3. EU and Regime Dynamics in Eastern Neighbourhood
4. ENP Action Plans
5. Conclusions: EU Democracy Promotion
V. International Influences
1. Leverage of (Non-EU) Democratic West vs. Russia
2. Linkage with (Non-EU) Democratic West vs. Russia
3. Democratic Diffusion
4. Conclusions: International Influence
VI. Domestic Contexts
1. Cost-Benefit of Rule Transfer 2. Structural Determinants
3. Institutional Determinants
4. Actor-related Determinants
5. Conclusions: Domestic Contexts
VII. Synergetic Effects of Domestic, EU and International Factors
1. Configurational Logic
2. Configurational Logic vs. Case Studies and Argument
3. Probabilistic Logic
4. Conclusions: Synergistic Effects
VIII. Conclusions
1. Results and Argument
2. Theoretical and Policy Implications3. Methodological Implications
Sergiu Buscaneanu is Research Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Germany. He has been Visiting Researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the University of Hamburg, Germany. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Buscaneanu has been a Chevening, EMECW, and DAAD Scholar and currently serves as a country expert for the V-Dem project.
This book examines the effectiveness and consistency of EU democracy promotion in its Eastern neighbourhood between 1991 and 2014. It concludes that the EU’s democratization role in this region was, not surprisingly, weak within this time period. However, this weak role only took shape under four domestic and transnational conditions: (a) a higher cost-benefit balance of rule transfer, (b) a lower structural difficulty a given country would need to overcome on its way towards a democratic regime, (c) increased levels of authority distribution across branches of power, and (d) a higher extent of democratic diffusion resulting from regional interactions. In those countries where these domestic and transnational conditions were present, as in Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, the EU’s democratizing influence was in causal terms only the tip of the iceberg. Most variation in regime dynamics remains to be explained by domestic and transnational contexts.