The Eastern Partnership is a typical long term EU technocratic instrument.

The EU faces a stark choice a renewed Eastern Partnership or a renewed division of Europe.

Armenia was the first ex Soviet state to succumb to Putin s pressure and shun the EU Eastern Partnership.

When the EU launched its new Eastern Partnership in May, the purpose was to promote further integration with the Union s six immediate eastern neighbors Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

This November, at its Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius, the EU will decide on whether to proceed with an Association Agreement with Ukraine.

The Eastern Partnership is about EU integration, about the six countries moving closer to the EU s values, legislation, and ways of working, and about the EU being there to support and help this convergence.

The Eastern Partnership originating from a Polish Swedish initiative offers to the six countries a substantial upgrading and deepening of relations with the EU in key areas.

After all, no EU strategic partnership is unconditional.

That summit comes at an auspicious time, as the EU reviews its European Neighborhood Policy (launched in 2004) and the Eastern Partnership (launched in 2009), ahead of a second grand summit in Budapest under the Hungarian EU presidency in May 2011.

It was logical that Poland was the spiritus rector of the EU s Eastern Partnership, which led to EU association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. No other country has a stronger interest in the successful transformation of the EU s eastern neighbors, particularly Ukraine.

The Eastern Partnership does not offer any quick remedies to the crisis.

In short, the EU will no longer be able to offer attractive membership prospects to neighboring countries, nor will it be able to allocate adequate resources for surrogate membership schemes like the Eastern Partnership.

Yet the window of opportunity for an EU Kazakh partnership may be closing.

Ukraine is one of eight countries in Eastern Europe with an Individual Partnership Action Plan.

The Eastern Partnership was inaugurated by the European Union in Prague on 7 May 2009.

Box 4 Regional integration in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) and EC economic partnership agreements

The foreign ministers meeting held during Germany s EU Council presidency produced the Nuremberg Declaration, which established a framework for closer EU ASEAN partnership.

The idea for the Eastern Partnership (EaP) came from a Polish Swedish initiative early last summer.

As a follow up to the Eastern Partnership summit, the EU must initiate lower level meetings of interior ministers to discuss migration, visas, and counter terrorism, and should seek to integrate Ukraine and Moldova into the European energy market.

The Eastern Partnership is based on the profound values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

A new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) between the EU and the Russian Federation must be negotiated.

The Eastern Partnership is not an answer to all the problems and difficulties that the six partners are facing.

The eastern neighbors are not like the central European states that negotiated EU accession in the 1990 s.

The first step in this process was the inclusion of Belarus in the EU's Eastern Partnership, a new framework for relations with six ex Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

The Swedish EU Presidency will concentrate on starting up the concrete work the nuts and bolts of the Partnership.

Here, the EU has a framework the Partnership for Modernization, negotiated with Medvedev that could potentially be very positive.

Approximately 150 million people in South eastern Europe the Western Balkans, Ukraine, and Turkey aim at becoming EU citizens.

The prospect and reality of EU membership has been a force for stability, prosperity, and democracy across Eastern Europe.

Political association with the EU, and the process of integration under this Partnership, will promote reforms in these key areas.

Specifically, beyond direct help for Tunisia at this critical moment, the EU must breathe new life into the Mediterranean partnership.

Continued fear and uncertainty about Russian gas supplies would undoubtedly lead the most exposed EU countries to seek to protect themselves by blocking EU Russia negotiations on new partnership and cooperation agreements.

Such organizations include the South Eastern Europe Prosecutorial Advisory Group, the EU Judicial Cooperation Unit and other EU frameworks and bodies, Interpol, the Southeast European Cooperation Initiative Anti Crime Centre and SIPA.

The Swedish Presidency, together with the European Commission, intends to organize the first meeting of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum this autumn.

The new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe, in particular, have a big stake in how the issue plays out.

Since the enlargement of the EU large numbers of migrant workers have arrived in the Netherlands from central and eastern Europe.

Only if Germany and Poland, together with the smaller eastern member states, jointly advocate such an eastern and neighborhood policy towards Ukraine, will EU policy as a whole receive the necessary power and perseverance.

The EU pledges to help set up Western type public institutions and to transform the Eastern economies through comprehensive free trade agreements.

The Eastern Partnership was also seen as a way to balance the EU s Russia first approach. Enormous resources had been invested in the relationship with Russia, but very little had gone into helping the countries in the neighborhood that the EU and Russia share including the most important of these neighbors, Ukraine.

The most recent stage of EU enlargement last May added millions of Roma from the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe.

Part of this capital export flowed to the new EU members in Eastern Europe, which enjoyed, relative to their size, gigantic capital imports.

The EU and its Member States fully support the G8 Global Partnership, to which they make a major contribution the Partnership works effectively towards disarmament and non proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.

Today, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is finally on the table, promising to boost growth in the EU and the US alike.

A joint rebalancing would help to fortify all facets of the EU US relationship, possibly catalyzing progress on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

But despite restrictions, by 2005 Germany had absorbed 37 of all migrants from Eastern Europe that came before and after eastern EU enlargement, whereas Italy had absorbed 22 , Greece 11 , Switzerland 8 , and the UK only 3 .

The Eastern Partnership s offer of deep integration with the EU in the areas such as trade and energy carries with it considerable transformational power.