Archive / Working Paper
Promoting Democracy Backwards
17/11/2006 By Peter Burnell
The idea and practice of international democracy promotion has gained considerable attention over the last few years. There is now both a substantial multinational industry involved in promoting democracy abroad and a significant accumulation of scholarly studies examining the performance.
In the United States, President George W. Bush has given impetus to the cause of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East especially, as a major plank in his administration’s strategy for countering international terrorism.
In Europe, the effectiveness of the European Union’s application of democratic conditionalities (the so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’) to accession candidates from post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has been widely acknowledged.
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Keywords
Civil society Conflict Democracy promotion European Union USRelated publications
- Alliance of Civilizations: international security and cosmopolitan democracy
- Democracy and Human Rights in the Barcelona process: conclusions of a workshop at FRIDE
- Democracy and Security in the Middle East
- Democracy promotion and the european left: ambivalence confused?
- Survey of European Democracy Promotion Policies 2000-2006
- The reluctant debutante: The European Union as promoter of democracy in its neighbourhood
Bio author: Peter Burnell
Peter Burnell is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Until recently, he was founding editor of the international journal "Democratisation".
