Can the EU support democracy in the Eastern Partnership?

Abstract

Democracy cannot be imposed from the outside: if it is to be sustainable, it has to come from within. External actors can at best help to support those on the ground who are pursuing the same democratic agenda. While democratisation has been one of the EU's key objectives for the Eastern Partnership region, in practice, the EU has faced many obstacles to achieving this goal. Internally, its actions have not always been coordinated, and the EU's rhetoric has not been backed up by political and financial resources. Moreover, those who hold power in the region and could therefore contribute to their countries’ democratisation have rarely been interested in doing so. These constraints are unlikely to change any time soon–-but the EU can enhance the region's democratic prospects by improving its coordination and widening the scope of those it supports in the region, thereby helping to expand the circle of those who have a stake in their countries’ democratisation.

Introduction

Can the EU promote democracy in its neighbourhood? If so, how? And what difference can the EU make in other countries’ democratisation? These questions are hardly new–-but events in the EU's eastern neighbourhood, from Belarus and Azerbaijan to Ukraine, have made them more acute than ever. This article argues that while the EU could increase its role as a democracy supporter abroad, thus far it has had only a limited impact on the democratisation of its eastern neighbours. While the EU's own internal limitations and lack of coordination have hampered the achievement of its goals, more importantly, the less-than-conducive conditions in the region, strong regimes and weak societies have also greatly limited the effect of the EU's contribution to these countries’ democratisation. To succeed in the future, the EU not only has to fine-tune its own policymaking and coordination, but also set its expectations appropriately: democratic transition is never a straightforward process and it will take years if not decades for the region to fully democratise.

Wanted: consistency, resources and determination

To start with, the EU as such does not have a single democratisation policy that guides its external actions and clearly outlines the EU's interests, objectives and ways to achieve them. Instead, what it has is a collection of ever-evolving conclusions, guidelines, declarations, decisions and resolutions which are amended, updated or added to as necessary. This alone makes coordination and the following of policy quite a challenging exercise. The EU has also devised several tools to help support ‘participatory and representative democracy, the freedoms of association and assembly, opinion and expression, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary and the peaceful conciliation of group interests’ (European External Action Service n.d.). In 2007, the EU launched the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights; it also uses money available from its thematic programmes funded by the Development Cooperation Instrument and the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, which both provide financial and technical support to civil society in countries in transition or dictatorships. More recently, in 2012 the EU member states decided to found the European Endowment for Democracy (EED). Legally, the EED is not an EU body but an independent grant-making institution. Nevertheless, EU member states, the European Commission and the European Parliament, as well as the European External Action Service, oversee the endowment's activities and provide funding for its actions which aim to support local actors of change in the EU's southern and eastern neighbourhood.

While supporting democratisation in other countries is a noble goal, in practice the EU's steps have not always gone in this direction, not even in the EU's closest neighbourhood to the east. It is always difficult to translate the EU's democratisation support into concrete figures given that actions in this direction could be included under a number of different headings, such as good governance or comprehensive institution building, but do not always count as ‘democratisation support’ (i.e. under this programme, the EU can provide capacity-building for state officials, which may or may not directly contribute to democracy). An overview of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) financing suggests that most of the funds that the EU spends in the region end up in these states’ budgets (Kaca and Kaźmierkiewicz 2010). This is not necessarily wrong–-for democracy to take root and become sustainable funding individual civil society projects will not suffice. Democracy needs to be institutionalised through legislation and enforced through an effective judiciary system and effective state institutions–-none of these functions can be performed by civil society; instead, the state needs to step in. The trouble in the EaP region is that those who hold power–-and who could therefore greatly contribute to their own countries’ democratisation–-are rarely interested in doing so. In practice, most of the funds the EU provides to the region are therefore directed at strengthening state capacities in areas which are important for both sides–-such as energy security or cross-border security–-but have little direct impact on the state of democracy in a given country.

Whether different EU institutions and member states have the same goals is also a question that needs to be answered. The latter's role in assisting democratic transitions–-or stifling them by contributing to the preservation of the status quo–-is almost as important as what the 28 EU member states decide to do collectively. Although Belarusian Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoliy Kuleshov remains on the list of the more than 200 officials who cannot travel to the EU, in January 2012 France allowed him to travel to Lyon for an Interpol conference. Slovenia, too, lobbied hard to prevent the EU from sanctioning one of the Belarusian businessmen with whom one of its companies does business (Charles 2012; Jozwiak and Solash 2012). Azerbaijan, which has an even worse human rights’ record than Belarus, has thus far avoided EU sanctions, also thanks to the EU's and its member states’ interest in the country's energy resources (Kobzová 2012).

