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Democracy promotion / Working Paper

Is European democracy promotion on the wane?

13/05/2008 By Richard Youngs

The EU routinely asserts that the promotion of democracy and human rights is central to its international identity.

However, while in some places the EU has a relatively strong record as a supporter of democratic values, it is failing to respond effectively to the emergence of a vastly more challenging environment for democracy promotion.

This paper, written by Richard Youngs for CEPS, reveals serious limits across three strands of democracy policy – the magnitude of incentives offered in return for democratic change, the degree of critical pressure exerted for democratic reform and the scale of European democracy funding.

Even where the EU is building on the initiatives it has pursued for the last two decades, the paper demonstrates that these policies fail to measure up to the challenges posed by the new international context.

This working document is available at CEPS' website.

Keywords

Democracy Democracy aid Democracy promotion European Union Political Reform

Related publications

• The democracy promotion policies of Central and Eastern European states
• Trends in democracy assistance: what has Europe been doing?

Bio author: Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Democratisation programme at FRIDE. He also lectures at the University of Warwick in the UK. He studied at Cambridge (BA Hons) and Warwick (MA, PhD) universities.