L'UE, promoteur réticent de la démocratie chez ses voisins

Dans ses discours,  l’UE accorde une importance de premier plan aux valeurs de démocratie et d’Etat de droit. Cette étude de Michael Emerson, Senem Aydin, Gergana Noutcheva, Nathalie Tocci, Marius Vahl et Richard Youngs, tous chercheurs au CEPS, constitue l’analyse la plus approfondie à ce jour des initiatives prises par l’UE pour mettre ses actes en conformité avec ses paroles dans le cadre de ses relations avec ses voisins – pays des Balkans, Turquie, Russie, Ukraine, Maghreb et Israël / Palestine. Si, dans le cadre du dernier processus d’élargissement, l’UE a pu jouer un rôle important de promoteur de la démocratie (notamment en imposant des conditions extrêmement strictes en la matière aux pays candidats), son action diplomatique demeure marquée par de fortes inhibitions. Pourtant, plusieurs développements récents montrent  que le mouvement de transition vers la démocratie gagne actuellement du terrain dans certains pays situés l’est et au sud-est de l’Union, dont la situation actuelle rappelle celle de l’Europe centrale et orientale au début des années 1990.  

Executive Summary and Conclusions 

In less than a year, the name of the game seems to have changed. A year ago, as the EU made its massive enlargement, the impression was one of a wider European area that divided neatly into three parts: first, the new EU member states and other candidate states that had become serious members of the democracy club; second, the European CIS states that had become entrenched as deeply corrupted phoney democracies; and third the Arab/Muslim states from the Mediterranean to Central Asia which for the most part were not even pretending to appear to be democracies. 

In the space of one year this landscape has begun to change, as some of the European CIS states resolved to clean up their phoney democracies, and the Arab/Muslim world is seeing either advances in the formal institutions of democracy or signs of popular uprisings against the incumbent authoritarian regimes. This leads to the idea that the European neighbourhood may now be witnessing a far wider movement of democratic revolution, with contagion on the scale of earlier historic episodes known by the dates 1789, 1848, 1917, 1945 and now 1989-[2005]. 

Yet what has been the role of the European Union in the current episode? Has it been a driving force for democracy promotion in its neighbourhood? It has been present, but often as a ‘reluctant debutante’, given the immature development of the EU as foreign policy actor. This paper was stimulated by an earlier paper, 1 which dissected the inter-agency tensions and contradictions in Washington’s efforts to formulate a democratisation strategy. Institutional structures and roles are of course totally different in the EU, both between and within the EU institutions – European Commission, Council and Parliament – and between the member states. Yet there are similarities in that while democracy always comes top in the speeches, in practice it has to find a more modest place in a complex set of often competing and sometimes contradictory interests. 

This paper begins with a review of some paradigms and syndromes that seem to characterise the roles currently being played by the EU institutions and member states. This provides the setting for a series of case studies of current EU policies from Russia round Europe’s eastern and southern periphery to Morocco. In a final section we attempt to draw together general findings from this detailed material. 

Our conclusions are: 

1. The EU has undoubtedly become important as a presence, integration model and democratic reference in the wider European neighbourhood. This flows from the fact that the EU is now an integrated space for almost 500 million people encompassing virtually the whole of Western and Central Europe, with high standards of democracy as the priority criterion for membership. At this level the EU does not need to try actively to shape its neighbourhood. It simply exists, and is an object of gravitational attraction for its neighbours. However when neighbouring states seek accession, then the EU sets democracy as the sine qua non test, and a hugely powerful political conditionality machine is deployed. The relative coherence with which EU actors have pursued political conditionality in the case of its would-be members follows from the objective of transforming these countries from outsiders to insiders. Here democracy is number 1. 

2. By comparison with this enlargement game, the EU’s performance as a foreign policy actor aiming at the promotion of democracy is very mixed. The distinction between enlargement and foreign policy, or between the internal and the external is thus crucial. The enlargement process sees the EU play to its legal and institutional strengths, whereas its foreign policy activity sees the EU and its member states reveal a whole set of divergent preferences, ambiguities and institutional cleavages. Clarity and strength of purpose with respect to democracy promotion in the neighbourhood suffer as a result. The case studies illustrate how the objective of democracy promotion can be trumped by several other priorities, such as strategic security, energy supply security, strategic diplomacy, conflicting visions for the future of Europe and world views. Here democracy is not so often, or so clearly number 1. Several of these competing priorities are similar to those found in the case of the US. 

3. However the distinction between internal and external, while categorical in principle, is in practice a fuzzy affair, since the EU’s neighbourhood policy is inviting convergence on EU norms and standards, and using ambiguous phrases, such as deeper integration, without quite specifying what they mean. Quite a number of neighbouring states are declaring their long-term accession ambitions, without this being acknowledged by the EU. Indeed there is mounting evidence of resistance to continuing enlargement, which the very recent French and Dutch referenda results now dramatically confirm, and which should in principle weaken the credibility of the EU’s political conditionality at least for states with long-run aspirations for membership. On the other hand, this weakening of enlargement prospects could induce the EU to invest more heavily in its neighbourhood policy, precisely because the automatic gravity model may otherwise run out of steam. 

4. As executor of technical assistance for democracy promotion, the EU’s performance is seriously hampered by cumbersome management procedures, which nevertheless amount to more than a merely technical matter, and more fundamentally reflect awkward and immature inter-institutional relationships. The fact that the EU is only an emerging foreign policy actor, with seriously constrained mandates accorded to the executive Commission, turns out to be far from a benign state of affairs, but one that impedes executive effectiveness. 

To read the paper in full, visit the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) website.