The ‘Golden Carrot’ as a Sticking Point: Destructive Dissensus and the Limits of EU Conditionality in Georgia

Why did the prospect of EU membership for Georgia from 2022 not lead to compliance with EU conditions, but to increasing autocratization, a contestation of EU conditions and democracy writ large? Literature on conditionality (Börzel & Lebanidze, 2017; Schimmelfennig & Scholtz, 2008; Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2004, 2020) suggests that the membership prospect is a ‘golden carrot’: a stronger incentive for compliance than weaker forms of institutional partnership like association. But puzzlingly, once Georgia was included into the circle of (potential) candidates, it contested the EU’s conditions and outright rejected liberal democracy. This article applies Coman & Brack (2025)’s typology of dissensus as a conceptual frame to analyse both the conflict between the EU and the Georgian government regarding democratic norms and the EU’s limited response to Georgia’s autocratization. Following Coman & Brack (2025), dissensus describes conflicts between actors about fundamental principles of liberal democracy, their implementation, or both. When the goals of actors are heterogenous but relate to the practice of liberal democracy, dissensus is ‘severe’; but when the goals of actors are heterogenous and related to the principle of liberal democracy itself, dissensus is seen as destructive. The article proceeds in two steps: first classifying Georgia’s relationship with the EU between 2021 and 2021 into these two types of dissensus, and then analysing how the EU’s conditionality policy was unable to achieve compliance in the face of dissensus. To do so, it conducts qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2023) of a body of 30 semistructured interviews combined with opinions, reports and statements from the EU made between 2021 and 2024. Firstly, the article traces how ‘severe dissensus’ over the implementation of EU conditions – initially in the context of the 2020/2021 political crisis and then the conditions related to its (potential) candidate status in 2022/2023 – transformed into ‘destructive dissensus’, seeing the Georgian government contest EU norms and liberal democracy per se by 2024. Secondly, it analyses the EU’s response to these two types of dissensus. During the first phase of ‘severe dissensus’, the EU misapplied conditionality by only granting the ‘carrot’ without insisting on reform. When the conflict deteriorated into ‘destructive dissensus’, the EU saw no other options but to respond with the ultimate ‘stick’, freezing the accession process. This demonstrates the EU’s limited ability to govern by conditionality where dissensus is severe or destructive.