Eastern Partnership Association Agreements in the Mirror of Global Ungovernance: Where Does the DCFTA Lead?

Abstract

The paper focuses on powers’ dissolving effects brought by Eastern Partnership Association agreements, signed with Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, to associated states’ governance systems and practices and the development of associations’ institutions and procedures. To that end, the research utilizes the concepts of “ungovernance” and “global ungovernance” that, in the authors’ view, possess significant explanation potential in the field. The paper reviews the emergence of said concepts, which may be traced back to the mid of 1990th. It emphasizes the main features of those concepts concerning both national states and transnational institution-building projects. The dispersion of powers due to the implementation of association agreements is caused by the extension of obligations far beyond those needed to implement the DCFTA and binding the market access with progress in other fields. Such agreement’s design brings the notions of “uncertainty” and “inconsistencies” into assessing the institutional and procedural issues of its implementation. The paper also analyses the side-effects of the lack of accession perspective, which, combined with extensive obligations towards approximation to the EU legislation, creates an “impossibility of closure” effect (i.e., impossibility to reach objectives set). Such an effect happens due to unclear goals and discouragement of actors involved in the implementation because of the absence of future membership guarantees. The paper also suggests that the implementation process’s failures may result in significant institutional and procedural rearrangements within the association agreements’ frameworks to adjust the governance mode to cope with such failures.