The Democratization of Eastern Europe: Where Western Policy Can Lead

Abstract

This paper aims to look at the progress of democratization in Eastern Europe during the post-Soviet time period 1992-2021 and develop a generalizable roadmap for the future of Western policy so that the effects of democratizing efforts in the region can be maximized. The paper opens with a brief introduction to the most influential purveyors of the Western liberal democratic agenda in Eastern Europe – The European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and United States foreign policy initiatives. Following this, after a brief literature review, I discuss the issues with existing scholarship on this topic, namely its age, relatively narrow scope, and lack of emphasis on generalized applications to policy. I then attempt to lay out a brief history of democratic values and practices in the Soviet Union. This includes the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet approach to democracy and how democratic freedoms unfolded over time in the Soviet Union. This allows a more in-depth understanding of how Eastern European governments and individuals perceive democratic ideals, the concept of democracy itself, and Western institutions. Furthermore, this develops and explains the perspectives of those that are creating policy today while dealing with the impacts of the Soviet legacy. These are important for policy suggestions and policymakers to take into consideration when trying to understand how to effectively democratize Eastern Europe. I then present data, including visualizations of this data, from the Varieties of Democracy Institute and the World Values Survey which explicitly show how democracy has unfolded in Eastern Europe throughout the post-Soviet period. Using this data, I correlate trends in democratization and autocratization to policy initiatives by the U.S. and influences of NATO and the EU. I find that the EU and NATO democratize through similar means by using passive leverage and the carrot of membership to influence domestic politics, but that this is generally limited to the pre-accession process. I further look at U.S. foreign policy, including sanctions and financial assistance, and find that proper targeted funding can be a very useful democratizer. I also find that there are several weaknesses in these mechanisms – namely decreased trust in foreign actors and lack of punitive mechanisms – that limit their democratizing effect. Following this, I outline several policy recommendations that I believe can be feasibly implemented by either NATO, the EU, U.S. policymakers, or future policymakers and organizations. These recommendations include the development of mechanisms within NATO, the EU, and future organizations to punish and potentially expel member states that commit to authoritarianism, taking advantage of passive leverage of international organizations by educating populations on the benefits of being part of an organization, extending active leverage to ensure continued democratic consolidation within member states, focusing in tandem on funding civic society organizations and making sure that they have a sustainable infrastructure and constituency, ensuring that policy initiatives are adequately associated with and developed by local actors, and taking hardline stances against democratic backsliders.