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Part I
Theory and overview![]()
1
Introduction: democratisation of EU foreign policy?
The role of new member states from Central and Eastern Europe
Benedetta Berti, Kristina Mikulova and Nicu Popescu
The literature on democracy promotion largely focuses on mapping the strategies and impact of large established donors, mostly the United States, the European Union and Western European countries. Much less is known about the role ânewâ democracies can play, both at the normative and policy level, in shaping and influencing democracy assistance strategies.
New democracies can be regarded as uniquely positioned to promote democratic values. Having gone through recent democratic transitions themselves, they possess intimate understandings of transition dynamics and reform processes. Their recent success lends them a competitive edge in the global democracy assistance industry. It also fuels a desire to share their know-how and experience with fledgling democratisers or struggling opposition movements abroad â whether in pursuit of security or economic interests, as a matter of solidarity and principle, or both.
This volume examines the attempts of one group of young democracies, those hailing from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), to channel this value-laden, pro-democracy agenda into both national and European foreign policy and development assistance.
Inside Europe, a decade after their accession to the EU, the states of Central and Eastern Europe have turned from recipients of aid into policy-makers at the EU and international level. Their impact appears to be both âupstreamâ and âdownstreamâ, with CEE states formulating and implementing EU policies across a whole range of issues, while also extending their activism outside the policy frameworks of the European Union.
These intra-European developments are taking place in a dynamic, if not outright dramatic, international environment. Instability and conflict in the EUâs Eastern neighbourhood as well as in the Middle East have imbued the discourse on successes and failures of democratisation movements and democracy promotion with a new sense of urgency. The hopeful transitions initiated at the time of the Arab Spring have for the most part stalled or escalated into internal conflicts, whereas the vacuum of power that emerged after the Euromaidan revolution and the ousting of president Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in early 2014 eased Russiaâs annexation of Crimea and the descent of eastern Ukraine into war. Although the book touches upon the most recent events only tangentially, it aspires to deepen our understanding of them by addressing a wider series of questions about democracy assistance and the strategic and normative factors behind it.
From recipients to donors: charting new territory
In examining the patterns and dynamics underscoring CEEâs role in promoting democracy both through the EU as well as bilaterally, the volume is contributing to the emergence of a new generation of CEE studies. The main concerns of scholarship on CEE in the past two decades, following the downfall of communism, have been related to domestic developments â namely the nature of the post-authoritarian transitions â and the impact of the EU on the region, often referred to as âEuropeanisationâ. Hence, the existing body of literature on the region has mostly approached CEE states as beneficiaries of technical assistance, democracy promotion, soft power and the like, or as agents of change at home.
But a decade after EU accession, which marked CEE countriesâ âgraduationâ from post-communism transformation, it is time to consider their contribution as donors, policy-makers and agents of change vis-Ă -vis the outside world. This book fills a distinct empirical gap by examining both the upstream effects of CEE statesâ efforts to shape the EU foreign policy agenda in the field of development and democracy assistance as well as the downstream effects of CEE statesâ respective initiatives and activities in third countries and regions.
The analysis targets several crucial aspects of CEEâs engagement on the global foreign policy stage. The first set of empirical and theoretical questions deals with the relationship between CEE statesâ foreign policy and democracy promotion. The volume seeks to explore to what extent CEE countriesâ recently transpired transition from autocracy to democracy translates into a foreign policy preference for democracy support and, ultimately, how this preference feeds into real-time policy. The volume touches upon CEEâs donor identities to explore whether they reveal an additional and unique concern for democracy promotion. The analysis goes in-depth in seeking what might motivate CEE states to spend their scarce political and financial capital to support democratisation abroad, outlining the normative and strategic factors at play and mapping the interactions between the two.
The second group of questions relates to the nature of CEE countriesâ âupstreamâ impact on relevant strands of EU foreign policy. Here the focus is on both comparing CEE ânewâ member statesâ policies as donors with those of âoldâ member states and on assessing the impact of the âbig bangâ EU enlargement by post-communist democracies on EU development and democracy assistance. Have the new members from CEE been successful at âuploadingâ their declared foreign policy preferences, including the commitment to human rights and democracy, to the EU level? Or, in turn, has EU membership had a traceable impact on the motivations and approaches of CEE countries to foreign policy-making and/or development and democracy assistance? Can we, in this respect, speak of âEuropeanisationâ with regard to CEEâs foreign policy or rather, the other way around, of âCEE-isationâ in EU policies?
