Summary
- Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine brought a new geopolitical urgency to EU enlargement. The EU now faces the task of balancing that urgency with the need to help aspiring members in the Western Balkans and the eastern neighbourhood transform into genuine liberal democracies.
- Indeed, the EU’s imperative to ensure it remains a community of resilient democracies means democracy promotion in candidate countries is a key geopolitical interest for the bloc.
- The policies and instruments the EU has deployed in pursuit of democracy promotion in its neighbourhood – primarily the enlargement policy and eastern neighbourhood policy – hold several important lessons for the post-2022 round of enlargement.
- The EU will need to apply its conditionality more consistently and predictably. It should also approach cooperation with ‘hybrid’ regimes in both regions in a more principled way, by supporting civil society and non-state initiatives to bring about change ‘from below’.
- But democracy promotion starts at home – and the EU will need to address its own rule of law crises to prevent systemic competition between autocracies and democracies reaching further into the bloc, potentially hollowing it out from within.
Introduction
On 24 February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine spectacularly hammered the final nail into the coffin of the post-cold war era. The return of a large-scale conventional war to Europe buried three main assumptions that had guided the European Union’s policymaking in its eastern and south-eastern neighbourhoods since the early 1990s. The first of these was that cooperation alone could ensure security and stability on the European continent. The second was that such cooperation would be fostered by the inevitable – if not linear – transition of former “people’s democracies” to genuine liberal democracies. Finally, the invasion finished off the idea that the EU’s cooperation with these states should focus mainly on encouraging and accompanying them on that path towards stable, resilient democracies: they also needed protection from and stronger defences against foreign malign influence and aggression.
Since the 1990s, the EU had underpinned its engagement in the Western Balkans and the eastern neighbourhood with the premise that these three ideas were interrelated: democratisation would turn these countries into cooperative partners that, in turn, contributed to Europe’s stability and security. The EU therefore deployed various policies and instruments to promote and hasten its neighbours’ democratic transitions.
This democracy promotion is a key element of the EU’s enlargement policy, which has itself been central to the way the bloc conceives of its relationships with its neighbours. Prior to 2022, the EU tackled democracy promotion in Western Balkans states mainly in the framework of that enlargement policy (even though not all of them enjoyed formal candidate status). In eastern Europe, on the other hand, the bloc did not initially envisage EU membership for the countries in question. It therefore pursued greater alignment with EU norms and values through its eastern partnership policy – at least in part to avoid confrontation with Russia.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine superseded that division, with the EU granting candidate status to Moldova and Ukraine in June 2022 and then to Georgia in December 2023. These decisions were a signal of the EU’s commitment to the security of the eastern neighbourhood. But they also brought enlargement in general firmly back onto the EU’s agenda after years of stagnation and fatigue. The implication is that all these countries will eventually become EU member states and should therefore comply with the Copenhagen criteria – the set of rules and standards that aim to ensure the EU remains a community of liberal democracies.
The EU’s renewed vigour for enlargement means its efforts to promote democracy in both the Western Balkans and the eastern neighbourhood are now exceptional cases: compared to the EU’s foreign policy engagement with other parts of the world, but also compared to how other international organisations such as the United Nations pursue democracy promotion in these regions. Other organisations promote democracy based purely on values, without being affected themselves by the nature of the political regimes in the countries they work with. But the EU’s goal within its enlargement policy is to transform and prepare countries to join a political and economic union that shares and defends common values, benefiting both the EU and the candidate countries. Enlargement is therefore a transformative process both for the candidate countries and for the EU; the consolidation of democracy and rule of law in the candidate countries before they join helps to ensure that the EU will remain a community of democracies.
In this paper, we examine the EU’s efforts to promote democracy in three countries in the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia) and three in eastern Europe (Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). We first take a closer look at the shift in the EU’s engagement with its neighbours in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. This underlines that democracy promotion is a key geopolitical interest for the EU – and not just a matter of values. We then map a variety of policies and instruments that the EU has used to promote democracy in the two regions since the early 2000s. Finally, we set out some lessons the EU can learn from its previous efforts at democracy promotion in the Western Balkans and eastern neighbourhood and how it can begin to build on these to achieve its geopolitical goals.
In selecting these policies, we adopted a broad definition of democracy as outlined by researchers Morten Bøås, Mathilde TE Giske, and Kari Osland. Accordingly, democracy encompasses not only a high-quality, free, and fair multi-party electoral process but also respect for human rights and key elements of good governance, such as the rule of law and accountability. A well-functioning democracy creates conditions for trust from societies to state institutions, and gains legitimacy by providing physical and economic safety and creating conditions for economic growth and a promising future for citizens.
But the EU’s efforts may not have always contributed favourably to this outcome. The bloc’s instruments and policies become part of the political economies of its partner countries and contribute to shaping them, by creating opportunities and constraints for decision-makers and other political actors. This could, in turn, result in unexpected and sometimes adverse effects.
About the author:
Piotr Buras is the head of ECFR’s Warsaw office and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Marie Dumoulin is the director of the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Tefta Kelmendi is the deputy director for the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Marlene Marx