EU Human Rights and Democratization Policies

Achievements and Challenges

Felipe Gómez Isa, Cristina Churruca Muguruza, Jan Wouters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351617031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Though the EU has tried to place human rights and democracy at the heart of its external action, there are serious concerns about its capacity to have a significant impact on the situation of human rights and human rights defenders as well as on the democratization processes taking place in different regions of the world.

This edited volume sheds light on the achievements of EU policies and programmes in the field of human rights and democracy, also taking into account the challenges ahead. Analysing the changing global context's effect on the ability of the EU to have a meaningful impact in the field of human rights and democratization, it examines relevant policies and programmes of the EU to see their impact on the ground. Combining various methodologies, the authors examine primary agreements and other EU documents, secondary sources (such as evaluations of EU's policies and programmes) in the field of human rights and democracy promotion, and have interviewed EU officials, academics and other key stakeholders. From these, the book sheds light on specific programmes such as the EIDHR, the EOM and the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders, illuminating the increasingly hostile environment to work for human rights and democracy in a number of countries.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU human rights and law, to practitioners in Europe and beyond, and more broadly to EU studies, democracy studies and international relations.

Part I

Context and framework

1 EU human rights and democratization policies in a post-Western world¹

Felipe Gómez Isa²

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, the EU has tried to accompany the so-called third wave of democratization processes in a number of countries, and has projected itself as what some scholars refer to as a ‘normative power Europe’ (Manners 2002). Accordingly, human rights and democratic principles have become one of the essential pillars of EU’s identity both at internal and at external level (Barbé 2014, p. 395), at least as a proclamation of principles.³ Against this background, some scholars argue that the EU can be defined as a ‘democracy promotion community which has both a tangible presence and which manifests most of the requirements for actorness’ (Simmons 2011, p. 6).⁴ Others manifest a more cautious approach, and defend that while the EU has developed an ‘international presence’ (Youngs 2001, p. 44), this does not amount to the actorness of the nation-state; at best, one could eventually point to the ‘EU’s sui generis features as an international actor’ (Youngs 2001, p. 45).

With the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the EU started to pay a particular attention to human rights and democratization issues in its relations with third countries (Alston 1999; Smith 2008). Since then, the EU has significantly upgraded its human rights and democratization policies vis-à-vis third countries, and has placed human rights and democracy ‘at the heart of EU External Action’ (European Commission and High Representative 2011). As a clear manifestation of this commitment, the EU has adopted a wide range of instruments, policy statements, guidelines and programmes (both thematic and geographic) to support human rights and democracy as an integral dimension of the EU foreign policy (FRAME 12.1 2014).

But, from the outset, there are serious concerns about the capacity of the EU to have a significant impact on the democratization processes taking place in different regions of the world. In that sense, some commentators have underlined the delivery gap in the EU human rights and democratization policies (Hill 1993), the enormous distance between the rhetoric proclamations in Brussels and the impact on the ground of the EU policies and programmes. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the challenges the EU is facing due to the new international scenario and the progressive decline of Western power.

The EU in a changing international context

A decline of Western power?

In the last decades, we are witnessing a progressive decline of Western power, with an increasing economic and political relevance of emerging countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (the so-called BRICS), the Gulf States or Turkey, to name but a few. While some emerging States are currently facing a strong economic crisis, they still pose a geopolitical challenge to the exercise of power by the West. This has led to some commentators to proclaim that we have entered a ‘post-Western World’ (Dennison and Dworkin 2010), a new context in which the EU and the US cannot take the lead any more in issues that have to do with the promotion of a value-based international system. Contrary to the prophecy advanced by Francis Fukuyama with his idea of the End of History and the victory of the liberal democratic paradigm after the fall of communism (Fukuyama 1989), we are facing a troubling weakening of human rights and democracy as shared values of a universal scope (Magen 2015). Against the background of this dramatic change in the global balance of power, Richard Youngs (2010) has alerted that the EU is running the risk of becoming globally irrelevant. In order to regain relevance and credibility as a normative actor, the EU needs to rethink its strategies and to rebuild a North-South consensus on a new human rights and democracy agenda based on a common understanding with these rising partners on the compatibility between political rights, economic growth, social justice and human development.⁵

