Analyzing The Strategy For European Union's Democracy Promotion In Central Asia

The European Commission, in a communication on'The European Union's Role in Promoting Human Rights and Democratisation in Third Countries', proclaimed that it intends to be evaluated on its performance in realizing the EU's policy targets (in this field). The paper is aimed at inspecting it concretely through a case of the five Central Asian republics. It will disclose that the EU's democratization policy is high on rhetoric but stays low on practice. EU's democratization assistance to the Central Asian states is far lower when compared with other newly independent states. Strong instruments such as sanctions are scacely adopted; what's more, the principle of positive conditionality, which has been laid down in almost all EU strategy documents and agreements with the Central Asian countries, is short of observance. Thus EU's democratization policy leaves an impression of tameness and imposes low pressure exertion on the incumbent elites. The lack of determination in advancing the EU's norm promotion agenda is surprising. As far as Central Asia's non-conformance to liberal principles is concerned, one would have expected a more resolute schema. In most states, presidents have obtained wide powers to rule by decree in post-communist. Parliaments and courts are so weak that they are often ignored. Opposition has been circumscribed, co-opted, and/or repressed. Almost all elections have had dubious legitimacy and the emergence of independent mass media has been hampered; In short, authentic democracy is either absent or falls short of the mark. The region can be divided into a more semi-authoritarian north-eastern tier and an authoritarian or even dictatorially governed south-western tier; the former consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the latter of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which have both gradually become of a tragic yet farcical restaging of Stalinism's police state.To analyze the reasons for the EU's rhetoric-reality gap, the paper is made of five parts. Apart from the prelusion and the conclusion, the first part will put across the EU's motivations from the aspects of country, region and globe respectively. The second part investigates the EU's concrete democracy instruments to the region. The third part evaluates the effect and asks why so high a rhetorical profile has been implemented so poorly. It argues that the EU's poor performance in realizing its stated policy goals is because its interests in Central Asia focus more on the perceived issues than on political change. Namely, the EU is driven more by its self-interest than by the norms and principles of democratic governance.