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European Democracy Support Annual Review 2023
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- Richard Youngs,
- Konstantina Alexopoulou,
- Kinga Brudzińska,
- Zselyke Csaky,
- Ricardo Farinha,
- Ken Godfrey,
- Erin Jones,
- Evelyn Mantoiu,
- Elene Panchulidze,
- Elena Ventura
Richard Youngs is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, based at Carnegie Europe. He is also a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick and previously held positions in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as director of the FRIDE think-tank in Madrid.
Youngs has authored sixteen books, the most recent of which are Geoliberal Europe and the Test of War (Agenda Publishing, 2024), Rebuilding European Democracy: Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age (Bloomsbury/Tauris, 2021) and The European Union and Global Politics (Macmillan, 2021).
The EU has vowed to be more receptive of its partners’ needs and concerns. To ensure the “listening to others” mantra does not become a performative quick fix, the union must clarify how this commitment fits with its desire to exert geopolitical power.
The tussle between democracy and authoritarianism has drastically altered Europe’s geopolitical landscape
The EU’s fragmented approaches to the crises of climate change, conflict, and democracy fall short by not addressing the mutually reinforcing links between them. Brussels needs an integrated strategy to tackle the emerging three-way nexus and mitigate the vulnerabilities it creates.
In response to great-power rivalry and the weaponization of interdependence, the EU has adopted a geopolitical approach to economic statecraft. To build resilience and maintain its international credibility, the union will have to balance its pursuit of economic security with broader foreign policy goals.
A discussion of the defense of democracy in the EU in 2024.
The EU’s focus on security has caused it to shift from a proactive to a defensive democracy support strategy. As a new institutional cycle begins, the union risks downgrading its global democracy promotion efforts too much and relinquishing one of its distinctive geopolitical advantages.
If, for many years, the EU dangerously neglected the need for hard, defensive power it now risks moving to other extreme – giving hard power such pride of place that it detracts from the more consequential trends that will redefine the world order.
The 2020-2024 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy has been instrumental in advancing EU democracy support through a broad range of commitments. Yet, the rapid evolution of challenges to democracy has outpaced the Action Plan’s capacity to adapt.
After more than a decade of democratic regression, three major crises have acted to reshape global politics in recent years: climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic legacy, and geopolitical conflict.
In his new book, Senior Fellow Richard Youngs delves into how global crises—from the climate crisis, the post-neoliberal economic shift, to rising geopolitical tensions—are reshaping democracies worldwide. While today's multi-crisis era fuels authoritarianism in some regions, others find new paths to democratic renewal.