Finally, the third series of questions explores the âdownstreamâ effects of CEE development aid and democracy promotion efforts, to evaluate their impact on the ground. The volume explores CEE activities in regions such as the Western Balkans, the Eastern neighbourhood, Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. How did policy-makers in the CEE region respond to the Arab Awakening or the reignited revolutionary fervour in Ukraine, and what do their reactions tell us about the contribution, uniqueness and sustainability of their policy practices? To what extent can we speak of a consistent âCEE brandâ of development and democracy assistance, and has there been convergence or divergence over time, especially after EU accession?
Unpacking CEE pro-democracy foreign policy: branding or reality?
The book places CEE countriesâ commitment to democracy and democratic values within the broader context of their post-2004 foreign policy ambition. For CEE states, the enterprise of diffusing democratic norms â and their own transition experience â does not seem to be merely another instrument in the toolbox of external action or a necessary policy upgrade required after EU accession.
Albeit modest in budgetary terms, CEE democracy support â sharing transition know-how included â is construed as the regionâs trademark: a marker of the countriesâ foreign policy identity. The logic, be it strategic or normative, that underpins democracy-related projects is often the same one that animates CEE foreign policy decision-making more broadly. The âgroupâ dynamic in the CEE region when it comes to democracy support is also important at the EU level: through their combined influence inside the European institutions, CEE countries, along with other EU member states, have worked rather consistently to steer the entire EU policy-making machinery towards assigning additional weight to the democracy promotion agenda.
One of the leading conceptual innovations of the volume is the redefinition of CEE countries as donors, rather than beneficiaries, of democracy assistance, and makers, rather than objects, of foreign policy-making. By reintroducing them as such, the book effectively launches a new round of scholarly and policy debate on CEE. This creates a raison dâĂȘtre for the upstream part of the book: by claiming that CEE member states have a unique approach to foreign policy-making â one imbued by a pro-democracy zeal â we can examine how it may have informed policy output at the EU level, turning Europeanisation studies on their head. In turn, the downstream section of the volume, pioneering in focus and scope, can evaluate CEE impact on the regionâs immediate neighbourhood as well as âout-of-areaâ. Little, if anything, has been published about CEE development and democratisation efforts in the Middle East or Central Asia.
In tackling these issues, the volume offers theoretical and policy-relevant insights that transcend the nature of foreign policy-making in the post-communist region. Most evidently, it aspires to enrich the literature on norm diffusion and policy transfer. Theoretically, the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the causal weight of norms and ideas in foreign policy-making, a question that has attracted much attention in international relations scholarship, especially its constructivist branch. Given that the CEE regionâs transition from recipients to generators of ideas and policies was compressed in time, it offers a unique opportunity â not readily available in research on norm diffusion â to pin down the conditions and track the processes whereby imported and adapted norms are recycled for further export to see how they fare in third countries. In turn, establishing why and how young CEE democracies have infused their foreign policies with value-laden agendas will allow scholars to pit the CEE experience against those of young democracies elsewhere.
In terms of policy relevance, the empirical chapters are novel inasmuch that, in contrast to the bulk of policy analysis and journalistic work on CEE foreign policy and democracy support, which remains rather celebratory, they paint a decidedly mixed picture. In some cases, CEE actions left a clear mark, such as in leading efforts to establish the European Endowment for Democracy (EED) or in helping the Western Balkans advance in institution building, structural reforms and EU integration. Elsewhere, as in Central Asia, CEE efforts bore less fruit, whereas in North Africa and the Middle East, they may have been marketed better than applied.
How foreign policy becomes democratised: a look at what lies ahead
The book is organised in three main sections, beginning with a comprehensive chapter outlining the volumeâs theoretical framework. It examines the theoretical explanations that account for the prominence of the democracy promotion agenda in CEE. The second part of the book then focuses on CEE efforts to instil an emphasis on democracy promotion in the EUâs common foreign policy, i.e., on the âuploadingâ of their foreign policy preferences to the EU level. Finally, the bookâs third part analyses the downstream effect of CEE activities on democratic transitions in third countries or regions, including the Eastern neighbourhood, the Western Balkans and the Middle East and North Africa.
The theoretical chapter, by Tsveta Petrova, primarily discusses the motivations for CEE young democracies to promote the norms and values that they have recently embraced. To theorise the range of plausible explanations, the chapter divides them into two ideal-type categories, strategic and normative: whereas strategic motivations compel states to promote democracy as a way of furthering other political, security or economic objectives, normative motivations originate in international and/or domestic norms, ideas and institutional culture. From this standpoint, democracy promotion can be understood as an end in itself.
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