For almost two decades the driving force of EU foreign policy was the idea of the EU as a transformative power. “Transformation” was achieved by enlarging the union and exporting its acquis, values and prosperity. The EU managed to successfully transform Central and Eastern Europe (though the business is still unfinished) and push the Balkans in the right direction. Then the EU tried to transform the Eastern neighbourhood through a similar policy mix of dialogue, economic assistance and exporting the acquis, though all in reduced doses.

But after 7 years the European neighbourhood policy the EU discovers that its policies are failing to even prevent the drastic deterioration of the situation in the Eastern neighbourhood. Even the fact that the EU tries to relaunch its neighbourhood policy on an almost annual basis (ENP Plus, New Ostpolitik, Black Sea Synergy and now the Eastern Partnership) is proof of a lingering dissatisfaction of how things stand. In the last years every single eastern neighbourhood country went through a series of major political, economic or security crises: Georgia cracked down on demonstrators in November 2007 and ran into a war with Russia in august 2008; post-electoral violence in March 2008 in Armenia left at least 10 persons dead; Moldova recent post-electoral protests lead to riots, the burning down of the parliament, and then a crackdown against the protesters (leaving three persons dead, possibly, in police detention), opposition parties, media and journalists; Azerbaijan is locked into an unsolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and recently abolished constitutional limits on presidential terms opening the way for Ilham Aliev to remain president for life. And Ukraine seems in a perpetual state of crisis: gas crises, political crises and economic crises. In Ukraine pluralistic politics goes hand in hand with a systematic self-destruction of state institutions. Against such a background, even Belarus looks better than it ever before.

In such a context the EU is brutally exposed to the limits of its “transformative power”.  In official EU speak “security starts with human rights”. But this seems to not be the case anymore in the east, at least. The EU discovers that it cannot behave in the unilateral and confident way it behaved in Central Europe and the Balkans. In the eastern neighbourhood Russia and local political regimes greatly constrain EU’s transformative power, as Andrew Wilson and I argued in a recent report on “European and Russian Power in the Troubled Neighbourhood“. These limits are imposed not because the EU is weaker than it was in the 90s, but because the internal (pro-)European consensus in the Eastern neighbourhood is much lower than in Central Europe in the 90s.

The Eastern neighbours have no sense of direction, but the EU is also loosing its own sense of direction. EU’s pro-democracy talk is more muted than ever before in the last two decades. Since a few years ago the EU learned not to criticize Russia for its domestic (undemocratic) politics. But that was perhaps easy to explain and justify: Russia is big, stubborn, energy-reach and irritated by EU attempts to transform it. But now a similar “realist” policy starts to inform the EU approach to almost every state of the region: on energy-rich Azerbaijan and energy-poor Armenia, on consolidated authoritarian regimes like Belarus, or states where politics is relatively pluralist but increasingly problematic like Georgia and Moldova. More often than not, democratic deterioration in the last two years in the states of the Eastern neighbourhood have not lead to serious worsening of relations with the EU. EU’s professed attempts to defend democratic principles in the Eastern neighbourhood are increasingly dissapointing. 

Of course, the way to support democracy is not only through loud statements or sanctions. Criticism and coercion rarely work, especially if done half-heartedly. The EU policy on Belarus for over a decade is proof of that. External pressures seemed to only strengthen authoritarianism in Belarus.

Engagement and cooperation with insufficiently democratic governments is a legitimate policy. The logic of engagement is to cooperate and strengthen links with authoritarian regimes without criticizing them too openly, in the expectation that such cooperative links will build up internal constituencies for reform and will help the EU gain leverage over time. But it is also true that often “engagement” becomes an excuse for ignoring values for quite a number of EU member states. For many European states are more interested in selling BMWs than democracy. But this is a mistake. The less democratic neighbourhood states will be, the more problematic their relations with the EU will become. So if the EU wants a policy of engagement with its neighbours, demoracy will have to be part of that package of engagement more than it has been in the last two-three years. Or risk further deterioration of both neighbourhood stability and relations with the EU.

EU Observer Blog