Mikayel Hovhannisyan. ARMENIA. Striving for complementarity / Eastern Partnership. a Decade on

Ten years ago, the EU sought to revamp its policy in the eastern neighbourhood. This endeavour became the Eastern Partnership initiative which offered Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine a much closer institutional, economic and political relationship with the EU. This Chaillot Paper analyses how attitudes towards the Eastern Partnership (EaP) have evolved in these states, assesses retrospectively which elements of the programme have worked and which have not, and finally suggests ways in which the EaP could be adapted to fend off regional challenges and take advantage of rising opportunities in the coming decade.

This chapter by EPF Program Director Mikayel Hovhannisyan aims to provide a detailed analysis of EU-Armenia relations under the EaP framework. It first explains how and why Armenia’s stance towards the EaP initiative fluctuated over the last decade, and then proceeds with an analysis of the EaP’s failures and achievements in Armenia. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on Armenia’s expectations vis-à-vis the EaP in the coming decade.

The entire publication can be found here.