The Eastern Partnership: civil society in between the European and domestic level: the case of Georgia

Abstract

This article applies a governance-based framework to produce a more nuanced view on the democracy promotion efforts of the European Union (EU) within the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and to trace less direct avenues of EU impact on democratisation. The central claim is that the EaP offers democracy-promoting actors such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opportunities for empowerment, thus altering the existing opportunity structure. To verify this claim, this article focuses on the case of Georgia and how NGOs there have made use of EaP-related opportunities based on qualitative data acquired during several research visits. The EaP appears to have indeed moved away incrementally from a traditional bilateral framework to a network mode of governance, allowing NGOs to become acknowledged partners and creating opportunities for them. This research uncovers a number of initiatives from within Georgian civil society to attempt to make use of these opportunities. However, the eventual impact has been heavily limited by existing internal relations between NGOs and Georgian government and the EU is unable to exert enough pressure to change this domestic deadlock.

Keywords:

• civil society assistance
• Eastern Partnership
• Georgia
• democratisation
• governance

Notes on contributor

Thijs Rommens is a researcher at the Institute for International and European Policy at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is currently working on his PhD on the EaP as an opportunity structure for Georgian NGOs.

Notes

1. The term “colour revolution” is loosely applied when describing different forms of popular protest in authoritarian regimes in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although all cases share similar traits, there is no single template for all of them. The most cited examples are the three post-soviet cases of Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) which all led to the ruling presidents' resignations. For their part, these shared traits with events in Serbia in 2000 and earlier in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Croatia. Important for this article is that in all cases civil society organisations which had enjoyed international support have been active in the protests.

2. About 900 km lie between the westernmost part of Georgia and the most Eastern part of the EU (the Northern Black Sea shore of Romania). The westernmost part of Georgia is Abkhazia, which is currently not under the control of the government in Tbilisi; another 100 km needs to be added when excluding Abkhazia from this geographic exercise.

3. It is important to note that the EaP does not replace the ENP, but is intended to reinforce it. Whereas the ENP also included countries from North Africa and the Middle East, the EaP only includes countries from the Eastern neighbourhood of the EU. Another caveat is the non-participation of Belarus in the ENP while it is part of the EaP. Furthermore, the ENP's funding instrument (ENPI) is also used to finance the Strategic Partnership with Russia which does not take part in either ENP or EaP.

4. These numbers only serve as an indication as to how important democratisation is for both actors; specific and detailed data on financing regarding civil society is not available. The necessary caveats are in place here: besides these formal allocations, both actors have other sources of funding that may affect civil society but are not included in the respective policy instruments described here. The August 2008 war has also led to a sudden increase in budget allocated to Georgia by both actors making it hard to distinguish between allocated money in their anticipated budgets and post-war assigned help.