The problematic role of EU democracy promotion in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh

Abstract

This article looks at the interdependences between the democratisation processes in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh and the management of the Karabakh conflict, focussing on the EU’s democracy promotion policies. The article argues that the EU’s normative foreign policy in the South Caucasus has been limited by the permanence of the protracted conflicts, in two interrelated ways. First, by not addressing the conflicts the EU focused on long-term goals but failed to provide short-term incentives towards peace. Second, by allowing only a limited involvement in the protracted conflicts, especially inside Karabakh, the EU was perceived as a reluctant partner, undermining its normative credentials.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Why do Peace Processes Fail ‘From the Inside’?

“…As such, throughout the 1990s, the EU played a distant role and hesitated to engage directly in managing the con licts in the South Caucasus ( Baev, 1997;Whitman & Wolff, 2010;Simão, 2012;Pashayeva, 2015;Relitz, 2016;Shelest, 2016). The con licts in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh remained largely outside of the EU's area of interest and actions, leaving the OSCE to act mostly on its own, as the main responsible actor dealing with the con licts of the region ( Whitman & Wolff, 2010;Pashayeva, 2015;Paul, 2015;Shelest, 2016).…”

EU normative performance: a critical theory perspective on the EU’s response to the massacre in Andijon, Uzbekistan

“…To date, the concept of "Normative Power Europe" (Manners 2002) has dominated scholarly works on the values and norms informing the EU as an actor in its wider Eastern neighbourhood (e.g. Kelley 2006;Bosse 2007;Grimm and Leininger 2012;Simão 2012;Börzel and Van Hüllen 2014;Ghazaryan 2014;Burlyuk 2015), including assessments to what extent the EU can be considered a normative or a strategic actor (e.g. Johansson-Nogués 2007;Haukkala 2008;Seeberg 2009).…”

De Facto States and Democracy: The Case of Abkhazia

“…Until now, research on de facto states has been mostly conducted by political scientists or specialists in the field of security studies, international relations or area studies (Pegg, 1998;King, 2001;Lynch, 2002Lynch, , 2004Kolstø, 2006;Popescu, 2006Popescu, , 2007Berg, 2007;Kolstø and Blakkisrud, 2012;Caspersen, 2008aCaspersen, , 2009Caspersen, , 2011Caspersen, , 2012Protsyk, 2009;Caspersen and Stansfield, 2011;Simão, 2012;Pegg and Berg 2014). Contributions by political geographers deal with particular problems of de facto stateness.…”

“…A growing number of studies have dealt with the phenomenon of democratisation in de facto states since the second half of the first decade of the 21 st century, e.g., Protsyk (2009Protsyk ( , 2012 focused on democratisation in Transnistria, Azam (2013) on Somaliland, Kolstø and Blakkisrud (2012) on Nagorno-Karabakh, Smolnik (2012) on elections in Nagorno- Karabakh, von Steinsdorff (2012), von Steinsdorff and Fruhstorfer (2012), and Berg and Mölder (2012) focused on the comparison of democratic institutions and their legitimacies in de facto states in the post-Soviet area, Simão (2012) on the role of the EU in democracy promotion in de facto states. The presented article reflects in part the results of these studies, and at the same time, brings a new and detailed view of the examined topic.…”