East Central European Foreign Policy Identity in Perspective ― Back to Europe and the Eu's Neighbourhood

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries that previously formed part of the Eastern Bloc have worked on their 'return to Europe' through their accession to traditionally West European supranational institutions such as the European Union and NATO. The book investigates the political and historical foreign policy identities of six of these countries and shows how, despite a clear policy oriented towards the West, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia have participated in a differentiated manner in the definition of a European policy towards the Eastern and South-Eastern neighbours. Through analysis of evidence from an original and broad dataset, this study highlights that the coherence of EU policy towards the East is mainly linked to its members' capacity to reconcile their political and historical foreign policy identities. The book will be of particular interest to policy-makers, students and specialists of the EU and East Central Europe, as well as to the larger public interested in European integration.

Elsa Tulmets is a Research Fellow (Marie Curie Fellow) at the CERI/Sciences Po in Paris, France. She is also Associate Researcher at the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Prague, Czech Republic, where she undertook the research for this book. She also contributes to the activities of the Franco-German Research Centre for the Social Sciences, the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, Germany, and teaches on European foreign policy as a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.