Topic of thesis: The topic of my thesis would be to evaluate the impact of the European Union activity in promoting Democracy outside the EU borders. The choice to extend the Europeanization study, mostly linked to the members states and the accession countries, to the Neighbourhood is due to the objective to study whether and under which conditions the EU is able to induce domestic changes in the absence of a membership perspective, that is considered to be the main tool for domestic compliance. the methodological approach would be to focus on the Linkages and Leverage established by the EU vis-à-vis the target countries in order to extert some kind of pressure in promoting domestic democratic chances.
Abstract: The aim of the reasearch thesis is to provide an analysis of the democratic activity of the European Union outside the European border, in order to verify if the European Union is able to act as a credible democratic actor toward the countries that are part of the newly established Neighbourhood Policy. The hypothesis is that the EU, through a series of linkages established in the ENP, namely institutional, trade, cultural or economic assistance linkages, could trigger internal democratic developments. This hypothesis is, therefore, linked to the concept of the EU as being a democracy promotion actor. The history of the EU democracy promotion is quite young compared to the whole European integration process. A structural and formal discourse around democracy firstly appeared with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and, with the creation of the EU, democracy and its consolidation became one of the core objectives of CFSP; after that, in 1993, the Copenhagen Criteria formally established the condition of democracy for the Central and Eastern Europe. As a result of the last enlargement the EU has become a democracy promoter actor developing a series of instruments that allowed a direct action with the implementation of the political conditionality, in the aftermath of the eastern enlargement the EU established the Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in order to replicate the successful strategy of democracy promotion with the newly countries at the borders. After the enlargement, thus, the EU clearly became a democracy promotion international actor and the new challenge, nowadays, are those countries without membership perspective of the Union. The research question of this thesis is, thus, to see is if the ENP instruments are able to induce domestic changes that conduct to more internal democratization, to evaluate the Union’s potential and main limits in promoting democracy without the main carrot, i.e membership perspective, that allowed the Central and Eastern countries to great efforts during the enlargement process. The evaluation of the impact of the EU will provide a further step of analysis in the theoretical frame of Europeanization studies and in particular in the aspect of democracy promotion.
Research interests: Democratization, Europeanization, ENP, European external governance, Middle East and North Africa regional policy, European Mediterranean Policy.
Graduated from: Università di Bologna
Degrees obtained: BA, international studies. MA, International Relations
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