The latest round of enlargement of the European Union has profoundly altered the number, identity and the nature of neighbors that form Union's external frontier. Inevitably, the EU has been confronted with a new set of security challenges - such as violent conflicts, cross-border crimes, economic instabilities, terrorist movements, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ethnicity and minority problems etc.- in its current neighborhood stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic and from the Aegean to the Mediterranean. Extending the zone of security around the EU's periphery by addressing the above-mentioned problems, and thereby dealing with the security challenges of the 21st century, has become one of the Union's strategic objectives declared by Javier Solana at the Thessaloniki European Council in June 2003: “Our task is to promote a ring of wellgoverned countries to the East of the EU and on the borders of the Mediterranean with whom we can enjoy close and cooperative relations.”1 Moreover, Solana's forward thinking has become the strategy of the day with Article I-56 of the draft Constitutional Treaty of the EU by stipulating that the Union shall develop a special relationship with neighboring states in order to create an area of security and prosperity founded on the values of the Union.