Trust, anger and the limits of EU democracy promotion

In the EU’s enlargement debate, attention usually centres on Brussels—legal benchmarks, progress reports and diplomatic bargaining. But in countries hoping to join the bloc, politics is often decided via informal power networks, fragile institutions and the everyday effort of navigating uncertainty.

In this episode we shift from the top-down to the ground level as Jessica Hendrick speaks with Morten Bøås, research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), who is leading RE-ENGAGE’s comparative fieldwork across Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine.

Together, they take listeners behind the scenes of how the project gathers original data in places shaped by war, protest and political pressure. Methods range from training local university students to conduct trust surveys to vignette experiments that test how citizens respond to crises and competing external “relief packages” from China, the EU, Russia and Turkey.

What do early findings reveal? What does “trust” really look like in a hybrid regime? How can the EU design programmes that people actually feel, rather than reforms they never see? And what should Brussels learn about democracy promotion to avoid repeating past mistakes?

This is the third episode from the RE-ENGAGE podcast series The Neighbourhood, which unpacks how countries hoping to join the EU navigate political change and outside pressure, and what that means for Europe’s democracy and security. The podcast series is produced by ECFR, and co-published by ECFR and NUPI. The RE-ENGAGE project is led by NUPI, and is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101132314.

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