Regional Integration and Democratization: the EU and ASEAN Compared

区域一体化是国家在特定地理区域内为物质利益进行合作的过程，通常通过超国家或政府间机构进行。区域一体化一直与成员国内部的民主化联系在一起，并主要被视为民主化的推动者。这是基于欧盟（EU）在其南部和东部扩大期间在促进和稳定民主方面的成功；欧盟在各加入国之间推动民主，帮助许多后威权国家建立了民主。这将民主化与欧洲化进程联系起来，欧洲化描述了欧盟的政策和政治如何影响现有和潜在成员国的政策和政治。特别是，欧盟通过扩大附加条件对民主化产生了影响；欧盟在东、南扩过程中对候选国的要求被视为决定性因素。国际社会对民主的承诺并不是欧盟所独有的，东南亚国家联盟（ASEAN）也在不断发展，包括对民主的承诺，以及对任何向威权主义倒退的谴责，这种倒退曾在它们的大部分历史中困扰过它们。此外，一些东盟国家，特别是印度尼西亚和菲律宾，已经把促进民主作为主要的外交政策目标，这给了东盟新的民主口号更多的信任。然而，这两个实体最近都因民主宣传不力而受到批评。欧盟正在经历一场民主危机，一些成员国，如匈牙利和波兰，似乎已经倒退回威权主义。此外，欧盟的影响可能是美学上的，因为自加入以来，许多国家在民主实践方面没有取得进展或改善；欧盟“锁定”民主的能力似乎很弱。欧盟的欧洲邻国政策（ENP）利用条件来促进欧盟的价值观，如民主，但在乌克兰和波斯尼亚-黑塞哥维那等许多国家效果有限，这表明欧盟作为民主促进者的作用可能被高估了。​东盟民主国家也存在民主稳定的内部问题，如2014年泰国政变和最近印尼民族主义的兴起。本研究旨在比较欧盟和东盟各自在成员国之间促进和嵌入民主的能力方面的影响。具体来说，这篇文章的兴趣在于质疑区域一体化与民主化之间的积极联系，这一点变得更加重要，因为欧盟和东盟的结果都表明，它们在促进民主方面的努力存在缺陷。这也将有助于理解任何一个地区成功的解释因素，并解释每个地区国家之间民主标准的差异。通过考察欧盟和东盟在促进和嵌入民主方面的战略和有效性的差异，本研究将揭示区域一体化对民主化的影响，以及为什么这两个地区都存在具体问题。这将使区域一体化对各国国内政策的影响变得清晰，突显出有多少国家拒绝促进国际民主，以及为什么区域一体化项目难以稳定民主化的结果。

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.