EU promotion of democratic governance in the neighbourhood

Abstract

This article analyses the effectiveness of the EU's promotion of democratic governance through functional co-operation in the European neighbourhood. In a comparative study of three policy sectors in three countries (Moldova, Morocco, and Ukraine), we show that the EU is capable of inducing neighbouring countries to adopt policy-specific democratic governance provisions in the absence of accession conditionality. In line with the institutionalist hypotheses, we find that effective rule adoption can be secured by strong legal specification of democratic governance elements in the EU sectoral acquis and international conventions. However, successful rule adoption does not necessarily lead to rule application.

Keywords:

• Democracy promotion
• democratic governance
• European neighbourhood policy
• external governance
• sectoral co-operation

Acknowledgements

This paper presents the results of a project entitled ‘Promoting Democracy in the EU's Neighbourhood’ led by Sandra Lavenex and Frank Schimmelfennig within the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) ‘Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century’; see http://www.nccr-democracy.uzh.ch/nccr. Financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) is gratefully acknowledged. We wish to thank the participants of the external governance workshop in Lucerne, the reviewers for this special issue, and the members of the SNSF review panel for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the paper. We would also like to express our gratitude to the EU officials, representatives of international organizations, and Moldovan, Moroccan and Ukrainian officials and civil society activists who provided the information for our empirical study.

Notes

Until the NAPC was established to implement the 2000 competition law, the State Anti-monopoly Committee supervised competitive practices in the Moldovan economy according to the 1992 Law on Restrictions of Monopolistic Activities and Development of Competition.

Telquel: ‘Conseil de Concurrence. Le coup de pouce royal’ (Fahd Iraqi), no. 337, 2009.

The ‘Rabat process’ was triggered by the Ministerial Euro-African Conference on Migration and Development in July 2006 and mainly consists of preparatory meetings for the next conference.

There is an office for refugees and stateless people responsible for assistance to and protection of refugees under the authority of the Foreign Minister which, however, has been closed for some years. In the absence of a national asylum procedure the UNHCR office in Rabat undertakes the determination of refugee status.

Telquel: ‘Le Maroc brade la question des immigrés’ (Laetitia Grotti), no. 68, 2003.