ABSTRACT
In recent years, support for democracy has suffered some heavy knocks. Democracy promotion is increasingly denigrated as ‘liberal imperialism’ or as simply out of tune with a reshaped, non-Western world order. The European Union (EU) is now most commonly accused of being too heavy-handed in pressing for democratic reforms and instrumentally conflating liberal democracy with liberal markets.1 Experts opine that, after the financial crisis, the EU needs to stop trying to support democracy beyond Europe and simply safeguard it within its own member states.2 The fact that the Obama administration remains cautious on democracy support reinforces a more general scaling back. But it is increasingly wide of the mark to excoriate the EU for over-promoting
human rights and democracy. European policy has mercifully eschewed the use of force as a tool of democracy promotion. As the international context has changed, the EU has also become less willing to sacrifice political engagement with autocratic regimes. European governments and the Commission have become increasingly less minded to exert pressure on autocratic regimes for democratic reform. Of course, critical measures and sanctions can easily be counter-productive and over-deployed. But the EU is going to the other extreme. European governments have gratuitously upgraded relations with repressive states and have actively resisted the calls of local reformers for pressure to be exerted on their respective non-democratic regimes. Moreover, the EU has failed to engineer its positive engagement effectively to
support liberal democratic values. The rewards and incentives the EU offers for democratic reform remain limited, in some cases increasingly so. European approaches rely on some overly heroic, modernization theory assumptions that, as China, Russia and other non-democratic states extend their trade and investment links, they will come to press for more democratic governance to protect their own investment in third markets. The standard critique of the liberal agenda that widespread human rights conditionality is a cover for imposing market liberalization does not hold up in the case of European policy. Although EU rhetoric continues to insist that supporting democracy and
human rights is a necessary part of long-term security, in practice, member states show increasingly less faith in such liberal internationalist thinking. Supporting democratic reform remains as a policy objective, but of relatively
low priority. It is not conceived as a core driver of broader improvements in geopolitical and economic interests, as liberal theory posits. Sceptics are right to recall that democratic change must come ‘from within’ and that, even in the best of cases, Europe can exert only relatively modest influence over political developments in other countries. But the EU could certainly be doing more, and at least ensuring that its policies help rather than hinder internally driven processes of reform. Moreover, problems also exist at the more micro level, in terms of the way in which European donors spend the funds they allocate to human rights and democracy projects. To the extent that these avoid sensitive political issues, their aim does not seem to be to foster genuinely democratic political reform. Chapter 3 outlined the paucity of EU efforts to build broader multilateral alliances to support its liberal, values-based foreign policy aims; in this chapter, the ‘thinning’ out of Europe’s own policies are catalogued.
