Conclusion and Discussion

Abstract

The EU’s success in sustaining democratic change is well documented in the context of enlargement. Analyses of EU democracy promotion largely concur that EU conditionality has been key in triggering and locking in democratic reforms in the accession countries. Beyond the circle of candidate countries, however, studies come to a much bleaker assessment of the EU’s influence and potential (see Chapter 1). Outside the enlargement framework, the EU’s incentives are too weak and its foreign policy actorness is too incoherent, while the authoritarian forces in non-candidate target states are too resilient. The EU’s lack of consistency and determinacy, meeting high political costs on the part of partner governments, creates an expectation that the failure of the EU’s democracy promotion to non-candidate states is overdetermined.