An International Political Economy Approach to the Neighbourhood Policy. Studying the ENP at the shadow of the EMP

Scholars have widely used the enlargement process as a foil for assessing both the nature and the potential influence of the ENP. In this paper, I attempt to show that the ENP- enlargement comparison is flawed by the fact that the two policies pursue different finalité – association and integration respectively. The paper then privileges the comparison with the Euro-Mediterranean policy. Drawing on the ENP-EMP comparison, the paper argues that the ENP marks the shift away from policy-change to policy-level. Two implications are drawn from this finding. The first is substantive in that it points to a pragmatic international role for the EU. The second is methodological in that I argue that adopting an IPE approach to the study of the ENP bears important analytic advantages.