Understanding Dissensus on Liberal Democracy in the EU’s Neighbourhood

The EU has been facing several challenges over the last decade. Internally, the EU has been dealing with authoritarian populism, illiberal tendencies in member states, growing Euroscepticism, the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, and the EU’s ongoing legitimacy challenges. Externally, the EU has been struggling with competing power centres such as China and Russia, COVID-19, instability in the broader neighbourhood and accompanying challenges emanating from adjacent regions, as the refugee challenge. More recently, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the gross violation of several norms of international law have further complicated the geopolitical environment of the EU’s foreign policy. While the world continues to be multipolar with rising alternative and autocratic governance models, the multilateral system for mitigating or addressing crises has eroded by unilateral actions in breach of international law, emphasising the need for the EU to develop its capacity to deal with the increasing geopolitical and hybrid challenges in its Neighbourhood. Against this backdrop, the main purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of the phenomenon of rising competing powers around the EU, contesting the EU and liberal world order, but also to offer an analytical framework for studying the interaction of internal (domestic) and external (in foreign policy) changes in these norm breakers and their influence on the EU’s neighbourhood. To capture the main changes in these alternative models of governance and their approach to international relations, we offer the concept of dissensus, which is discussed in three steps in this paper: In the first section, we define the concept of dissensus from the domestic level by focusing on both anti-liberal dissensus and anti-democratic dissensus. The second section offers a definition of dissensus at the international level with a focus on similarities and differences of dissensus from its related concept "contestation". The third section empirically uses the countries of the broad EU’s Neighbourhood to introduce a typology based on the possible results of the interaction between internal and external dissensus on liberal democracy.