More recently, member states had diverging positions on whether or not the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko should be an obstacle to the signing of the Association Agreement (AA) and the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) between the EU and Ukraine. As a result, despite its official position, which insisted on addressing the ‘cases of selective justice’, the EU has been sending mixed signals to the government in Kyiv for almost two years. Some argue that had the EU been firmer in its position and more clearly announced whether the former prime minister's release was a condition for signing the AA and the DCFTA, there would have been greater clarity about President Yanukovych's intentions, and the fiasco at last year's Vilnius Summit could have been avoided (Kuzio 2013). Instead, a few days ahead of the high-level event, Ukraine's President Yanukovych decided to accept Russia's offer and ignore the one from the EU. In this case, the EU's lack of clarity on an issue linked to the state of democracy in Ukraine has directly affected not just Europe's political goals but also its economic interests. Various branches of the European Commission could also act in a more synchronised way: a year ago, a report that EU funds had been spent on training the Belarusian police force (which is often used against the country's opposition and democracy activists) stirred public opinion and called into question the EU's commitment to promoting democracy (Holehouse 2013).

Difficult environment

The fact that the EU has not always got its policies and tools to support democratisation right is just one and by far not the most significant of the obstacles for the eastern neighbourhood's transition towards democracy. While the EU can provide incentives for other countries to democratise and discourage their leaders from pursuing a different path, its influence and ability to engineer change is limited. As Wilson and Popescu (2011) argue, although the EU's presence in the region has increased, this has not led to a substantive increase of the EU's influence in the region. In other words, the EU's ability to shape the region's developments, or have a decisive impact on these countries’ states of democracy or governance, remains constrained.

This is nothing new. In fact, it is not even necessarily bad: democracy cannot be imposed from the outside if it is to be sustainable; it has to come from within. The EU can at best help support those actors–-in the government, business community, local civil society or at the grass-roots level–-who are pursuing the same goal of democratisation as the EU. However, when it comes to Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus the EU has often been short on partners. Most of the EU programmes aimed at supporting democratic reform by default treat local governments as their partners. But in the EaP, such an approach has had limited results given that most of the region's ruling elites who control the state apparatus have very little interest in reforms or democratisation: their primary objective is to remain in power and preserve this authority, even at the expense of their society's civic liberties and country's economic growth or governance.

Reaching out to society

In the most authoritarian regimes in the EaP, Azerbaijan and Belarus, the EU has tried to redirect some of its assistance towards civil society in order to help strengthen in-country pro-reform constituencies and improve democratic conditions. Until recently, only well-established non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the region could benefit from EU assistance, as most of the smaller, often grass-roots, civic groups simply lacked the capacity to apply for and implement such funding. These Western-funded NGOs often have little connection with the public at large and, as Ukrainian researcher Orysia Lutsevych (2013) shows, often form a ‘NGO-cracy’ which is closer to its donors than the citizens they claim to represent. In this way, EU funding–-just like that of many other Western donors–-has often indirectly contributed to sustaining the gap between a few well-established civic groups and the rest of society. In addition to using more flexible ways of funding (such as the EED, but also member states’ bilateral aid programmes), the EU also needs to widen its definition of civil society to increase the impact of its support on the countries’ democratisation.

Democratisation in the region is not only about nationwide legislation or institutions, important as they are–-in practice, it is also about empowering citizens to influence political developments through engagement on issues they care about, from the local village's infrastructure to workers’ rights to pushing the authorities to fight corruption. In the 1980s, some of the dissident groups in Central Europe came not from the more traditional circles of political dissent but from issue-based initiatives such as environmentalism. This does not happen over time: the legacy of communism–-poverty and social deprivation–-that is still prevalent in a number of EaP countries is hardly conducive to citizens’ active participation in their country's affairs, not to mention the legal frameworks in much of the region which make public oversight of the government virtually impossible. The EU should pursue this issue-focused and society-centred approach in its efforts to help the region democratise.

Getting the expectations right

Democracy does not happen overnight. To grow, it needs space and time. The EaP has neither–-the space for pro-democratic groups in half of the region's countries is severely restricted by local autocrats, while Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine all struggle to find such space in the light of severe security risks. Moreover, more than twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, societies in the region still question the benefits which democratisation has brought or could have brought to them: the most democratic country in the EaP, Moldova, is also its poorest; living standards are comparably better in autocratic Azerbaijan or Belarus. While there is no direct link between Moldova's poverty and its democracy, it is a powerful tool for the autocrats’ propaganda to showcase the benefits of their authoritarian stability and contrast it with the economic difficulties which more pluralistic societies in the region are facing.

Conclusion

The EU cannot change these perceptions overnight and its policies and resources–-even if deployed in full and in a coordinated manner–-are unlikely to have an immediate effect: the changing of conditions in these countries is gradual and will take time. That should not be an excuse for inaction: the EU can still do more to support democracy in the region by improving coordination and streamlining democracy issues into the EU's decision-making in other areas of its neighbourhood policy. Widening the scope of those civic groups that it supports to include issue-based groups or citizens’ initiatives would help the EU to expand the circle of those inside the country who have a stake in democratisation. Continuously identifying possibilities for improvement and windows of opportunity for greater engagement with the region's citizens–-such as the one created by the pro-democratic protests in Ukraine–-would help the EU to avoid being caught off guard and reacting too slowly. This is hardly a recipe for a quick victory–-but there is every reason to think that–-if the EU improves its own actions–-significant improvement will also take place in the region.