Integration as a platform for stabilization, peacebuilding and security-building has been the cornerstone of the European project since the 1950s. The liberal proposition that political and economic integration would make war obsolete served as a motto for widening and deepening the European Union (EU) for the past 70 years, and was the reason why the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. However, the return of armed conflicts to Europe, first with the destabilization of Eastern Ukraine, since 2014, and later with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in February 2022, demonstrated the brittleness of European peace and security. Against this background, and in line with the genesis of the European project, the deepening of Ukraine’s European integration emerged as the main strategy of the Union to promote the stabilization of the territory and, as a consequence, regional peace and security. Within this scope, this paper aims at mapping the EU’s response to the crisis and, subsequently, the War in Ukraine. By focusing on the case-study of the European Commission the paper further envisages to test the concept of supranational activism in order to assess whether integration remains a preferred platform for stabilization, peacebuilding and security-building in Europe. Supranational activism refers to the ability of EU supranational institutions to act as a driver of EU integration. This study is particularly interested in analyzing how the European Commission has informed and helped to shape the preference of Member States, and played an influential advocacy role in a process culminating with the granting of candidate status to Ukraine. The research, methodologically supported by process-tracing and discourse analysis, concludes that integration continues to be the preferred platform for promoting stabilization, peace and security in Europe and to project the EU as a strong, reliable and value-driven international actor.

This paper scrutinizes the EU-driven strategic framings of “neighbours” and “neighbourhood” through a critical and thorough investigation of the European Neighbourhood Policy’s (ENP) documents and related official EU texts. The paper enquires into how the EU has discursively framed the ENP since 2003. Based on a discursive and empirical analysis of key ENP documents and the ENP itself, this paper argues that the EU’s internal understanding of the ENP has changed over time. The main change the paper identifies is that increased securitization of the ENP has taken place between 2003 and 2022, along with a simultaneously increasing diversification and overlaps across different policy fields within the ENP. In turn, this change has occurred as a result of growing perceptions and notions of external threat and an ever-increasing interlinkage of different policy areas with the different ENP partner countries.