But some of these emerging countries (or already ‘emerged’, as the case of China) have a rather different approach to human rights and democracy, thus questioning the legitimacy of the EU to promote its human rights and democracy agenda internationally (Walker 2014). To some extent, the so-called Beijing Consensus is progressively substituting the Washington Consensus as a paradigm to be followed in many countries outside the West (Dennison and Dworkin 2010, p. 2). The main consequence of this trend is that economic liberalization can go hand in hand with authoritarian or semi-authoritarian policies and practices (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 287). And some of these relatively powerful countries have initiated a calculated strategy of ‘autocracy promotion’ (Burnell 2010) in third countries to counter-react to Western efforts at human rights and democracy support when they perceive these efforts ‘as a threat to its own regime survival…, or as a threat to its geostrategic interests’ (Risse and Babayan 2015).⁶

A particular case is the strong support by Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, by Qatar, to authoritarian regimes in the MENA region to avoid any influence of the democratic wave brought about by the Arab Spring and to maintain the status quo (Sigillò 2015). Saudi Arabia has been able ‘to buy influence and undermine Western leverage for political reforms’ (Hazan 2015, p. 492). But this counter-revolutionary role played by Saudi Arabia points to one of the greatest contradictions of the values-based foreign policies of both the EU and the US. Once again, the West has prioritized security and stability over democracy and human rights, very much in line with the strategic interests of Saudi Arabia (Greenfield and Balfour 2012). We cannot but remember that Saudi Arabia is one of the closest allies of the West in the region, in spite of its manifestly poor record on human rights and democracy.⁷ This is a crystal-clear manifestation of one of the main deficits of the EU human rights and democracy policies: the credibility gap, the use of double standards when European strategic interests are at stake in third countries (Durac 2009). Obviously, this lack of credibility strongly undermines the EU’s legitimacy to pursue a human rights and democracy agenda, thus hindering the effectiveness and impact of its human rights and democracy promotion efforts. This contradiction is clearly illustrated in the case of Egypt, where a window of opportunity for promoting democracy opened after the revolution of 2011. When General Al-Sisi organized a coup d’état in July 2013 to oust Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, ‘the counter-revolution was straightforwardly institutionalized with the implicit approval of the US and the EU’ (Hazan 2015, p. 491), prioritizing strategic interests over the promotion of democratic principles.

The Arab Spring has acted as a wake-up call for an EU that for decades had supported the authoritarian regimes that offered stability and access to their natural resources in the region (the democratization–stability dilemma). These uprisings clearly illustrate the shortcomings of the interest-driven EU’s approach to the promotion of human rights and democracy worldwide, paving the way to criticisms of selectivity and double standards. The EU has tried to accommodate to the new scenario in the region (new ENP, the reference to the concept of ‘deep democracy’, a strengthened role for civil society, etc.), but it remains to be seen to what extent the EU meets its declared intentions and not only its strategic interests. Unfortunately, the case of Egypt just analysed points to the wrong direction (Virgili 2014; Völkel 2014).

Another telling illustration of this emerging autocratic wave is exemplified by Russia’s support of authoritarian regimes in its neighbourhood (its ‘zone of influence’ in the eyes of the Russian regime, reinvigorating the old language of the Cold War)⁸ to counter-react democracy promotion by the EU and the US. Russia perceives human rights and democracy promotion as an orchestrated campaign by a number of actors in the West (the EU, the US, the Soros Foundation and other think-tanks, etc.) aimed at curtailing its influence in its neighbouring countries, therefore undermining its strategic interests not only in the region but, ultimately, worldwide. This confrontational attitude adopted by Russia is based in its perception of the actions sponsored by the West as arrogant and based on a sense of moral superiority. In the end, Russia is suffering from what some scholars refer to as ‘imperial nostalgia’ (Krickovic 2014). As Nelli Babayan (2015, p. 438) has rightly pointed out, Russia’s strong and, somehow, bewildering reaction to human rights and democracy promotion from the outside is mainly based on ‘its ambitions of restoring its great power status and maintaining its regional influence’. And in order to do so, Russia is prone to contain any attempt to challenge authoritarian rule and to promote democratic ideals. The accurate reflection by Christopher Walker (2014) speaks for itself:

Russia’s destabilization of Ukraine, where Moscow has annexed Crimea and provoked a debilitating separatist rebellion in the eastern part of that country, has dominated the news recently. But this action should be seen for what it is: a Kremlin containment effort to prevent Ukrainians from achieving a democratically accountable government that would threaten Russia’s corrupt authoritarian system. The Ukraine example is just one small part of a vast containment ambition led by the regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Riyadh and Tehran, which may disagree on many things but share an interest in limiting the spread of democracy.

