Earlier this year, the EU awarded a Horizon grant worth €3 million to a consortium of 14 universities for a project called ‘Embracing change: Overcoming obstacles and advancing democracy in the European neighbourhood’ (EMBRACE). So where is this European neighbourhood? “I’m not overly keen on the name,” Bosse says. “But you can think of all the countries around the Mediterranean and the former Soviet countries.”

Her part of the project revolves around economic modernisation and its interaction with democratisation. The focus is on authoritarian and hybrid regimes, the latter combining democratic traits (e.g. frequent and direct elections) with autocratic ones (e.g. political repression). “We’ll explore whether the EU’s democracy-promotion tools are still up to the task, and how they need to be adjusted in a constantly changing global context.”

Naïve economic beast

Shouldn’t countries democratise themselves? “Not everyone wants to become like the EU—and that’s perfectly legitimate,” Bosse says. In her view, the EU has fallen for the naïve belief that democracy flows logically from commerce. “The EU is inherently an economic beast that approaches the rest of the world through trade agreements. But does this alone actually promote democracy?”

Historical context is crucial. “Countries that started out fairly autocratic after the Cold War—think Azerbaijan, Belarus or Turkmenistan—have pretty much remained on that track.” Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, however, had already started to develop democratic systems by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. “Here you see a steady but uneven improvement.”

The two big roadblocks, she says, are Eastern Europe’s deeply ingrained corruption problem and state capture by oligarchs, who impede reform processes through political influence or dominance of the media. “Ukraine, for example, had great difficulties developing a public prosecutor’s office that could reign in the oligarchs’ monopolies.”