Empowered to Deliver: The Institutional Model and Implementation Arrangements under the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement

Abstract

In the context of truly politicised and geopolitically discoursed public and academic debates around the pioneering and, at the same time, revolutionary EU-Ukrainian association deal, this article seeks to present a pragmatic law and politics view on one of the cornerstone issues in the newly launched EU association policy towards Ukraine, i.e. the institutional and implementation framework. It therefore explores possible modalities and the actually arranged implementation model of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses thereof. The challenges posed by the recent unduly ‘flexibilisation’ and postponement of the agreement’s provisional application are analysed, and the procedural requirements for transitional implementation and full enactment are disclosed. Finally, the association’s institutional engineering is given thorough legal and political scrutiny, that allowed to contend that the truly empowered institutional framework and selected implementation model are deemed to gear the process of political association and economic integration, yet these heavily draw on explicit conferral of dynamic powers and implicit integration-oriented functional rationale.

Keywords

• European Union
• Ukraine
• association agreement
• application
• implementation model