Mass protests have spread around the world in recent years. In Algeria, Hong Kong, Russia, Sudan, and elsewhere, protests show a growing hunger among citizens for democracy. While democracy is struggling to retain its legitimacy, authoritarian regimes are also on the back foot—this is an era of popular mobilization against all forms of regime.
Yet the EU has become more cautious about supporting democratic reformers in recent years. Many official documents talk about the importance of supporting democracy for the EU’s own strategic interests, yet the union’s democracy and human rights policies generally remain relatively low-key.
The EU is now set to agree a new democracy strategy, and the union needs to decide whether it is really committed to putting democracy at the center of its geopolitical grand strategy for the twenty-first century.
The EU last agreed council conclusions on democracy support in 2009, and since then the global context has changed dramatically.
Democracy is struggling internationally and within the EU itself, while the United States is no longer the same partner in support of democratic change around the world. At the same time, many regimes have become more explicit and assertive in their attempts to neuter outside support for democratic reformers.
For these reasons, doubts have grown among policymakers about whether democracy support now has any place in EU external policies.
The gist of much debate in the last few years has been that the union needs to move toward a more interest-centered foreign policy strategy. Many see democracy support pushing so much against the grain of current trends that it is a largely doomed aspiration, however much effort the union might put into it.
Under Federica Mogherini’s term as the EU foreign policy chief, the union’s focus has been firmly on defense, security, and migration. In contrast, democracy support has continued as a low-profile area of aid projects, somewhat disconnected from the broader evolution of EU geostrategic visions.
The EU has been equivocal in fighting democratic regression. It has used sanctions in relation to security concerns (Russia, Syria) but increasingly recoils from using such measures to press for democracy.
In those cases where the EU has adopted critical measures, these have usually been fairly circumscribed. Recent cuts in pre-accession aid to Turkey are comprehensively outweighed by the six-billion-euro package to control migration. The EU’s 2017 sanctions against Venezuela are relatively limited in scope. It recently pushed strongly in Moldova to defend the democratically elected coalition from oligarchic interference, but only after years of its funds pouring into a feckless elite. In response to serious rights abuses in Cambodia and Myanmar, the EU is going through a lengthy process of considering removing trade privileges, but even this would be a limited step. A new human rights sanctions mechanism is being considered, but this is not likely to cover broader democratic reversals.
Instead, the union has actually deepened cooperation with regimes that are heading firmly in a more authoritarian direction. In a large number of such countries, the EU has either signed or is offering new trade and aid agreements, while dampening any critical edge to its policy—examples include Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Cuba, Egypt, Kenya, and Vietnam. The EU is also looking to reopen trade talks with Thailand despite the military junta just having sown up rigged elections. Democratic reformers in Zimbabwe accuse the EU and some of its member states of being too quick to seek new commercial agreements after former president Robert Mugabe was ousted in 2017, when the new government is just as authoritarian. Exports of arms and surveillance technology from Europe to authoritarian regimes have increased dramatically. From 2013 to 2017, 84 percent of the EU’s development aid went to authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes.
Despite all its rhetoric about human rights and democracy being core values, the EU spends only around 0.1 percent of its budget on upholding these internationally. This is less than 2 percent of the aid budget. The proposed new EU budget promises an increase, but only by a limited amount compared to the huge funding it promises for security and border control cooperation with other countries. Only half a dozen member states spend non-negligible amounts of aid on democracy programs.
All these limitations mean there is much room for improvement in the new democracy strategy. And this improvement also needs to be qualitative—not simply a little bit more of what the EU has always done. If EU approaches to democracy have lost traction in recent years, it is also because they have failed to keep up with the larger political and strategic changes within and beyond Europe.
It is less clear today than it was a decade ago that democracy is really central to the EU’s world vision. If the EU doesn’t make democracy a core of how it defines its geostrategic interests and fundamentally rethink the way democracy fits into its overarching foreign policy, the new strategy will make little difference. And the incoming EU leadership will continue the union’s drift into democratic agnosticism.
This is the crucial decision that European leaders need to make as they sign off on the EU’s new democracy strategy.
