Values, wallets, and walls: Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the EU’s shifting democracy promotion and protection relationalities in its Eastern neighbourhood

The EU’s democracy promotion defines much of the Union’s engagement with its Eastern neighbourhood and further afield. Yet the democratization progress among the EU’s Eastern neighbours has proven uneven and, in some cases, even reversible. Russia’s all-out military invasion of Ukraine has only further exacerbated domestic and regional politics in Eastern Europe, making democratic reform stand second to security considerations and, thereby, opening space for a renewed push of autocratization. Against the backdrop of this critical juncture and the related arguable change in the EU’s policy from promoting to protecting democracy in its Eastern neighbourhood, this article enquires into the established and emerging practices of the EU’s differentiated democracy support, focusing on three discernible foreign-political ‘relationalities’: ‘enlargement’, ‘engagement’ and ‘estrangement’ (3Es). Putting relationship at the epicentre of analysis in the EU’s democratization/counter-autocratization dynamics vis-à-vis its Eastern neighbourhood, this article embraces the ‘relationality’ perspective and thereby brings in insights from IR to the hitherto pursued democratization and European studies approaches. In so doing, the article compares and contrasts how the ‘values, wallets and walls’, as the three corresponding rationalities of the EU’s democracy promotion and protection through ‘enlargement, engagement and estrangement’, have manifested throughout the past three decades in the EU’s relations, especially with Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia – and to what end so.