The EU and its Neighbourhood: The Politics of Muddling Through TOBIAS SCHUMACHER European Neighbourhood Policy Chair, College of Europe, Natolin Campus, Warsaw, Poland Introduction Virtually all JCMS Annual Review articles on the EU’s engagement in and towards its eastern and southern neighbourhoods published in recent years share almost identical as- sessments of EU influence: depictions range from ‘stasis’ (Whitman and Juncos, 2013), ‘meagre’ (Whitman and Juncos, 2014, p. 157) and ‘marginal’ (Juncos and Whitman, 2015, p. 212) to ‘waning’ (Pomorska and Noutcheva, 2017) and, thus, echo the critique that has been voiced elsewhere (Howorth, 2016; Schumacher et al., 2018; Gstöhl, 2019). The year 2019 is no exception in this regard. EU relations with its 16 neighbouring countries have been marked by similar dynamics and trends as in previous years and continue to suffer from ambiguity, coherence problems and ‘inherent design faults and political misjudgements’ (Leigh, 2019, p. 386). The EU’s eastern and southern neighbourhoods in 2019 were characterized by multi-layered security crises, territorial conflicts and wars, slowly advancing or stagnating reform processes, or the consolidation of the so-called authoritarian turn, in conjunction with an unprecedented exposure of many neighbours to seemingly incessant inflows of irregular migrants. Conversely, the EU itself remained exposed to disintegration dynam- ics, as exemplified by Brexit – tipping the EU’s internal power balance even further in favour of Germany – and the advancement of the illiberal script in several Member States. These phenomena are poised to affect negatively perceptions of the EU’s credibility, in- fluence and leverage in the neighbourhood and contribute further to an erosion of the al- ready decreasing public support for European integration and the EU’s supposedly normative appeal in several neighbouring societies (Lavrelashvili, 2016; Pomorska and Noutcheva, 2017, p. 168). 2019 witnessed a renewed search for alternative and attractive integration offers below the level of EU membership. On one hand, this was demonstrated by the European Commission’s public consultation process on the future of the Eastern Partnership (EaP). This was initiated on 14 May 2019 by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn at the Brussels high-level conference on the tenth anniversary of the EaP and ended on 31 October 2019. Replicating the 2014–15 public review process of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) (Furness et al., 2019), this consultation process revolved around the idea of providing stakeholders from EU Member States and neighbouring regions with an opportunity to submit their propositions on the future strategic direction of the EaP and a new JCMS 2020 pp. 1–15 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13076 © 2020 University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd