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Competing Political Models and the Prospects for Political Change in the European Neighbourhood

Democracy
Democratisation
European Politics
Foreign Policy
International Relations
Domestic Politics
Assem Dandashly
Maastricht Universiteit
Assem Dandashly
Maastricht Universiteit
Gergana Noutcheva
Maastricht Universiteit

Abstract

Research on the impact of international actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has focused predominately on the EU’s democracy support policies in the framework of the ENP and the US’s policies of selective engagement in both the eastern and southern neighbourhood. The scholarship has mainly zoomed in on Western policies aimed at political transformation via offering external material incentives and empowering liberal reform coalitions, inter alia banking on the rational choice paradigm. Scholarly attention to the softer non-coercive mechanisms of influencing political change in the European neighbourhood by external actors has been significantly less pronounced, even though the literature on the normative facets of EU foreign policy has been burgeoning. Similarly, the role of illiberal powers in undermining democracy support or directly strengthening authoritarian rule has only recently become the focus of scholarly attention against the background of rising activity in this field of individual players such as Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and of regional organizations such as the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council. The scholarship has examined Western democracy support policies by emphasising the policies of rewards and punishments pursued by powerful autocracies. While the actions of such illiberal players have been attributed to rational motives rather than an ideological commitment to authoritarian rule, the attractiveness of the political ideas of these actors and their softer means of influencing the neighbourhood have more often been neglected than scrutinised. This paper sets out to examine the competing norms of political authority of both liberal and illiberal actors in the eastern and southern European neighbourhood. It seeks to answer the following questions: What is the substance of the norms provided by the alternative political models? What are the mechanisms of soft influence/diffusion? And what are the conditions under which these models get traction in specific countries?