The Limited Attractiveness of EU-Style Liberal Democracy

The consolidation of liberal democracy in the countries of its immediate vicinity is an absolute imperative for the European Union: not only because it aims to be situated within a stable and friendly milieu (Wolfers 1962; Schumacher 2018), but because 2022 has seen a proliferation of accession perspectives to neighbouring states – promises the EU will have to live up to in a foreseeable future if it wants to remain a serious actor beyond its borders under an atmosphere of increasing contestation. For this endeavour the liberal transformation of accession candidates is crucial, even more so as internal rule-of-law mechanisms still show only limited effect on EU-members exhibiting democratic backsliding. Thus compromising on the “Fundamentals” during accession processes would risk to strengthen an alliance of illiberals, once they become members. But “something out there… doesn’t like liberalism” (Menand 2018) and the aim of this paper is to shed light on the illiberal contestants to the EU’s liberal transformation efforts. Drawing on the differentiation between disruptive and ideological illiberalism by Kauth and King (2020), the focus is not only on the limited attraction of liberal democracy for power-hungry elites aiming to stabilise their power base (the emergence of a stabilitocracy [Kmezić 2019] and the EU’s contribution in their making has been convincingly analysed [Richter and Wunsch 2020; Börzel and Lebanidze 2017; Pavlović 2023]), but also on those actors who reject the core ideas of liberalism, in particular “liberal neutrality” understood as absence of positive doctrines on how people should conduct their lives (Shklar 1989). They consequently find it hard to align with values like equality, pluralism, non-discrimination and tolerance as stipulated by Art. 2 TEU. In this respect the paper builds on an understanding of “post-liberalism” as resulting from an “encounter with and repulse against certain aspects of liberalism” (Laruelle 2020). Consequently, we focus on actors: which actors participate in the process of contestation, which strategies they adopt, which coalitions they build (in the sense of normative communities) (Casier 2022), how they mobilise identities, ideas and interests but also – importantly – how they assign meaning to the EU’s demands and offers and thererfore also asking how the EU matters to these actors(Fisher Onar and Nicolaïdis 2013). The paper takes stock of the various frontlines of contestation which form as actors engage in processes of rejection (refusal to engage), objection (evoking protest), de-legitimation (actively adopting antagonistic positions) and reframing (assigning new meaning). It draws on the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine and presents results of the project “(Il)liberal Contestation: The European Union as a Contested Liberal Actor in the Neighbourhood”. It hopes to contribute to the questions of the (in)effectiveness of the EU’s strategies for democracy support, how the specific kind of democracy promoted by the EU externally is challenged, but also feed into a discussion on competition between different international players as “norm diffusers” (Casier 2022) or gravity centres (Kneuer and Demmelhuber 2016).