Integration Without Europeanisation : Ukraine and its Policy Towards the European Union

This paper examines the progress Europeanisation in the post-Soviet states, using Ukraine as a case study on the eve of EU's launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004. It is argued that since the late 1990s Ukraine had indicated its willingness to participate in European integration by declaring the intention of joining the European Union. Yet its foreign policy declarations were not been matched by the necessary acceleration of reforms in the domestic context. Ukraine sought integration with the EU but without underging Europeanisation, i.e. extensive change to institutions and policies at the domestic level in response to EU's conditionality - as has been the case with East-Central European states. The paper aims to explain why Ukraine's integration with the EU remained declarative by mid-2000s by focusing on: first, the sources of Ukraine's policy towards the EU both at the elite and mass levels; second, the reasons for Ukraine's inability to enact the ‘European choice' in domestic reforms, and, finally, the conditions under which a shift from declarations to actual Europeanisation in post-Soviet non-EU countries might occur by drawing insights from the literature on the EU's eastern enlargement