Assessing the effectiveness of EU democracy promotion strategies in the ENP: Between coherence and complementarity

The EU has been deploying a number of democracy promotion strategies towards the ENP countries, some with a degree of success and some which have underperformed. Its Member States have also developed a number of strategies and actions towards the same countries in a bilateral way. Do these strategies complement the ones by the EU? Do they offer a coherent message around democracy promotion? How does the alignment or mismatch between the EU and the Member State strategies impact the success of these actions? The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of these strategies and at the same time generate a new paradigm for ‘effective democracy’ by bringing together the idea of coherence and complementarity in a new typology of policy actions towards the ENP and offering a refreshed theoretical framework through multilevel governance and Europeanisation to map out the factors that lead to success or failure. Using data from the REDEMOS project, the paper reviews the types of actions the EU is engaging in across six countries: Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia; and the types of actions seven key Member States (Germany, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the three Baltic states) have undertaken between 2010 and 2022, to support democratisation efforts in the region. Where complementarity and coherence are high, actions are likely to be successful, and when they are both low, actions are likely to fail. However, the question becomes: what determines success or failure when there is a mismatch of either complementarity or coherence?