Join Salome Samadashvili, Senior Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, as she presents her research in the RSC Seminar Series
Salome Samadashvili’s forthcoming paper explores possible ways to restructure the Eastern Partnership (EaP) initiative, the EU’s 2009 policy designed to engage with six countries—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine. It advocates for a radical change in both the geography and strategic focus of the EaP by adopting an innovative approach to its multilateral framework of cooperation.
A look at the map of the former USSR—from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea—reveals a clear division between those countries that have embarked on the European path and those that remain in the political and geopolitical grey zone of ‘Eurasian’ identity. Currently, the EaP includes countries from both of these subgroups. This paper argues that this approach no longer works. Instead, it proposes reshaping the EaP to make EU policy more relevant to both groups, to the EU’s strategic interests in the region, and to the new realities on the ground—by strengthening and expanding its multilateral formats of cooperation to include the Central Asian countries alongside the current EaP partners.
In the 1990s, the EU’s policy towards the eleven countries in question—six EaP partners and five Central Asian states—was homogeneous and took the form of the EU’s Technical Assistance for the Commonwealth of Independent States. Since then, these countries have followed diverging development paths. Today, some EaP countries have more in common with the Central Asian states in terms of their economic and political frameworks, while others, such as Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, have been granted candidate status for EU membership. Since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Central Asian countries have shown increasing interest in developing stronger relationships with the EU, hoping to counterbalance the influence of Russia and China on their political and economic systems.
The EU’s interest in strengthening its relationships with these countries—rich in natural resources and located in geopolitically strategic areas—is self-evident. The ‘mission letters’ from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to the new members of her Commission clearly identify the advancement of relationships with the Central Asian countries and the EaP partners as one of the priorities of the EU’s common foreign policy. As the EU decides on the policy tools for achieving these goals, this paper argues that reshaping the EaP might be the way forward. Focusing on the shared interest in enhancing connectivity, security, trade and people-to-people contacts among all parties involved—the EU, the EaP and the Central Asian countries—it offers recommendations for extending the EaP further east to cover Central Asia.
Speaker: Ambassador Salome Samadashvili
Ambassador Salome Samadashvili is a member of the Political Council and Political Secretary of the ‘Lelo for Georgia’ party, and a Senior Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She served two consecutive terms in the Parliament of Georgia from 2016 to 2024. She was re-elected for a third term in 2024 but resigned her seat, along with other opposition MPs, as a political act of protest against violations of democratic standards in the 2024 parliamentary elections.
From 2005 to 2013, Ambassador Samadashvili was Head of Georgia’s Mission to the European Union and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As Head of Georgia’s Mission to the EU, she oversaw successful negotiations of the Association and Free Trade Agreements between Georgia and the EU.
In 2014, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels, a global think tank associated with the European People’s Party, where she remains a member of the Academic Council. In 2015, she served as Interim Resident Governance Director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for Libya, having previously worked for NDI in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.
Ambassador Samadashvili has been awarded the Presidential Decoration of Splendour for her outstanding service to Georgia. She holds a BA in Political Science from Allegheny College, Pennsylvania, USA; an LL.M with Merit in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University in Budapest; an MPP from the School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, DC; and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Georgia. In addition to her political work, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in European Studies at the University of Georgia and is the author of numerous academic and policy publications.
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