The project explored the question of how and under what conditions the European Union promotes democracy in neighboring countries of Eastern Europe and Northern Africa. These neighbouring states, including among others Ukraine and Moldavia to the East as well as Morocco and Jordan to the South, still require considerable progress before being seen as consolidated democracies. The EU took a significant step forward in its relations with its neighbours with the founding of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2003, the most important goals of which were the strengthening of the rule of law and promotion of democracy and welfare. In this project, we distinguished between three mechanisms of external democracy promotion: leverage, that is top-down democratization through the use of conditionality; linkage, that is bottom-up support for civil society and modernization; and governance, a new model of democratic governance promotion through transgovernmental networking and functional cooperation. Our results show that in contrast to the leverage model, whose success is linked to the incentive of EU membership, and linkage, which, in EU external relations, has remained relatively weak, the governance model of democracy promotion is capable of inducing subtle democratic changes in authoritarian contexts. Our research suggests that two factors are particularly conducive to the successful adoption of elements of democratic governance by a non-democratic country: the strong codification of rules of democratic governance in the international documents promoted by the EU and a high institutionalization of cooperation between the EU actors and the partner state.

Research Projects

NCCR Project "Promoting democracy in the EU and its near abroad"