ABSTRACT
Is ‘democratization without democracy’ not a paradox? Does this phrase suggest that democratization is impossible without democracy, in other words that a democracy can only be built within the overall political context of a democracy? In that case, democratization of autocratic regimes, such as Palestine, would seem a rather hopeless endeavour and the efforts of the European Union (EU) to support such processes would, subsequently, be quite unlikely to bear any fruit. Rather than engage in a discussion on the societal and political prerequisites for successful democracy-building, this contribution will seek to draw attention to the welldocumented democracy-reform dilemma of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). Thus, ‘democracy promotion strategies’ faced the problem that ‘the transition from authoritarian to democratic regime was most commonly an extremely destabilizing period, during which elites were often encouraged to offset internal strains’ [Gillespie and Youngs, 2002: 9].1 International actors, such as the EU, therefore constantly have to weigh the political costs of supporting stability in Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs) and thereby sustaining the ruling elites and political stability, on the one hand, against the demand for democratic reforms aimed at more transparency, pluralism and freedom in these countries, on the other. It is against the background of this democracy-reform dilemma that this contribution will analyse the EU’s support for democratization processes in Palestine, one of the mainly authoritarian MPCs.
