Reconceptualizing Democracy Promotion: The EU and Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Over the past three decades, Eastern Europe - here referring to the geographical area comprised of Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – has witnessed unprecedented, seismic shifts. The so-called post-Cold War wave of democratization has neither conclusively influenced all countries in the region, nor has it brought about consolidated and permanent systems of democratic governance. Presently, three out of the six Eastern European continue to suffer from ‘stuck democratization’ in which the basic norms and practice of democracy remain effectively locked within a hybrid regime state, demonstrating examples of both good and poor governance (Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia), while Georgia has embarked on a path of democratic regression as a result of the ‘incremental strangulation of democracy’ (Diamond 2021, see also Way 2022). Societies in the remaining two eastern neighbours, Azerbaijan and Belarus, remain ever more locked into repressive and authoritarian regime practices marked by the evisceration of political opposition, and grave and persistent violation of basic human rights, and political and civic liberties at both state and non-state levels.

The EU has been a major actor in Eastern Europe in what has been called so far democracy promotion. The Lisbon Treaty of 2007/2009 formalized the EU’s presumptive ‘normative power’ structure (Manners 2002), endowing the EU with considerable democracy support-related mechanisms and instruments, and consolidating already-existing practices of storytelling in EU public diplomacy (Hedling 2020), depicting the EU as the ultimate ‘force for good’ (Barbé and Johansson-Nogués 2008).Throughout the last three decades and particularly since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in December 2009 EU democracy promotion has been in crisis. As such, we now witness with depressing regularity practices merely fostering the status quo, rather than supporting democratic change (Börzel and Lebanidze 2017) or, generating unintended consequences (Dandashly and Noutcheva 2019) that directly contradict and undermine the EU’s external normative script. For more than a decade, EU democracy promotion towards Eastern Europe - within and beyond both the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) - has been rooted in a static and minimalist conception of democracy.

This panel calls for a paradigmatic shift and radical reset in conceptualizing, policymaking and implementing democracy support in Eastern Europe. The different papers explore approaches on how EU democracy promotion can be reconfigured generating an alternative vision for EU democracy collaboration. The understanding of democracy collaboration entails sensitivity towards the concerns, needs and agency of citizens at the non-state level. For this purpose, it is necessary to gain insights into the discourses, narratives and
perceptions of EU democracy support within the countries and to examine the multi-layered success factors and barriers – and their interlinkages – encountered by eastern neighbourhood countries in their democratization efforts, on the political, institutional, socio-economic, cultural and security level.

This topic has gained additional relevance since the Russian war against Ukraine and the additional threat this poses to democracy in the region. Moreover, the EU’s decision in 2023 to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and with the Republic of Moldova has added a new aspect to the picture. The panel and its papers offer new conceptual ideas, but at the same time consider the practical-political dimension for a differently tailored implementation of democracy cooperation, especially in the context of the future stabilization of democratic structures and societies vis-à-vis the authoritarian pressure from Russia.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• A Regime-Sensitive Approach to EU’s Democracy Support - Sergiu Buscaneanu, Technische Universität Dresden; Marianne R. Kneuer, TU Dresden

• The EU’s Good Governance Agenda: What’s in It for Democracy in the ENP? - Theofanis Exadaktylos, University of Surrey; Amelia Hadfield, University of Surrey

• A Demos-Centred Approach to EU Democracy Promotion in Its Eastern Neighbourhood - Madalina Dobrescu, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Theofanis Exadaktylos, University of Surrey; Ragnar Weilandt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• The Perception of the EU’s External Image and Its Democracy Promotion Practices - Alexander Matthias Geisler, University of Geneva; Tina Freyburg, University of St.Gallen; Danyl Denysenko, University of St.Gallen; Ioannis Vergioglou, University of St. Gallen

Chair

• Marianne R. Kneuer TU Dresden

Discussant

• Thomas Demmelhuber Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg