Katharina Hoffmann

As hybrid regimes persist, we need to better understand their behaviour in international affairs. Concentrating on business actors, we use a qualitative study of Turkey’s foreign relations with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine in the period 2014– 2018 to explore how hybrid regimes disseminate regime-related principles. Inspired by the concepts of neo-patrimonialism and limited access orders, we argue that hybrid regimes lack cohesion and cannot compel all relevant actors to disseminate a coherent set of regime-related principles. Depending on their domestic environment, Turkish actors transmit both neo-patrimonial closure and competitive openness, which makes Turkey’s hybrid regime a dual agent of transition.

This paper studies how the local governance reforms carried out between 1997–2014 shape state-society relations at Georgia’s local level. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyze how the reforms shape practices and actors at the local level. Research interviews with state officials at the national and subnational levels and citizens of the Georgian district Marneuli highlight both government rationalities and how people react to them. I argue that the reforms, which have been declared to promote participation and accountability, hardly contribute to bridging the huge gap between state and society, particularly with respect to the case of the Azeri minority in Marneuli. Thus far, the newly introduced formal actors at the local level, the municipalities, lack power. Societal action in absence of the state and interaction with the state via informal networks remains dominant. The study contributes to literature on state-building and transformation in Georgia by shedding light on the often-neglected local level and to the debate on external democracy promotion and policy transfer by empirically studying the effect of a policy transfer.

The question of what drives stability of non-democratic regimes remains prominent given the obvious limitations democracy promoters like the European Union (EU) face. Plenty of studies focus on the burgeoning competition between authoritarian and democratic regimes in influencing other state´s regimes. It is severely understudied how hybrid regimes that blend authoritarian and democratic features impact their neighbours. We shine a light on this question with a qualitative study on Turkey, a hybrid regime with increasing regional agency. The paper explores Turkey’s economic engagement in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine during the most recent period of Justice and Development Party rule (2014-2018) since beneficial economic relations are the state’s foremost foreign policy goal. With reference to the concepts of neo-patrimonialism and limited access orders (North et al. 2009), we enhance the understanding of hybrid regimes by emphasizing the co-existence of sectors driven by competitive openness and neo-patrimonial closure. We argue that in hybrid regimes like Turkey the state lacks the power to muster all relevant actors to pursue a coherent foreign policy. Scrutinizing the key economic actors, we observe a high degree of freedom for Turkish actors to disseminate their own stance on the way of doing business. Crucially, Turkish actors disseminate the regime-related principles of the domestic environment they operate in and therefore disseminate neo-patrimonial closure or impersonal competitiveness. Hence, Turkey as a hybrid regime acts as dual agent of transition in its regional neighbourhood.

More than 25 years after the collapse of the socialist regimes in South and Central Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union believe in smooth democratisation of the region turned out to be premature. Likewise, Western actors’ power to fuel democratization fell short of expectations. Western democracy promotion, including the efforts of the EU, had particularly little success in the Eastern Partnership countries Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova. In the meanwhile, in recent years the influence of non-democratic external actors on these countries has increased. These observations call for a better understanding of external actors’ strategies towards the Eastern Partnership (EaP) region. Gaining an adequate picture of opportunities and constraints of democracy promotion in this region requires sound knowledge about the external actors’ varying influence on change or stability of the target countries’ current social orders. This paper takes a first step in this direction. It draws attention to Turkey as an external actor with a domestic social order moving towards authoritarianism. We develop a heuristic for analysing Turkey’s strategy towards the EaP countries that allows us to gain insights on its direct and indirect efforts to manipulate the social orders. The heuristic suggests analysing the discursive and practical dimension of foreign policy strategy by focusing on guiding principles, goals and objectives, the relationship between these three elements as well as the groups of actors in Turkey that carry foreign policy and the groups of actors targeted at in the EaP countries. This approach pays tribute to the growing complexity of international and transnational relations.