Mastering Space by New Mean of Power Politics: Democratization

Abstract

Democratization has been dominating international relations since the end of the Cold War. Moreover, democratization assistance became embedded in states' foreign institutions, as it is seen in the examples of the United States and the European Union. As states perceive international relations from a neo-realist perspective, it raises a concern about their reasoning behind democracy promotion. This thesis attempts to find a correlation between states' geopolitical objectives and democratization. Its goal is to prove that democratized countries tend to incline towards the assisting power, and this benefits the assisting power's geopolitical objectives. By studying EU and US geopolitical goals and applying them on the democratization of Ukraine, this thesis attempts to find how democracy promotion in Ukraine benefited the USA and the EU. To support the claim that ideology can be used to pursue geopolitical goals, it draws a parallel with the Communist coup d'état in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and analyzes how the USSR benefited from supporting the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Keywords Democratization, soft power, smart power, Cold War, communism, United States, European Union, USSR, geopolitics, democracy assistance