Democracy Promotion in the EU's Neighbourhood

From Leverage to Governance?

Sandra Lavenex, Frank Schimmelfennig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135710835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

EU external democracy promotion has traditionally been based on 'linkage', i.e. bottom-up support for democratic forces in third countries, and 'leverage', i.e. the top-down inducement of political elites towards democratic reforms through political conditionality. The advent of the European Neighbourhood Policy and new forms of association have introduced a new, third model of democracy promotion which rests in functional cooperation between administrations. This volume comparatively defines and assesses these three models of external democracy promotion in the EU's relations with its eastern and southern neighbours. It argues that while 'linkage' has hitherto failed to produce tangible outcomes, and the success of 'leverage' has basically been tied to an EU membership perspective, the 'governance' model of democracy promotion bears greater potential beyond the circle of candidate countries. This third approach, while not tackling the core institutions of the political system as such, but rather promoting transparency, accountability, and participation at the level of state administration, may turn out to remain the EU's most tangible form of democratic governance promotion in the future.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

EU democracy promotion in the neighbourhood: from leverage to governance?

Sandra Lavenex^a and Frank Schimmelfennig^b

^aInstitute of Political Science, University of Lucerne, Hirschmattstrasse 25, 6000 Luzern 7, Switzerland; ^bCentre for Comparative and International Studies, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, European Politics, Haldeneggsteig 4, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

EU external democracy promotion has traditionally been based on ‘linkage’, i.e. bottom-up support for democratic forces in third countries, and ‘leverage’, i.e. the top-down inducement of political elites towards democratic reforms through political conditionality. The advent of the European Neighbourhood Policy and new forms of association have introduced a new, third model of democracy promotion which rests in functional cooperation between administrations. This article comparatively defines and explicates these three models of external democracy promotion. It argues that while ‘linkage’ has hitherto failed to produce tangible outcomes, and the success of ‘leverage’ has basically been tied to an EU membership perspective, the ‘governance’ model of democracy promotion bears greater potential beyond the circle of candidate countries. In contrast to the two traditional models, however, the governance approach does not tackle the core institutions of the political system as such, but promotes transparency, accountability, and participation at the level of state administration.

Introduction

During the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has developed into an agent of international democracy promotion in its neighbourhood. The EU had long conceived of itself as a community of democracies and recognized the need to strengthen its own democratic credentials. Some of its external policies – most prominently, its Southern enlargement to Greece, Portugal, and Spain – had also been regarded implicitly and informally as a contribution to democratization. However, most of its external relations – above all trade agreements and development cooperation – had been notable for their apolitical content and the principle of not interfering with the domestic systems of third countries. It was only in the early 1990s that external democracy promotion became an explicit, formal, and general aim of the EU. In the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), the EU declared the development and consolidation of democracy as a goal of development cooperation (Art. 130u) and its Common Foreign and Security Policy (Art. J.1), and the principle of democracy was introduced in all its external trade and aid agreements.

From its beginnings, EU democracy promotion has been a multifaceted policy. We distinguish three models, two that reflect main approaches to external democracy promotion and a third model that is more germane to the EU as a framework for regional integration.¹ The first model is linkage. It consists of activities that tackle the societal preconditions for democracy and give support to the democratic opposition and other civil society actors in the target countries. The second model of democracy promotion is leverage. This approach induces democratic reforms via political conditionality. Finally, the EU also promotes democratic principles through policy-specific, functional cooperation with third countries. We refer to this third approach as the governance model of democracy promotion. Whereas the linkage approach has been a constant in EU external policies since the early support to democratic transitions in Latin America in the 1980s,² the leverage model then became dominant in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The governance model started becoming more prominent in the early 2000s in the context of the European neighbourhood policy (ENP) which seeks to promote neighbouring countries’ approximation to the EU’s system of rules below the threshold of membership.³

