Contesting Illiberalism. The EU as a Contested liberal Actor

Why despite the countless instruments available, the offers of access to the wealth of the worlds largest market and, in some cases, even promises of membership have the ambitions and steadfast work of the EU to transform its immediate neighbourhood into an area of stability, democracy and wealth been rewarded with only limited and fragile success? Conflicts in the neighbourhood are on the rise, implementing the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) remains a fraught process and the prospect of further enlargement often seems foreboding. Russia, instead of becoming a reliable partner is increasingly adversarial protecting its sphere of influence. This project is designed to shed some light on the reasons for the EUs limited success in the intensifying illiberal dynamics embroiling its vicinity. It draws on the broader end of liberalism debate and asks the question of how the EU is faring with these dynamics in a geographic area which is crucial for its security. The concern here is that these dynamics may be a reaction to the liberal transformation process the EU itself wants to induce. A better understanding of the rationales of the contestants is crucial. While often perceived as an irrational rejection of the promises for peace and stability created by rules, institutions and markets and an outdated adherence to blunt power-politics, this attitude hampers developing a deeper understanding of the attractiveness of illiberalism outside the EUs borders, but also how alliances are forged with actors inside the EU. The interest of the project is on how the EU has become a struggling liberal actor in a vicinity where liberalism seems to have lost its gloss and to point to the dialectics between the EUs role as a promoter of a liberal order and its engagement in geo-political competition. The project focuses on the perception of the EUs offers by illiberal contestants. The objective is to map the varieties of contestation arising in the EUs vicinity, to address how and why actors engage in contestation and which local patterns of illiberalism we can discern. This builds the basis for comparative analysis and for further theoretical reflections on the EU as a contested liberal actor. The aim is to establish how EU demands and offers resonate in particular social contexts and to understand how actors rationalize and argue strategies vis-à-vis those demands. The project further analyses how this in return affects the liberal genetic code of the EU as external illiberal actors exploit the new winds of change to their advantage and connect with the Unions internal manifestations of illiberalism. And in the midst of this (il)liberal contestation the question is asked how the EU will change or needs to change in a more competitive multi- polar world, particularly if not all of its member states are gravitating towards the same pole.

The most effective challenges to liberal democracy in Europe's neighbourhood are not made against Europe. They are made in its name. Governments, parties, churches and media in candidate countries - Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and the Western Balkan states - rarely reject European values outright. They claim them, and redefine them. Restrictions on independent courts, on critical journalism or on the rights of minorities are presented not as departures from European standards but as defences of sovereignty, tradition and the will of the majority. Transparency rules are invoked to constrain civil society. Democracy is detached from the protection of minorities. CONLIB followed these arguments as they were made, in speeches, in the press and on social media, across several years. The most consequential result concerns where the conflict runs: not between the Union and its outside opponents, but through both. Politicians in candidate countries borrow arguments from governments and parties inside the EU and receive political cover from them, while disputes that begin in the neighbourhood re-enter European debates. Russia operates in this space less as an external power than through connections built over decades, some inside member states. Contestation works through feeling as much as through argument. The conditions attached to membership can be recast as humiliation, as unequal treatment, as proof of double standards; once that framing holds, the Union appears as the party violating the principles it demands of others. This is why seemingly technical disputes turn political so quickly. An argument over farm subsidies, judicial appointments or forest management becomes an argument about the normative trajectory of Europe. The wider lesson is that enlargement is not the handover of a finished rulebook. What democracy, the rule of law and belonging to Europe mean in practice is settled during accession, not before it. Norms can therefore erode without anyone rejecting them: laws are passed, procedures are preserved, and their effect is quietly withdrawn. Georgia shows how far this can travel. The governing party there presents itself as the true European force, betrayed by a Union that has strayed from its own values; it has suspended the accession process without giving up the claim to Europe. For enlargement policy this changes what needs watching. A law can be checked against a list; how it is used, and whether it holds politically, cannot. The findings have fed into training for parliamentary staff in Ukraine, into work with civil society and the wider public on democratic resilience, and into a European research network that will keep watching after the project ends. European rules can be transferred. Their meaning only takes shape in use.