The European Union's International Promotion of Lgbti Rights: Promises and Pitfalls by Markus Thiel

Author:Markus Thiel [Thiel, Markus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000431803
Google: Kg43EAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57342565
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

European neighborhood policy (ENP)

In countries in the EU’s so-called ‘neighborhood’, where the accession perspective remains distant, the EU’s leverage over policy creation and reform diminishes even more. These diverse countries ranging from Belarus to Morocco already feel that they have been distanced from the EU by not being included as potential member states. The ENP came into existence in 2004 to provide states in the adjoining region that were not considered potential future members, such as Georgia or Egypt, with an elevated partner status and comprehensive aid. It explicitly includes a commitment to human rights and gender equality in order for states to receive this special status. The ENP contains two different regional groupings for a total of 16 countries, with the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean ones ranging from Morocco to Jordan as well as six countries in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine) that are subsumed under the EU’s ‘Eastern Partnership’ (see Figure 4.1 above). Theoretically, a closer collaboration is envisioned between the bloc and the six Eastern countries whose focus is on intensified trade and security relations. Notably, the Mediterranean countries have Muslim majorities, whereas the Eastern states are mostly Orthodox Christian. While they all display different forms of religiously or culturally based homophobia, they vary distinctively in terms of Islamophobia and their rejection of EU- propagated norms.

At a fundamental governance level, one could argue that the EU’s ENP should have improved the quality of democracy with its multisectoral policy as well as normative objectives. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit tracked the quality of democracy over time from 2006 to 2019, which approximates the length of the ENP in existence, on a 1 = worst to 10 = best scale. In it, the so-called Southern Mediterranean ENP members, ranging from Morocco to Syria, mostly remained stagnant and, in few cases, improved (e.g. in Algeria) or deteriorated (e.g. in Egypt or Lebanon) only slightly. The outliers were Tunisia with an improvement of over three points reaching 6.72 in 2019 and Syria which decreased substantially from an already low starting position of 2.36. Both of these changes are, however, unrelated to the EU’s influence and are in large part based on the repercussions emerging from the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War, respectively. Furthermore, in four of the six Eastern Partnership states, the quality of democracy declined. Only in Georgia and Armenia, the indicators improved slightly by about one point (Economist Intelligence Unit 2020). Hence they illustrate the relative lack of progress or, alternatively, the minimal influence of membership in the EU’s neighborhood policy framework.

In order to obtain a more fine-grained analysis, a look at the state of LGBTI rights in the ENP region is useful. Despite monetary aid and partial visa liberalization, no sufficient incentives in exchange for trade or aid concessions exist in either ENP sub-region. As a result, reforms in terms of LGBTI rights are rather slow or completely lacking, as Neighborhood Policy and Eastern Partnership review reports have shown (Bentzen and Przetacznik 2020).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.