A Regime-Sensitive Approach to EU’s Democracy Support

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Democracy Promotion: The EU and Eastern Europe

Abstract

It is common knowledge and practice of democracy promoters to consider the domestic factors of the target states. This also applies to the EU as one of the major democracy promoters in its neighborhood regions. In light of the continuing lack of efficiency and consistency of the EU democracy promotion, which is a ceterum censeo in literature and within stakeholders, this paper argues that the EU’s democracy support strategy requires a more precise diagnosis of the state of target political regimes. While the EU evaluates different the political-institutional situation on a small-scale and strongly broken-down perspective, the overall democratic development and its direction is not sufficiently focused. It is, however, of paramount importance to embed the domestic political conditions into an assessment that enables to identify democratic progress, stasis and/or democratic regression and a trend of autocratization. Thus, the strategy of democracy support might be readjusted accordingly if a country changes its trajectory (deepening democracy or moving away from democracy), becomes stuck in a hybrid state or oscillates within an intermediate state between democracy and autocracy. Looking at the EU’s Eastern neighborhood – here referring to the geographical area comprised of Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – this picture of the variance of regime trajectories becomes very evident. We find oscillating trajectories that recently manifest a trend of democratic progress (Moldova, Ukraine) or regression (Georgia), a long trend of progress in Armenia with a recent downturn and cases of autocratic consolidation (Belarus, Azerbaijan). Hence, the basic assumption of this papers is that effective democracy collaboration between the EU and the Eastern neighborhood countries must take into consideration the so far neglected regime factors.

For this purpose, this paper proceeds in three steps: Firstly, it presents a framework of regime states, which are defined as either static occurrences or as directional changes—either upward or downward—that have meaningful effects on the quality of political regimes. The framework accounts for all possible regime states of transformation, except abrupt regime changes, which represent highly impactful but rare events. Building on the salient insights from Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg (2018), we propose that along the autocracy-democracy continuum one can distinguish between three types of regime states: 1) autocratic stasis and democratic stability, 2) “downturn” and “upturn” regime change (cf. Knutsen and Skaaning 2022), defining polities that experience losses or gains in quality, but, essentially, oscillate within the same regime category; and 3) progression and regression for polities that experience a major qualitative change that is sufficient for them to be requalified into a different regime category. Secondly, the paper applies this framework to the six cases above mentioned and provides a descriptive account. For this, we rely on the Regime of the World typology (Lührmann, Tannenberg and Lindberg 2018) and the data of Varieties of Democracy (Coppedge et al. 2023).

Beyond this conceptual and empirical-analytical perspective, the paper will, thirdly, offer concrete insights for the reconfiguring of the EU’s democracy support strategy and practice, reflecting on how the EU and Eastern neighbors can co-design more precise and better tailored methods of democracy collaboration while taking into account the dynamic nature of regime development. This will advance knowledge on how the EU can respond to changing domestic regime dynamics in order to pursue its goal of a more democratic and stable Eastern neighborhood vis-à-vis the increased challenge since the Russian war against Ukraine and the increased pressure towards other countries in the region.

Authors

• Sergiu Buscaneanu, Technische Universität Dresden

• Marianne R. Kneuer, TU Dresden