Whose Norms? Domestic Contestation and Patterns of Norm Diffusion in the European Neighbourhood

Research on the impact of international actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has focused predominately on the EU’s democracy support policies in the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the United States’ (US) policies of selective engagement in both the European Union’s (EU) eastern and southern neighbourhood. The scholarship has mainly zoomed in on Western policies aimed at political transformation via offering external material incentives and empowering liberal reform coalitions, inter alia banking on the rational choice paradigm. Similarly, the role of illiberal powers in undermining democracy support or directly strengthening authoritarian rule has mirrored the examination of Western democracy support policies by emphasising the policies of rewards and punishments pursued by powerful autocracies. Scholarly attention to the softer non-coercive mechanisms of influencing political change in the European neighbourhood by external actors has been significantly less pronounced and the attractiveness of the political ideas of both liberal and illiberal actors and their softer means of influencing the neighbourhood have more often been neglected than scrutinized. This paper aims to fill in this gap by 1) examining the competing norms of political authority of both liberal and illiberal actors in the eastern and the southern European neighbourhood and 2) by investigating the societal reactions to externally promoted political norms in the neighbourhood. When external political norms hit home, they often encounter domestic contestation. This empirical reality goes against the classical study of norms centred around a dichotomous understanding of normative impact as norm adoption or norm rejection. The underlying assumption of this scholarship is a linear notion of norm adoption as a process that goes through stages and may begin with a strategic rhetorical commitment to norms but ends up with norm internalization and identity change. External agency plays a major role in these accounts. This paper zooms in on various contested scenarios where external political norms meet with domestic resistance. We are interested in understanding better the domestic processes that unfold in the encounter between external and domestic political norms and how this may lead to external norms undergoing adaptations as they become localized. The scholarship has recognized instances of decoupling where norm diffusion does not go beyond legal adoption and fails at the stage of application and practice. It has not considered comprehensively the effects of domestic norm contestation on norm diffusion. Therefore, this paper emphasises how the study of soft liberal and illiberal influences in the European neighbourhood advances our knowledge of political change. It asks three main questions: (1) What are the external political norms that the societies of the European neighbourhood are exposed to and whose norms are they? (2) Who are the main domestic actors that determine the degree of acceptance, modification or rejection of external political norms in the societies of the European neighbourhood? and (3) How does domestic norm contestation look like and what does it mean for political norm diffusion in the European neighbourhood?