European Union Democratic Research Articles

Fighting for Europe: The EU's Democratic Pull Phenomenon in Ukraine, Poland and Belarus

AbstractWhat drives ordinary citizens to want their country to join or stay in the European Union (EU)? Whilst scholarship addressed value‐based dispositions as drivers of pro‐EU positions, material benefits dominate explanations of support for EU accession and membership. New research suggests that it is precisely the growing import of being an adherent of liberal democratic values that drove citizens in countries as disparate as Ukraine, Poland and Belarus to support EU accession and remained the key driver for those already in the Union wanting to stay in. Employing national surveys and regression analyses, this article shows that (a) not only is a shift to supporting EU accession accompanied by citizens also moving towards supporting democracy in Ukraine; (b) this EU democratic pull phenomenon can also be identified amongst citizens of other EU neighbourhood countries, as well as in EU member states.

Strengthening European Union Democratic Accountability Through National and Treaty-Based Pre-Legislative Controls

This article considers whether greater accountability for EU supranational decision-making can be achieved through a combination of member states' legislative processes and EU treaty-based mechanisms. The EU is formed by member states' national consent through treaty ratification and a system of domestic pre-legislative controls on consent—parliamentary approval, public consultation and referendum—which operates to limit the nature and extent of EU law. Using the UK as an example to compare with other member states, the article contends that such domestic controls are prerequisites to national incorporation of EU law and strengthen democratic accountability. Consent alone, however, does not provide an adequate basis for accountability of supranational decisions; EU constitutional principles of citizenship, democracy, and political rights illustrate how the EU fulfills a role as protector of rights. The article further argues that the EU's protector role represents partial legitimacy and accountability for supranational decisions. Greater legitimacy and accountability derives from national parliaments' pre-legislative controls under EU law—scrutinizing legislation, monitoring subsidiarity, and exercising veto powers. The article concludes that if these controls are exercised properly, they represent powerful accountability mechanisms.

The EU's Democratization Efforts in the Black Sea Region: The Challenge of ‘Domesticating’ Democracy

The paper looks at the European Union (EU) democratization efforts in the Black Sea region. It shows that there is a clear correlation between the state of democracy of the countries of the region and the degree of their rapprochement with the EU. When it comes to the European Neighbourhood Policy or, more precisely, the Eastern Partnership, the EU's impact has been rather low due to disabling factors inside the partner countries. The paper points to the fact that the democracy-promotion agenda in the Black Sea region is rather driven and dominated by the EU, whereas multilateral cooperation in the region focuses on issues of a more functional nature. The countries of the region do not have a democratization agenda without the EU playing a proactive role. The paper argues that the EU should aim at making democracy an issue of multilateral cooperation in the region to top up its own bilateral efforts with individual countries. One of the ways would be to enhance synergies between the civil societies of the countries. As a first step, it would make sense to include representatives of Turkish and Russian civil society organizations (CSOs) in the work of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum. Additionally, the EU could promote a democracy-related agenda among the existing multilateral institutions of the region. Finally, it would make sense to enhance the democracy-exporting role of the countries of the region that are showing better progress.

From Brussels with love: leverage, benchmarking, and the action plans with Jordan and Tunisia in the EU's democratization policy

With the adoption of the European neighbourhood policy (ENP) in 2003, the European Union (EU) for the first time introduced benchmarking procedures in the realm of democracy promotion, while also establishing the principles of ‘positive conditionality’ and differentiation. In order to exploit its full potential, however, this strategy must be able to define how political development can effectively be measured and monitored, along with the benchmarks chosen for this purpose. Applying insights of democratic and transition theories to the Action Plans concluded with Jordan and Tunisia, the contribution shows that the ENP suffers from the absence of analytical depth as far as concepts and processes of democratization are concerned, along with an arbitrary and largely useless selection of pseudo-benchmarks. While undermining the effectiveness of the leverage model of democratization policies, the EU's lack of clarity and determination seriously contradicts the declared objectives of its democracy promotion policy.

An Alternative Approach to European Union Democratization: Re-Examining the Direct Election of the Commission President

AbstractA successful reform of any system of governance must be well informed of the system's own functional logic. In the context of its democratization, this article explores whether the institutional arrangement of the European Union has developed or behaves more like a presidential than a parliamentary system. Building on that, the authors re-examine the opportunities and feasibility of realizing that model as a step towards more democracy in European governance.

