Civil Society Organisations as Agents of Europeanisation in Armenia

Abstract

The accelerated expansion of democracy in the 1990s, turn the Western countries into the main democracy promoters worldwide. Existing literature identifies several dimensions or policies of democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period, as well as two distinctive agents for it: the state and the civil society. It is widely argued that the EU became involved in the promotion of democratization and Europeanization in its Neighbourhood by providing democratic assistance to the governments of the target countries and then gradually turned towards the civil society sector. It is believed that the ''bottom-up'' approach of Europeanization and democratization might have opened new avenues for EU's engagement with wider society in these countries and have subtly accelerated the process of democratization there. On the example of Armenia, the study at hand aims to verify this claim and assess the effectiveness of EU-promoted policies in the country from a new perspective, particularly by considering, first, whether EU-funded local NGOs might have contributed to the democratic transformation happened in Armenia in 2018, and, secondly, by looking into the way people change their attitudes towards the EU after interaction with these NGOs. After having conducted a survey with participants of an EU-funded project in...