“Civil society”, defined as a “partner in governance”, is a key component of EU-rhetoric and political engineering in the European Neighborhood Policy. The paper analyzes how social movement organizations from the Euro-Mediterranean and Eastern Partnership deal with EU “civil society” support and balance their strategies of conflict, cooperation and cooptation in their complex relationship with state and EU actors. We analyze “civil society” support as an interactive process: the EU has developed specific instruments such as selection procedures, dedicated budget lines, civil forums or training workshops which monitor interactions with non-state actors. Voluntary organizations and social movements in turn develop strategies in order to resist cooptation or on the contrary to be recognized as a legitimate partner and gain access to the decision-making arenas and to financial and symbolic resources. Using official EU-documents, archives of voluntary organizations and qualitative interviews carried out with social movement actors in four neighborhood countries (Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia, Egypt), we analyze the repertoires of actions and positions of non-state actors – reaching from astroturf representation to direct support of social movements. While much of the discussion on the interaction between social movements and state actors has developed focusing on established democratic regimes, our contribution will bridge this scholarship with recent developments in the comparative study of authoritarian systems. The uprisings in the Arab world point particularly to the paradox that these revolutionary movements were led by actors outside the “civil society” supported by Western donors. In this context, the paper asks to what extent EU political engineering allows circumventing more radical actors and delegitimize social movements. Adding to this, we also seek to contribute to the debate on cooptation of social movements by comparing cooptation mechanisms (or their functional equivalents) in authoritarian and democratic regimes.
