May 7-8 in Prague that extended families on both sides of the match had already seriously meddled with what had been a pretty simple proposal. An outgrowth of the E.U.'s long-standing European Neighborhood Program (ENP), the Eastern Partnership (EaP) plan called for establishing preferential development, trade, and travel agreements with the six former Soviet republics in exchange for them taking steps to create solid and responsible free market economies and democratic political systems. In that way, the multi-lateral EaP sought to strike up and reinforce ties...
...founding summit - namely, the global recession. Many of the countries worst hit by the economic downturn are the same 12 nations that have joined the E.U. since 2004, most from Eastern Europe. Now not only are those post-Cold War newcomers - who used huge inflows of European development aid to build up U.S.-style economies - most in need of more emergency funding to prop up their credit-dependent markets, but they are also viewed as migrant threats to other E.U. nations already facing escalating unemployment. Not surprisingly, such factors have fueled a rise in the sentiment among old E.U. nations...
...Given that, European leaders who in 2008 had enthusiastically backed proposing the EaP to the six former Soviet republics began scrambling to lower its scope ahead of its May 7 launch in Prague. Just hours before the gathering, for example, German and Dutch officials pushed to change wording in the official document to refer to the six EaP postulates as "partner countries" rather than "European countries". They similarly struck any language that even remotely hinted at possible E.U. membership for any time in the future, and revised a "long-term goal" previously described as "visa-free travel" by EaP citizens...
...became a non-event, because an initiative that corresponded to the very logic and mission of the European Union itself became undermined by a lot of political factors," says Liberti. "Just as people now tend to view E.U. enlargement as a mistake - rather than examine the errors made in managing it - leaders have gotten shy about the Eastern Partnerships over how it might look, rather than what it will...