The EU's Democracy Promotion in Its “Neighborhood”: Renegotiating the Post-Arab Spring Framework

Democracy promotion tied to development aid was one of the main strategic objectives of the Western powers during the Cold War. Democracy has also become a salient feature of European Union (EU) external governance and figures as a resonant theme in its key policy documents—Lisbon Treaty, Copenhagen Criteria for EU membership, European Security Strategy (ESS), European Development Policy, and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). ¹ The EU projects democracy as a positive form of governance to fight poverty and encourage development, and subsequently to build peace and stability. Thus, there is a clear causal link between development and new conceptualizations of security by the EU (Peters [personal communication] 2011). The global interconnectedness and its concomitant negative policy externalizations have led the EU to collaborate with its neighborhood in pursuit of constructive policy solutions (Filtenborg et al. 2002: 389). The changed security landscape in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the ensuing war in Iraq in 2003, and the big bang enlargement ² of the EU in 2004 and 2007 further reinforced the normative foundations for exporting democracy.