Democratization in the European Union’s neighbourhood: Does the EU have the tools to support new state building?
The post-communist revolutions of 1989 were the start of a genuine wave of democratization which led to the emergence of ten or more electoral democracies in Central and Eastern Europe a decade later. The European Union embarked on a journey of its own, which led its institutions and member states to support democratic consolidation in the post communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. For the EU, this journey involved the development of tools and approaches which appeared to be highly successful in driving post communist states to change. The EU had to define its own criteria and evaluate democratic progress made by candidate states. The successful transformation dynamics led EU policy makers to believe that enlargement has been the EU’s most successful foreign policy tool a tool used to promote the EU’s norms and values – above all, liberal democracy – in its neighbourhood.

Researching the mechanisms behind this success teaches us several things about EU supported democratization which have implications for any processes of democratization that may unfold in the EU’s neighbourhood. Among them: incentives matter, democracy is often evaluated by the presence of an effective state and neutral bureaucracy is hard to create in a post-authoritarian setting. These will be discussed in the session.

Populism: strategy or an ideology?
In the last decade scientific attention for populism has increased, thanks in part to electoral successes by alleged populist parties in the western world, such as Forza Italia in Italy, Front National in France, Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs in Austria, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, One Nation in Australia and the Tea Party Movement in the USA. Despite all kinds of studies about manifestations and variations of populism in various countries, a consensus about the very nature of populism seems however still lacking. Is populism is a specific ideology or should populism be judged as a communication-strategy?

I will argue that populism may be considered as an ideology with certain key concepts, that is the people, the elite and democracy. However, in the modern democracy and the current 'populist Zeitgeist' these keyconcepts are very suitable for strategic exploitation. As a result, the question whether a populist discourse should be seen as a strategy or as an ideology is basically a question about the motivations of the producer of this discourse. Does he/she really believe in his words, are they really an expression of a deeply rooted and genuine vision of the political? Or is the use of the populist concepts only used to convince voters to choose for an agenda which does not necessarily correspond with these concepts? As long as it is not possible to get into people’s heads to find out their motives, a clear-cut answer to these questions is of course impossible. At the most we could make an educated guess by means of contextual analysis and interpretative understanding. Therefore, I will attempt to make a framework in order to make the guess as educated as possible and hence to distinguish between a strategic and an ideological populism. As I will argue, this question about the motivations is a relevant one as it is connected to the question how dangerous populism is for liberal democracy.