Suchergebnisse

The Arab spring has highlighted once more the European Union's failure to bring about democratic change in the Middle East and North Africa through its Mediterranean democracy promotion policy. However, Arab authoritarian countries engage to different degrees in cooperation on democracy promotion, giving the EU more or less influence on domestic institutional change related to political participation, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. A comparison of domestic change and cooperation in Morocco and Tunisia in 2000-2010 shows that the EU has been instrumental in supporting and potentially reinforcing domestic reform initiatives. Yet the EU cannot trigger domestic institutional change in the first place. The degree of political liberalisation determines the fit between the domestic political agenda and external demands for reforms. It reflects different "survival strategies" between political inclusion and exclusion and is therefore a scope condition for rather than the result of cooperation and change. Adapted from the source document.

This article asks under which conditions the state-building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites 'from below.'. Adapted from the source document.

The failure of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in bringing about democratic change in the European Union (EU)'s neighbourhood starts with the EU's limited effectiveness in shaping outcomes of international negotiations according to the ambitious objectives it pursues. This paper argues that this is not primarily a problem of a lack of actorness, however. The EU does have one message and speaks with a single voice but pursues conflicting goals. Rather than the lack of internal cohesiveness, it is the ENP's substantive inconsistency in seeking to promote effective and democratic governance that undermines the EU's external effectiveness. While the ENP conceives of the two objectives as complementary, the democratization of (semi-)authoritarian countries entails the risk of their destabilization at least in the short run. As a result, promoting effective and democratic governance become conflicting objectives. The lower the level of political liberalization and the higher the instability of a country, the more ineffective the EU is in asserting a democratic reform agenda in the ENP Action Plans, clearly favouring stability over change. Adapted from the source document.