The rise of China as a competing economic power is also a source of concern in Western capitals due to the negative influence it may have on the EU and the US human rights and democracy promotion policies (Nathan 2015; Brautigam 2009). China and the EU ‘compete for the same resources, markets and political influence’ (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 285) in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world. China’s disregard for the human rights situations in the countries with which they cooperate is a relevant source of distrust and suspicion, since the EU firmly believes that it can pave the way to ‘undermining the EU’s human rights, democracy and development policies’ (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 286). China’s approach to EU’s democracy promotion policies is dominated by pragmatism, and it will only react to those policies when regime survival at home is at risk. If Chinese strategic interests are at stake, China will definitively counter-react to human rights and democracy promotion from the outside. Domestically, ‘the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is clearly determined to withstand, repress, outperform, and outsmart home-grown as well as external pressures for democratization’ (Chen and Kinzelbach 2015, p. 412). In terms of Chinese foreign policy, it will try to block any attempt of democratization from the outside when its geostrategic interests or regime survival are at risk, as the example of Hong Kong clearly illustrates (Lo 2010; Wong 2012). If that is not the case, and China’s ambitions remain unaltered, it will not impede the human rights and democratization policies of Western countries. As the cases of Angola and Ethiopia in Africa show, ‘the presence of China has had limited influence on the implementation of the US and the EU’s democracy promotion strategies’ (Hackenesch 2015, p. 431). But, as Dennison and Dworkin (2010, p. 11) have ironically emphasized, ‘instead of simply criticizing China’s role in Africa as undermining Western efforts, Europeans should look critically at the record of their own governments and businesses’.

In purely economic terms, the EU has been defined as a powerful ‘agent of globalization’ (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 33), since it fully supports the current process of globalization through its trade policy and the establishment of a neoliberal international economic order. Ultimately, the EU ‘contributes to international structures that, while positive in many ways, also reproduce and reinforce patterns of exclusion, alienation and uncertainty’ (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 33), thus paving the way to legitimate criticisms of arrogance and neocolonialism coming from the Global South (Barbé 2014, p. 413) and even from some protest movements in the West.⁹ This situation of social and economic exclusion associated with neoliberal economic and social agendas is precisely what ignited the protests that led to the revolutions in a number of Arab countries in 2011. As Pace and Cavatorta (2012, p. 130) have critically underlined, ‘ordinary Arab citizens rose up against precisely those rigged neoliberal reforms imposed by Western organizations like the IMF and the World Bank that led to an even more unequal distribution of wealth in their countries and impoverished the masses over the last two decades’.

But the financial crisis that the euro-zone has been suffering since 2008 is probably the most serious crisis in the history of the EU, and is undermining the privileged role the EU has played so far in the international financial system (Kurki, 2015, p. 45). Some emerging countries are strongly criticizing the supremacy of the West in the International Financial Institutions that were created in Bretton Woods in 1944, and are giving rise to alternative organizations such as the recently created New Development Bank BRICS (2014)¹⁰ to challenge the prevailing status quo.¹¹ This situation also points to one major incoherence of EU’s foreign policy. While being very active at promoting democracy and human rights in third countries, the EU and European countries enjoy a privileged situation in a number of international organizations such as the IFIs, the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the Security Council of the United Nations, where two members of the EU hold permanent seats. In spite of increasing criticisms coming from emerging countries, the EU, together with the US, show great reluctance to accept democratic principles in the functioning of these major international organizations (Keukeleire and Delreux 2014, p. 143).

Emerging countries as international donors

As a consequence of the new geo-economic scenario, some of these emerging powers (China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Turkey, India, Brazil or Venezuela with its oil diplomacy) have dramatically increased their roles as international donors,¹² competing with traditional Western donors such as the EU and the US (Manning 2006). One of the results of this shift in the development aid pattern is that the EU’s conditionality of aid to progress in human rights and democracy can be undermined, given that recipient countries may be less inclined to follow the European recipes. As it has been remarked by Laurence Chandy (2012), ‘emerging donors are perceived as showing less regard for environmental and labor standards and for the democratic credentials of recipient governments’. In this new context, we can expect that the EU will have much less leverage to push for democratic change in third countries (Whitfield 2009). But we need to be cautious since ‘little is known about the development cooperation practices of emerging donors or, most importantly, the impact of their aid in recipient countries’ (Cabral and Weinstock 2010, p. 1). More research and more evidence-based reflections are necessary in order to be able to come to reliable conclusions in this field.

Backlash against human rights and democracy promotion

As part of the new international climate brought about by the relative decline of Western power and the rise of emerging powers, many countries are expressing a growing hostility to the human rights and democracy support policies and programmes sponsored by the EU an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• EU human rights and democratization policies: an introduction
• Part I: Context and framework
• Part II: Reviewing the policy
• Part III: Assessing the instruments
• Concluding remarks
• Index