The normative origins of democracy in the European Union: toward a transformationalist theory of democratization

Institutional democratization has made considerable progress in the history of the European Union (EU). Mainstream theories of democratization, however, fail to capture this process because they are wedded to the nation-state context. This paper therefore proposes a transformationalist theory of democratization beyond the state. EU democratization results from the conflict about the redistribution of political competences between institutional actors in a multilevel system, in which liberal democracy is the shared norm of legitimate authority. To the extent that institutional actors, who push for further integration in order to increase efficiency, undermine existing democratic institutions at the national level, their competitors can put into question the legitimacy of integration by invoking the shared liberal democratic community norms and shame them into making democratic concessions. The normative origins of democracy in the EU are illustrated in case studies on democratic membership conditionality, legislative rights of the European Parliament, and the institutionalization of human rights in the EU.

The EU's democratization agenda in the Mediterranean: a critical inside-out approach

Democracy promotion in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains a central pillar of the foreign policy of both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), despite the failure of ‘dem...

Consensus to Contestation: Reconfiguring Democratic Representation in the European Union in the Light of 19th Century United States Democratization

This article explores how proposals for democratizing the European Union (EU) according to a supranational, contestational model are likely to disrupt its existing political system. The current EU is characterized by a dual system of representation that combines the representation of member states with that of individual citizens. Democratization typically entails enhancing the representation of individuals at the expense of state prerogatives. It is thus possible to make a pertinent analogy with the antebellum United States, which also featured dual representation, and where a great wave of democratization took place following Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829–1837). As the system of representation there became more majoritarian, John C. Calhoun led the calls for introducing new anti-majoritarian constitutional safeguards. A transatlantic comparison suggests the contestational system born of EU democratization will require institutional innovation in order to prove viable. In this context, Calhoun's theory of nullification, an ex post political mechanism wielded by the units to stymie federal legislation, appears more appropriate as an anti-majoritarian bulwark and better able to engender constitutional debate over competences than is the EU's stillborn judicial principle of subsidiarity. In similarly Calhounian fashion, a bottom-up procedure of constitutional amendment originating in the units is further proposed as a way of establishing unit acquiescence to greater supranationalism.

The Effects of the European Union's Democratic Conditionality: The Case of Romania during Accession

The EU's political conditionality has been a powerful although not always effective instrument for promoting democratic standards in accession countries. It has exploited the leverage that Brussels enjoys over them because a failure to comply can call EU entry into question. However, because of domestic constraints the implementation of the conditions has not been as straightforward as is sometimes assumed. In Romania's case, problems of state capacity and government reluctance over reform have persisted for much of the accession period. The country's record before EU entry shows a limited, and in some cases belated, effort in overcoming deep-rooted problems of political effectiveness over conditionality. On the whole, there was more success in Romania with formal responses to the EU's political conditions than with inducing behavioural changes to underpin their implementation. Nevertheless, it may be said that Romania's record here was more impressive when viewed diachronically in terms of its own democratic development than cross-nationally when compared with other candidate countries from post-communist Europe. This article draws on three fieldwork trips to Romania in May 2001, October 2003 and November–December 2005, funded respectively by the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust with a fellowship, and the ESRC with a fellowship for 2004–7 to work on ‘Europeanising Democratisation? EU Accession and Post-Communist Politics in Slovakia, Latvia and Romania’. During these three visits, 94 elite interviews were conducted in Bucharest. Additionally, the article draws on some interviews concerning Romania in Brussels, December 2002 and October 2005.

Turkey's Compliance with European Union Democratic Conditionality: Resistance or Transformation of Identity?

This article sheds a light on the recent legal, political and social developments in Turkey, which led to intense debates in the society on the freedom of expression and the protection of minorities. Author chooses these issues, since they represent cracks in the establishment of the Turkish identity by traditional state elite. Turkey's candidacy process to the European Union highlighted those cracks and caused the emergence of an identity crisis. Those issues have been among the main issues in the negotiation process with the European Union for membership. Author analyses these recent developments by looking at their reflections in the liberal and progressive Turkish media. Finally, she concludes that the success of the Turkish compliance with the human rights criteria of the European Union will depend on the resolution of those issues through democratic means, necessary legislative changes and reconciliation within the society.

