Changing patterns of contestation of democracy support in the EU. Comparative analysis of EU member states’ practices in EU democracy support

The EU is one of the key global actors engaged in democracy support, especially in its immediate neighbours. The main stakeholders are not only EU institutions such as the European Commission but also its member states. There are however growing tensions between these actors regarding the EU’s democracy support aims, content, and preferred geographical directions (Godfrey and Youngs 2019). This is even more visible when both Eastern and Southern neighbours deal with aggressive wars, conflicts and destabilisation of the international system. Scholarship on democracy promotion and support is linked with contestation. Scholars underlined the importance of negotiation and contestation in defining and implementing democracy promotion norms and programmes (Poppe, Leininger, and Wolff 2019). As regards the contestation of democracy support as a norm – a novel taxonomy (Buzogany, Costa, Góra 2021) is employed. Drawing from Wiener (2014) it allows capturing contestation of democracy support on several levels of generality related to debates on what type of democracy member states and civil society actors want to promote, how, and where. It also reveals tensions between various understandings of democracy (including illiberal one) among various actors (Krastev 2018; Zielonka and Rupnik 2020; Meyer-Resende 2018; Galston 2018). The main aim of the paper is to provide a comparative picture of what and how is contested and by whom in selected EU member states. The analysis focuses on whether the democracy support is value-based or more pragmatic. In addition, we analyse how both political or developmental aspects of democracy support are intertwined in each analysed case. We would focus on understanding how through contestation we can map the dynamic of the relation between these two aspects. Empirically, the paper is based on systematically mapped and qualitatively analysed discourses on democracy support in EUMS between 2014 and 2022/3 by various types of actors involved: from governmental to civil society. It presents key findings of SHAPEDEM-EU WP5 analysis of EU member states’ discourses on democracy support.