Jean Monnet Lecture by EmergEU

This is a guest lecture organised by the Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence on Crises and Emergencies in EU Integration (EmergEU). EmergEU is embedded within the existing interdisciplinary Centre for European Research in Maastricht (CERiM).
In the upcoming three years (2024-2027), EmergEU will explore crises and emergencies in EU integration from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Centre seeks to illuminate the evolving discourse surrounding the multifaceted challenges related to the responses to crises and emergencies that have threatened the EU’s foundations. Recent examples include issues related to the rule of law, the COVID-19 pandemic, energy security, environmental crises, and the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine. Addressing such challenges demands responses that may reshape the EU’s institutional structures and policymaking processes.
In its first year (2024-2025), the Centre will address the conceptualisation of crises and emergencies in the EU context from a multidisciplinary (law and political science) and multilevel (supranational and national) perspective.

These lectures will take place physically and online. 

Abstract: Democratization theory has long emphasized the international embeddedness of regime change processes and the role of external factors in shaping democratic or authoritarian trajectories. Yet analyses of post-2010 democratic erosion within the European Union from this perspective remain relatively scarce.

While the literature has extensively examined the effectiveness of post-accession conditionality, the enforcement instruments available to EU institutions, and the EU-level political preferences guiding their use, far less attention has been devoted to how EU Member States governed by illiberal elites have leveraged foreign policy to shape the external—European and international—context of domestic democratic erosion. Similarly underexplored is the extent to which geopolitical disruptions associated with the emergence of a multipolar international order have facilitated authoritarian tendencies within established Western democracies.

This lecture introduces the principal pre-2025 foreign policy models of autocratization within the Western alliance system, advances a theoretically grounded explanation for the unexpectedly rapid pace of democratic regression in the United States, and offers a forward-looking assessment of how deepening autocratization in the U.S. affects the political prospects of illiberal actors within the European Union.