EU Soft Power in the Eastern Neighbourhood and the Western Balkans in the Context of Crises

The paper aims to assess a change in the EU’s soft power in the Balkan and Eastern Partnership states in light of the crises the bloc has undergone in the recent years. Generally agreeing with the common argument that the EU’s attractiveness has significantly decreased in those states, the author still contends that it is not likely to change those states’ pro-EU foreign policy vector. To prove it, the author studies the EU’s soft power through the prism of Joseph Nye and Alexander Vuving’s “power currencies” approach viewing an actor’s attraction as a combination of its “brilliance” (an agent’s relationship with its work), “benignity” (an agent’s relationship with other actors) and “beauty” (an agent’s relationship with values and ideas).