European Union External Developmental vs. Political Democracy Promotion: The Case of the Eastern Partnership

Sammanfattning: The European Union’s external democracy promotion has increasingly and widely been characterized by most of the field’s scholars, with its overwhelming focus on supporting the overall socio-economic developments rather than nurturing the political underpinnings of democracy. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has undertaken certain efforts to promote the shared values in the neighbourhood countries but has yielded marginal results at best. But this does not mean that the ENP has not promoted democracy in the neighbourhood. Though there is a huge amount of research on the ENP, little has been researched regarding which democracy promotion approach: developmental, political or mix of them- has characterized the EU’s democratization efforts in the neighbourhood. In this regard, as an effort to advance this analytical tradition in the field of the ENP studies, this thesis has aimed to paint a picture and present a profile of the EU’s democracy promotion approach in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) that is the ENP’s Eastern neighbourhood dimension. Thus an analytical framework for developmental democracy promotion approach has been adopted from Thomas Carothers and this has theoretically informed by modernization and Europeanization theories. To conduct the study, a qualitative research design with the EaP as the exploratory single case has been established. The various sources of data have been collected and analyzed via different methods. The findings have been that the EU has determined a prevalently developmental democracy promotion approach within the EaP but the EU’s most recent embarking upon supporting ‘’deep democracy’’ in the neighbourhood may balance the trend.