The European Union Democratic Deficit

I outline the current debate over the European Union democratic deficit in terms of differing methodological approaches towards the realization of freedom and basic rights to political participation. Federalists opt for a model of freedom as noninterference and autonomous self-determination by proposing to tie basic rights in the EU to a univocal form of European-wide popular sovereignty. Although skeptics argue that the EU lacks the fundamental basis for such European-wide democratic self-determination, they ultimately defend a similar view of freedom as noninterference with their appeal to the collective will of the member states. Democratic revisionists instead point to the novel democratic potential of institutions in the EU such as the Open Method of Coordination for mediating overlapping sovereignties. I conclude using the example of basic rights to effective participation for immigrants and minorities to illustrate the strengths of the revisionist view over views that appeal to the principle of subsidiarity.

The European Union's Democratic Conditionality and Domestic Politics in Slovakia: The Me ) iar and Dzurinda Governments Compared

THE PROCESS OF MONITORING CANDIDATE COUNTRIES for EU membership has in the past decade become much stricter than ever before, compared with previous enlargements, in terms not only of the scope but also the specificity of conditionality demands. This is evident with respect to both economic and political conditions, but it is the latter which is particularly visible and which has a wider significance for European integration. For the EU has moved resolutely down the path of high as well as low politics and, thereby, into areas traditionally regarded as internal to states. This is demonstrated most recently by the debate, and also controversy, over a formal commitment on human rights. It is also clear that the EU has moved beyond conditions of formal democracy to those pertaining to substantive democracy or qualitative conditions such as the role of political parties and political participation, the independence of the media and an active civil society as well as human and minority rights.' While there has been a general growth of conditionality on the part of international organisations (IOs) in the 1990s, the EU has been at the forefront in pushing both the political and economic versions of this. Some other IOs have been advocates of particular aspects of substantive democracy, like the Council of Europe (COE) over human rights and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) over minority rights as well as fair and free elections, while others, like NATO, have remained committed to more formal requirements (in its case, civilian control over the military and the existence of a constitutional state). The EU, however, has developed an ever more extensive portfolio of conditionality demands and increasingly so in recent years. It has elaborated on and added to the original Copenhagen criteria set out in 1993.2 The reasons for this trend are several-the end of the Cold War and hence of the predominance of security concerns over democracy promotion; the EU's own political dynamic in a federalising direction; and, in particular, the awareness in Brussels of the various problems of accommodating so many still unconsolidated new democracies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with their communist legacies.

Complying with the European Union's Democratic Conditionality: Transnational Party Linkages and Regime Change in Slovakia, 1993-1998

PRE-ACCESSION RELATIONS BETWEEN the EU and prospective member states involve a progression through a series of stages: policy reorientation towards Brussels leading to membership application, the formalisation of links (notably with an Association agreement), various pre-negotiation consultation procedures and then, finally, negotiations for entry. An obvious way in which prospective member states are affected is through policy choice, content and commitment and of course economic interests. But perhaps more telling is the impact and influence on elite mentalities in new democracies emerging from international isolation as these are likely to be. Such influence, deriving from ever closer contacts with political and other elites in established democracies, may well be system-reinforcing. Normally it has been assumed that the systemic influence of the EU is conditional on actual membership and tending over time to promote the consolidation of new democratic regimes.1 However, prospective entrant countries have to satisfy various basic requirements, of which the most political is the democracy test. New democracies, which are still likely to be in transition at the time they apply for membership, have to demonstrate they are moving in the right direction, have a potential for stability and meet a range of particular criteria. Increasingly, the EU's criteria have moved from mainly procedural conditions (e.g. rule of law, separation of institutional powers, free elections, freedom of expression) to include also criteria of substantive democracy, such as the role of political parties as a vehicle for political participation, the pluralism of the media, the importance of local government and an involved civil society. The Copenhagen criteria, established at the European Council meeting in 1993, included human rights and respect for minorities as well as the rule of law and stable democratic institutions.