The previous chapter showed that the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet sphere of influence led to a gradual shift in the geographical orientation of the EU's external relations. The most pressing challenges were now closer to home—around the corner, so to speak, in that ‘other Europe’—and the problems appeared to be solvable according to the initially optimistic way of thinking about a new global order and the end of history. That is, they seemed more solvable than the years of struggle against underdevelopment and poverty in more distant countries. Cultural factors certainly played a role in this. From the first steps towards national self-determination in countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, developments in the former Eastern Bloc were seen as a European matter. The double transformation that began with the Velvet Revolutions of 1989—from authoritarian rule to parliamentary democracy and from command economy to free market economy—became part of the EU's ‘historic duty’ towards the new democracies. The establishment of a sizeable aid operation—which included financial, technical, and other kinds of support—was accompanied by overblown slogans such as ‘the return to the European house’ of democracy and a market economy. As a result, in the course of the 1990s, the EU's relations with the non-European underdeveloped world were soon overtaken both in a quantitative and qualitative sense (quantitatively all the more so if we consider the difference in numbers of countries and inhabitants).

Table 5.1 shows the most up-to-date ramifications of this development that began in the early 1990s, at the time of Lomé IV (and is furthermore an accurate summary of the importance of the subject matter of this chapter, i.e. enlargement strategy and neighbourhood policy, for the EU's external relations). We see here the section of the EU's multi-annual budget for the period 2014-2020 that focuses on ‘Global Europe’ (see also the corresponding table with the breakdown of the entire Multiannual Financial Framework in chapter 1). The order of the categories presumably does not indicate any overt prioritisation, but the first two expenditure items together account for more than 40 per cent of the total amount of more than 荤66 billion, while the development cooperation instrument takes up slightly less than 30 per cent.