The EU's Transformative Power Challenged in Ukraine

Moving from the analysis of the EU’s actions in the Ukrainian crisis, this article aims at opening a reflection on certain traditional taxonomies such as civilian, normative and transformative power that have shaped the debate on both the EU ontology and its external manifestation.1 While the peculiarity of the development of European integration might have quite spontaneously produced a normative power, on the external front the application of this power requires a political drive. The recent policies – ENP, EaP – promulgated to stabilize and restructure the EU’s neighbourhood through the diffusion of norms have undoubtedly geopolitical implications. It is not yet clear whether these policies are simply replicating the enlargement rationale (although not contemplating membership), or, rather, they are part of a power politics project dissimulated under a normative veil.The EU responded to Russia’s aggressiveness in an ‘unreflective’ way, a procession of ‘patterned actions’ with limited efficacy.The EU’s performance in Ukraine reveals both a lack of analytical capacity in the elaboration of policies directed to the neighbourhood and of tactical planning for facing up to the consequences of those policies.