Eu Strategies on Governance Reform: Between Development and State-Building by Wil Hout

Author:Wil Hout [Hout, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415622035
Google: mnF6tgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13714331
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T08:40:21+00:00

The EU in Central Asia: successful good governance promotion?

Katharina Hoffmann

ABSTRACT A reappraisal of security and economic interests has led to increased engagement by the European Union with Central Asia in the past few years. As a new foreign policy tool the EU adopted a new partnership strategy for Central Asia in 2007. The strategy aims to integrate both interest-based and governance-related policy ambitions. In the two years since the strategy was adopted activities concerning the implementation of good governance-related initiatives are still rather weak. This article discusses the obstacles and prospects for good governance promotion in Central Asia. The prospects for external good governance promotion in stable authoritarian environments are limited. Domestic economic pressure increases the willingness of the Central Asian incumbent governments to enter into international agreements and widens the scope of external good governance promotion. Yet the prioritisation of interest-based policy objectives and the reluctance to employ conditionalities on the part of the EU provide an opportunity for the Central Asian regimes to limit their concessions and feign reforms. Initiatives focusing on grassroots levels appear to be the most promising in terms of the diffusion of ideas of good governance and democracy.

Until recently Central Asia hardly existed on the map of European foreign policy. Only during the early years of the 21st century did the European Union start paying more attention to the region, intensifying its financial engagement and readjusting its foreign policy tools for the area. The Strategy for a New Partnership was adopted by the European Council in 2007 as a core foreign policy instrument.1 The EU’s new engagement was motivated by the new strategic relevance of Central Asia, as EU enlargement had brought it closer to the borders of the Union and the region’s vast supply of energy resources was being recognised. Accordingly, the EU’s foreign policy ambitions in the region are motivated by both interest-based issues and value-based policy aims like good governance and democracy promotion.

The strengthening of ‘democracy, human rights, the rule of law and good governance’ is presented as one of three priority areas of the strategy. However, in the first two years since adoption of the strategy, implementation efforts and results concerning the promotion of good governance have been weak. Set against this background, this article discusses the obstacles and prospects for good governance promotion in the framework of the latest EU strategy for the five former Soviet republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The EU’s Central Asia strategy depicts good governance in a rather technocratic way, focusing on administrative reform and transparency of public finances. Yet it is emphasised that good governance, the rule of law, democratic process, civil society and respect for human rights are fundamentally intertwined.2 For these reasons, the article focuses both on the wider context of good governance and on the technocratic use of the term. It discusses efforts to implement good governance and democracy-related projects formulated in the strategy rather than the impact the EU’s approach has had on the general governance performance of the

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