The Reluctant Debutante The European Union as Promoter of Democracy in its Neighbourhood

In its discourse the EU places democracy and the rule of law as number one. This paper examines the extent to which the EU is a coherent actor in pursuing this goal in practice, especially in its wider neighbourhood. Case studies are presented, covering much of the neighbourhood: Balkans, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine, Maghreb and Israel-Palestine. The distinction is made between the enlargementrelated sphere, which is an extension of EU internal policies and the foreign policy sphere beyond. In the enlargement process, the EU has worked powerfully as a promoter of democracy both through its gravitational attraction and explicit political conditionality. In the foreign policy sphere, a whole set of institutional and historical inhibitions and partly conflicting priorities muffle the outcome for democracy promotion. However, these two spheres, the internal and external, are in practice overlapping. The EU’s official neighbourhood policy, which sets democratisation as the number one priority, is subject to ambiguous interpretations, between the EU that claims it is a foreign policy, whereas various partner states view it as a pre-accession strategy. Recent developments see new dynamics. On the one hand, the Constitutional ratification crisis will shatter some pre-accession illusions, yet on the other, this may drive the EU to give greater substance to its neighbourhood policy in order to mitigate discouragement. Moreover, in the neighbouring regions from former Soviet Union states to the north and the Arab world to the south, there develops a fresh momentum to the democratic transition, with apparent contagion of ideas and revolutionary behaviour that is even reminiscent of some of the major historical episodes in the evolution of political liberalism on the European continent.