Ken Godfrey is the executive director of the European Partnership for Democracy.
Richard Youngs is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, based at Carnegie Europe.
Comments(5)
The EU has enough internal deficiencies and weaknesses to be a role model for democracy for the rest of the world. More modesty is required. Start changing flaws in the system at home.
The EU has enough internal weaknesses to be a role model for the rest of the world. Modesty is required. Start with flaws in the own system and fix those before others to teach the way to go.
Interference in the development of democracy can have bizarre consequences. For example the Saakashvili regime in Georgia was propped up by EU support long after it became obvious to most observers that he was building an dictatorship.
As the East returns to the center of the world, population, economics, military, the EU part of CoE doesn’t appear ready to conceptualize the decline, and prepare for irrelevance. In the pursuit of myths, democracy is a Western construct, almost as old as recorded history. At birth, Thucydides was already criticizing the widespread “preference for ready-made accounts” for the average voter (roughly 10% of the population, male, adult), and that was before Twitter and Facebook (worst forms of human interaction), Cambridge Analytica and troll farms. Is the EU (27/28?) a living example of democracy? Cameron, May, Johnson all reference Brexit as a supreme binding democratic exercise, although the referendum was a non-binding one. Cameron confirmed Thucydides concern about the common man by forgetting to add the GFA and much more to the referendum question. Merkel’s decision to accept a million refugees, was it a democratic exercise? The humanitarian concerns were justified, but there was no consultation, democratic or not; also, the number of refugees was a fraction of those displaced by wars in the Sykes-Picot space. More visible, les gilets jaunes, and the climate strikes. Is the EU still geopolitically relevant? The article assumes that the EU will be geopolitically relevant for the foreseeable future, but unfortunately the facts don’t support this assessment. The article lists Azerbaijan and China in the same sentence, but try to remove China as an EU economic partner, and see what happens to the EU economies. The Western powers utilized for centuries their superior firepower in spreading anything but democracy, the EU should try to match China’s recent display of military hardware/software, as well as India’s (as always forgotten in the analysis, even after the latest Kashmir events). The Turkey reference in the article is misleading. Turkey appears to have reached the point where it has achieved strategic independence, and might be looking for a better deal with the rising East (SCO). The reality is that the billons paid for “control migration” is a euphemism for the consequences of a war and migration not triggered by Turkey. One-man rule, it is a different discussion. In this context the EU should acknowledge and prepare for a diminishing role. The best is to focus on its internal stability, which will be threatened by the reduction of EU funds after Brexit; EU democracy might be soon an angry electorate expressing displeasure by booting out anybody in power.
First, let me carve out the UK as part of my continental Europe, a.k.a. EU, comments. Looking at Europe's actions over the last 2 or 3 decades it's difficult to find "support for democratic change around the world" examples. Europe verbally supports world democratic movements like the Arab Spring, Orange Revolution and Hong Kong protests, but it really doesn't put its aid money, or military, where its mouth is. Europe is the diplomacy / media PR "soft power" cheerleader for world democracy. It encourages democratic movements, then pulls back from any costs. If a democratic movement goes wrong, e.g. Arab Spring morphing into Islamic tribal wars, Europe denies all accountability and responsibility. If a sweet trade deal is involved, e.g. Middle East or China, then Europe/EU will happily dump all talk of democracy and all support for democratic movements. Unlike the author, I just don't believe Europe has actively provided the soft power political "support for democratic change around the world", or ever will. This is fine. Many cultures and societies, e.g. China and Arab Muslims, don't want western democracy. The EU brand of socialism has EU member countries on a glide path to more socialism and citizen social benefits. There is nothing wrong with this choice. But, as Europe/EU reduces its military further and further, and dedicates funds to social benefits, eventually it will break with the U.S. The NATO alliance won't survive another decade or two. Europe will adopt the small token European/EU military its citizens want for peaceful tasks like border control and customs, maybe patrol/protection of Europe/EU's oil shipments. As a consequence, the EU won't provide "hard power" financial aid or military aid "support for democratic change around the world". But, then again, over the last few decades, Europe/EU never has.
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