In person icon The Growing Dissensus Surrounding Liberal Democracy and its Implications for EU Policies in the Eastern Neighbourhood

Abstract

Submitted as part of a special issue project, this is one of two panels setup to explore how specific EU neighborhood policy instruments have been impacted by the growing dissensus within and beyond the EU surrounding some key tenets of liberal democracy. In this first panel, contributions will collectively explore how mounting dissensus surrounding liberal democracy has impacted the legitimacy and efficiency of the EU’s external action specifically in the Eastern neighborhood. The presented papers share a common understanding of dissensus which conceives of the “current conflict[s] around liberal democracy [as] possess[ing] an inherent conductivity, effectively transferring dissent between the social, legal, and political arenas and making it more complex and challenging”(Coman & Brack, 2023). As a result, the EU is held to act both internally and externally in an environment where different conceptions of democracy compete, while several of its core principles are also disputed. This has led to new forms of endogenous contestation as well as renewed forms of exogenous competition, both with far-reaching implications. Whether or not the nature of the underlying conflicts resulted in the prevailing dissensus being either constructive or disruptive (Coman & Brack, 2023: 7-8) has proven particularly determining for one set of widely debated European external policy instruments: the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). With this foundational distinction – between constructive and disruptive dissensus - in mind, the specific case studies presented in this panel will assess how dissensus has impacted the membership prospects as well as partnership prospects across the EU's Eastern neighborhood. The three papers focus on a set of compelling national case studies - i.e. Belarus, Georgia and Armenia - which each reflect a different situation where EU-supported democratisation processes have face challenging forms of dissensus both among the elites in the partner country, as well as within the EU itself. The selected case-studies also cover the gamut of the formal nieghbourhood partnerships present in the region, from the absence of formal dialogue with Belarus, to the halting enlargement talks with Georgia, by way of the bilateral partnership with Armenia.

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