European Union Democracy Promotion via Conditionality in Regional Context (original) (raw)
International organisations are among the key external actors promoting democratisation process of nation states. The tools international organisations utilise to externally impact on political transformations at the domestic level are centred on their democratic norms, rules and values. In that respect, the European Union (EU) has been acknowledged as primary democracy promoter within its region, attributable to its effective influence mechanisms based on democratic conditionality. This paper aims to analyse the formation of the characteristics of the EU as a democracy promoter and intends to unveil its contributions to the spread of democracy within its regional sphere, and democratisation processes particularly in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.
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How effective and relevant is European Union political conditionality for the promotion of democracy in third countries? This article reports the results of a panel study of 36 countries of the East European and Mediterranean neighbourhood of the EU for the years 1988-2004. The analysis shows robust and strong effects of EU political conditionality on democracy in the neighbouring countries if the EU offers a membership perspective in return for political reform. Absent the offer of membership, however, EU incentives such as partnership and cooperation do not reliably promote democratic change. The analysis controls for economic development and transnational exchanges as two alternative potential causes of democratization.
How effective and relevant is European Union political conditionality for the promotion of democracy in third countries? This article reports the results of a panel study of 36 countries of the East European and Mediterranean neighbourhood of the EU for the years 1988-2004. The analysis shows robust and strong effects of EU political conditionality on democracy in the neighbouring countries if the EU offers a membership perspective in return for political reform. Absent the offer of membership, however, EU incentives such as partnership and cooperation do not reliably promote democratic change. The analysis controls for economic development and transnational exchanges as two alternative potential causes of democratization.
EU Democracy Promotion and lessons from the Eastern Europe and Middle Eastern experiences
The studies of democratization constitute a significant portion of the comparative domestic politics literature and they generally draw on the 'second image' explanations derived from experiences at a domestic level, followed by an in-depth ideographic analysis of the specific institutional settings. What is generally absent from the limelight however is the role of international actors and the linkage between international relations and regional studies of democratization. Drawing on the role of the EU as a committed promoter of democracy at the time of the post-Soviet transitions from 1989 onward, this paper aims to draw a comparative analysis in the light of the recent developments in the Middle East; the so-called "Arab Spring". The paper argues that political conditionality attached to the EU accession process has had a significant influence on the post-Soviet space's transition to democracy. By contrast, in cases where the conditionality raises questions of uncertainty under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), such as the recent Middle Eastern cases, the future potential of the regimes in the region in making successful transitions remains at best questionable. The events of 1989 to 1991 created a new dimension and a new research programme regarding the role of external actors, most significantly focusing on the role played by European Union as an external anchor in the democratization process of Central and Eastern European (CEE) states. 2 One of the main pillars of the European Union's foreign policy has been the promotion of democracy, human rights and rule of law, especially after 1993 with the Copenhagen European Council imposing political conditionalities for the accession of CEE countries, commonly referred to as the 'Copenhagen criteria' which consisted of stable institutions for democracy, rule of law and respect for human rights and minority rights. 3 The transition of the CEE countries marked an important point in the democratization literature for including the international dimension, however; studies on the recent Middle 2 Eastern mobilizations still continue to focus on the internal dynamics of each country. Rightfully so, each country in the Middle East has followed a divergent path, like those of CEE, after the events of 2011 and it seems necessary to highlight the national level processes of these developments. However the relationship with the most important external actors in the region; namely the EU and the USA, and the implications of their foreign policies have a quite significant impact in the common underlying feature of the almost all states in the region 4 : region's general lack of democratization in comparison to the rest of the world's developing regions despite the quite pronounced demands put forward for regime change since 2011. The EU and external actors' role in the process of democratization lacked systemic analysis and remains largely undertheorized 5 . Democratization as a research programme holds major importance for the comparative political literature while the legacy of studying democratization by focusing primarily on the domestic dynamics constitutes the mainstream paradigmatic discussions. Research and analyses generally draw on the 'second image' 6 explanations focusing at great lengths over the the nation-level attributes while seeing systemic and international factors epiphenomenal at best 7 . Arguably, with the exception of studies of International Political Economy (IPE), mainstream international relations and comparative politics remained two separate areas of study during this period; neorealism saw second image explanations as 'reductive', the rational choice framework assumed that politicians and institutions were autonomous and independent actors which existed separately from their embedded context and did not problematize the direct constitutive influence of international structures on domestic actors and mainly took their importance as secondary to domestic actors.
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