Why does Libya not accept the ENP and its conditionality?

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 1,3, University of Hamburg (Institut für Politikwissenschaft), course: "The European Neighbourhood Policy - Mere Window Dressing or Real Stimulus for Democratic Reform?" , language: English, abstract: The ENP includes all neighboring states of the European Union except the Russian Federation - No not all are included - there is one state that is neither a member of the ENP nor of any other formal or legal multilateral framework agreement with the EU - this is the Great Socialist People`s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Why is Libya the only neighbor state of the European Union that is not part of any legalized continuous process of interaction with the Union and what are the reasons? In order to find an answer to this question, in the following we will on the one hand draw the attention to the existing instruments for legal partnership agreements of the Unions external governance like the ENP or the Barcelona Process. Especially the policy instruments and the underlying theoretical assumptions of the ENP will be questioned in this part. On the other hand our emphasis will be to highlight the two-way interdependency between the EU and Libya as a reason for the non-participation of Libya in any of the existing institutionalized frameworks.

With the Puzzle described above as a starting point the argument, that the relation between the EU and Libya is different to that of the EU and any other of its neighboring states, will be enfolded. Thinking the Unions external governance as a "rationalist bargaining model" (Schimmelfennig/ Sedelmeier 2004, p. 663) we will show that the bargaining position of Libya towards the EU is stronger than that of all ENP member states. The missing power-asymmetry between the Union and its neighbor in the case of Libya will then be pointed out as the main reason for the non- participation of Libya in the ENP or any other legal framework. This leads to the hypothesis, that Libya does not participate in any formal or legal foreign policy program by the EU, because the power relations in the bargaining process are not asymmetrical enough as to enable the Union to imposeinstruments of conditionality on Libya. Bound to the former is the argument, that the ENP as a foreign policy is insufficient to formalize the relations between the Union and Libya and therefore is even more insufficient as a stimulus for political reform.