In the early 1990s, the political integration symbolized in the creation of the EU coincided with the transformation of many Eastern European countries and these countries’ gradual rapprochement with the EU. While the EU continued to give support to democratic transition in Central and Eastern European countries through economic aid and targeted action towards civil society, it also embraced a more explicit and direct approach to democracy promotion by making aid, market access, and deepened institutional relations from association to membership conditional on a third state’s progress in institutional democracy. In the relations with candidate countries, political conditionality or leverage came to epitomize the EU’s democracy promotion efforts. Most notably, the Copenhagen Criteria agreed by the European Council in 1993 made the consolidation of liberal democracy the principal condition for starting accession negotiations. From the first round of Eastern enlargement negotiations, opening in 1998 and excluding Slovakia because of its democracy deficits, to the discussions about the membership prospects of Turkey and the Western Balkans, political conditions related to the state of democracy have been of central relevance. Whereas linkage continued to be the preferred approach to democracy promotion in Africa, Asia and Latin America, democracy, human rights and the rule of law became ‘essential elements’ in almost all EU agreements with third countries as both an objective and a condition of the institutionalized relationship. In the case of violation, the EU introduced the (theoretical) possibility to suspend or terminate the agreement.⁴

The relative success of EU leverage in Central and Eastern European countries through political conditionality in triggering democratic change was mainly attributed to the attractiveness of membership.⁵ Although political conditionality remains an important declaratory policy in the EU’s external relations, its practical relevance has always been limited outside the enlargement context. Inconsistency and ineffectiveness is the general picture.⁶ The marked slowdown of EU enlargement and the failure to implement conditionality consistently beyond the circle of candidate countries have therefore partly shifted the attention of academics and practitioners away from leverage as a model for EU democracy promotion.

In recent years, the implementation of new association policies below the threshold of membership has yielded attention to a third approach to democracy promotion that has come to complement the two traditional channels and strategies of external democratization. This third approach consists in the promotion of democratic governance norms through third countries’ approximation to EU sectoral policies, i.e. functional cooperation. Less top-down than leverage and less bottom-up than linkage, this functional approach operates at the level of democratic principles embedded in the governance of individual policy fields and unfolds through the deepening of transgovernmental, horizontal ties between the EU and third countries’ public administrations. The ENP, which the EU designed as an institutional framework for managing relations and developing cooperation with the non-candidate countries of Eastern Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East, is a case in point. It proclaims shared values (including democracy, human rights, and the rule of law) to be the basis of neighbourhood cooperation and links the intensity of cooperation to the adoption of shared values by the neigh-bourhood countries.⁷ In practice, however, it is up to the neighbouring countries to decide to what extent they would like to cooperate with the EU on democracy, human rights, or the rule of law, and non-cooperation does not prevent intense cooperation in other sectoral policies, such as the environment, trade, or migration. Considering the constraints on democracy promotion outside an enlargement framework, the European Commission suggested refocusing the EU’s efforts from the promotion of democratic regimes to the promotion of democratic governance, that is more transparent, accountable, and participatory administrative practice within the limits of autocratic regimes. It outlined that ‘[d]emocratic governance is to be approached holistically, taking account of all its dimensions (political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, etc.). […] Accordingly, the concept of democratic governance has to be integrated into each and every sectoral programme’ in the relations with third countries.⁸

This special issue seeks to reflect and assess EU democracy promotion in the regions covered by the ENP and Turkey at a critical juncture when the past successes of leverage in Central and Eastern Europe are unlikely to be repeated in the future and the conditions and impact of alternative models of democracy promotion are still insufficiently researched. Some of the contributions explore the potential and limits of leverage in the European neighbourhood in such pivotal countries as Turkey and Ukraine. Others focus on the prospects of the governance model of promoting democratic rules and attitudes in Northern African and Eastern European countries through transgovernmental, sector-specific cooperation – a model that seems to be especially suited to the EU’s relations with neighbouring non-candidate countries. The special issue goes beyond the existing literature by broadening our understanding of EU democracy promotion conceptually and theoretically and by providing a comparative assessment of effects and effectiveness of different models of democracy promotion in the EU’s neighbourhood.

In this introductory contribution to the special issue, we comparatively define and explicate the different models of democracy promotion. We then move on to describe the current context of EU democracy promotion in the European neigh-bourhood, the decreasing relevance of leverage and the need to explore other models. In the two final sections, we give an overview of the contributions and draw general conclusions.

