The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The Barcelona Process since 1995

Chapter IV. Democracy Promotion in the Mediterranean

‘The EU now has a comprehensive strategy for the
promotion of democracy, human rights, the rule of law,
and “good governance” in place covering the entire
globe. […] The EU is making an explicit effort to
project its own identity of a democratic polity into its
relations with third countries’

It can be argued that Europe considers liberal democracies as the one and only legitimate political regime. According to Schmitter and Brouwer, Europe is convinced that its positive post-war experience of democracy in pluralist societies is a ‘model’ for the rest of the world.52 With respect to its Mediterranean neighbours, with very few exceptions, the EU is surrounded by authoritarian regimes. The EMP could therefore be seen as the instrument par excellence by which to export the European model of democracy. This chapter introduces the concept of democracy promotion as a means of European foreign policy and examines how it is applied within the EMP framework. In its rhetoric, the EU links the donation of aid and development assistance, amongst other things, to democracy. I will introduce the concept of ‘conditionality’ describing its different characteristics and whether and how it is applied in EFP. This chapter does not aim to evaluate the success achieved in the field of European democracy promotion. Rather, it asks whether it is indeed a centrepiece of the EU’s Middle East and North African relations. The fundamentally conflicting approaches of neo-realism and social constructivism were deliberately presented in the previous chapters to test which approach can best explain European foreign policy in this realm.