Comparing Western Democratic Leverage: From Tirana to Tripoli

What are the conditions under which external actors positively influence democratization? A growing literature analyzes the external dimension of democratization, focusing, for instance, on the power of EU enlargement conditionality to spur democratic reform in the post-communist world, and especially the Balkans. This paper compares the effect of Western leverage over transitions in the Balkans and the Arab Spring countries. Western democratic leverage is a function of external power and internal vulnerability to external democratizing pressure, but it is also related to factors such as Western political will, the influence of countervailing external powers, and nationalist resistance. The article demonstrates that on all of these dimensions, Western democratic leverage over the Arab Spring countries is significantly lower than it has been over the Balkan states, and thus that the prospects for democratization in states such as Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia are dimmer.