Regional Integration and Democratization: the EU and ASEAN Compared

Regional integration is the process of state co-operation within a specific geographic region for material gains, often via supranational or intergovernmental institutions. Regional integration has been linked to democratization within member states and modelled primarily as a promoter of democratization. This is based off the European Union's (EU) success in promoting and stabilising democracy during their southern and eastern Enlargements; the EU's democracy promotion across acceding states helped institute democracy in many post-authoritarian states. This links democratization to the process of Europeanization, which describes how the EU's policy and politics affect the policy and politics of current and would-be member states. In particular, the EU has had an impact on democratization via enlargement conditionality; the demands of the EU on candidate countries during the southern and eastern enlargements are seen as the determining factor. International commitments to democracy are not unique to the EU, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has evolved to include commitments to democracy and the condemnation of any regression into the authoritarianism that plagued the majority of their history. Furthermore, some ASEAN states, particularly Indonesia and the Philippines, have embraced democracy promotion as a primary foreign policy aim, giving additional credence to the ASEAN's new democratic mantras.
However, both entities have been criticised recently for the weakness of their democracy promotion. The EU is experiencing a democratic crisis as some member states, such as Hungary and Poland, have seemingly fallen back towards authoritarianism. Additionally, the EU's impact may have been aesthetic because many states have not progressed or improved on their democratic practices since accession; the ability of the EU to 'lock-in' democracy appears weak. The EU's European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which draws on conditionality to promote EU values, like democracy, in neighbouring states has a had limited effect in many states like Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina, suggesting the EU's role as a democracy promoter may have been overestimated. Similarly, in the ASEAN it is worried the democratic members have been too weak in promoting democracy to their authoritarian neighbours, particularly Myanmar and Cambodia who have been heavily criticised internationally for human rights abuses. The ASEAN democracies also have internal problems with the stability of democracy as witnessed in Thailand's 2014 coup and the recent rise of nationalism in Indonesia.
This research aims to compare the effects of the EU and ASEAN on their respective ability to promote and embed democracy amongst member states. Specifically, this piece is interested in questioning the positive association between regional integration and democratization, which has become more important as the results in both the EU and ASEAN show that their democracy promotion efforts have been flawed. This will also help understand the explanatory factors with either region's successes and explain the variance in democratic standards between states within each region. By examining the differences in the EU's and ASEAN's strategies and effectiveness in promoting and embedding democracy, this research will expose the effects of regional integration on democratization and why there are specific problems across both regions. This will bring clarity to the effect of regional integration on the domestic polity of states, highlighting how many states have rejected international democracy promotion and why regional integration projects struggle to stabilise the results of democratization.