Models of EU democracy promotion

Democracy promotion comprises all direct, non-violent activities by a state or international organization that are intended to bring about, strengthen, and support democracy in a third country. This definition excludes the use of physical coercion as well as indirect and unintended effects such as the international demonstration effects of successful democratic transitions or the potentially positive effects of general international interconnections on democracy. ‘Democracy’ is understood in a very general and simple way as the accountability of public authorities to the people. Accountability mechanisms comprise, inter alia, the accountability of officials to the electorate through free and fair elections, the accountability of governments to parliaments, or the accountability of agencies to public scrutiny. Any activities designed to strengthen accountability, and hence also responsiveness to the citizens, qualify as democracy promotion. The concrete contents of democracy promotion activities vary across targets, envisaged outcomes, channels and instruments. For the purpose of this special issue, they are a matter of empirical analysis, not definition. We focus on democracy-promoting activities of the EU as an international organization rather than on the activities of its member states. Moreover, we further focus on strategies and behaviours rather than on the motivations of the EU. In other words, we are not interested in explaining why the EU promotes democracy and whether it is normatively desirable.

There is an extensive literature exploring the nature of the EU as an international actor but at a level that is too general and abstract for the purposes of this special issue. Whereas this literature discusses the ‘actorness’ of the EU, its peculiar organizational characteristics and capabilities as a non-state foreign policy actor in general,⁹ we prefer to describe the assumed organizational features and capabilities at the level of individual strategies. Another important strand of the literature seeks to describe the EU as a distinctive kind of ‘power’ in the international system. ‘Civilian power’¹⁰ and ‘normative power’¹¹ are the two best-known labels, though neither of them is sufficiently specific for the study of democracy promotion. For one, the promotion of democracy as defined above fits with both characterizations. Given the correlation of democracy with peace, international institutions, and trade, the promotion of democracy is a relevant activity for a civilian power engaged in civilizing an international system based on military self-help and the balance of power (see Note 10). Democracy promotion also matches well with the ‘normative power’ perspective according to which the EU projects its fundamental norms globally. In addition, both conceptions of EU power do not distinguish between different models of democracy promotion.

We propose three ideal-typical models of democracy promotion: linkge, leverage, and governance. These models can be distinguished on four main dimensions: the target system of democracy promotion, the envisaged outcome, the main channels, and the typical instruments.

• Target systems of democracy promotion. Democracy promotion can be targeted at the polity as such, including the electoral regime, the division of powers between state organs, and respect for individual rights and civil liberties. On the other hand, it may operate at the level of society and target the socio-economic preconditions for democratization, including economic growth, education, the spread of liberal values, and the organization of civil society and the public sphere. Finally, democracy promotion may also target sectors: the policy-specific governance regimes – such as environmental policy, market regulation, welfare regimes, or internal security.
• Envisaged outcome of democracy promotion Depending on the target, the outcome of successful democracy promotion differs. If it is targeted at the polity level, the typical outcome should be democratic institutions guaranteeing vertical (electoral) and horizontal accountability as well as the rule of law. When the target is society, the envisaged result is a democratic, ‘civic’ culture and meso-level institutions such as civic associations, parties, and a democratic public sphere. In the case of sectoral democracy promotion, the goal should be ‘democratic governance’, i.e. procedural principles of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. EU democracy promotion in the neighbourhood: from leverage to governance?
• 2. Political conditionality and European Union’s cultivation of democracy in Turkey
• 3. From Brussels with love: leverage, benchmarking, and the action plans with Jordan and Tunisia in the EU’s democratization policy
• 4. The EU’s two-track approach to democracy promotion: the case of Ukraine
• 5. The promotion of participatory governance in the EU’s external policies: compromised by sectoral economic interests?
• 6. Transgovernmental networks as catalysts for democratic change? EU functional cooperation with Arab authoritarian regimes and socialization of involved state officials into democratic governance
• 7. Democracy promotion through functional cooperation? The case of the European Neighbourhood Policy
• Index