Samenvatting

This qualitative research assesses the European Union’s (EU) democracy promotion, through the analysis of eight milestone policies, implemented between 1995 and 2014 in Tunisia.
The idea is that these policies should be analyzed over an extended period, rather than separately. This is because the international normative stance of the EU is relatively new, and therefore still an experiment.
The conclusion is that the democratization aims of the EU are primarily focused on commercial agreements, and there is a preference for stability over democratic reform. Furthermore, the policies appear to be quite vague in general.
However, the analysis over time reveals certain improvements: there is an increasing tendency towards prioritization of democratic reform, detailed explanation of strategy and transparency. Also, certain experiments are visible – especially the EU’s aim to push regional cooperation to the intergovernmental level. Although the EU made certain mistakes, it proved to be transparent by acknowledging its errors, and to establish new strategies.
Since the European normative stance is relatively new, it is positive to see certain improvements over time, although very slow. Therefore, it is recommended to the EU, to clearly prioritize objectives in the policy documents, to define strategies with short and long term goals,to explain what the results of former policies were, what that means for the upcoming ones, and to improve agenda setting.
For further research, it is recommended to analyze the EU democratization initiatives over extended time frames again, with focus on main initiatives. The focus should be on how the policies evolve over time. It would obviously be interesting to compare future results with this research, to see how it progressed.