European Contestations of EU Democracy Support in Lebanon

Since the launch of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership in 1995, democracy support has been a pillar of the relationship between the EU and Lebanon. In 2006, with the entry into force of the EU-Lebanon Association Agreement (signed in 2002), the country became a target of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which insists on supporting “human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Lebanon” through the establishment of independent public institutions and a focus on fighting corruption. Despite the strong discursive emphasis put on the EU’s role in democracy support to Lebanon since the launch of the ENP, the European Union has been criticized for both its objectives and modus operandi. This paper seeks to trace the discursive contestation of EU democracy support practices in Lebanon, with a focus on voices that come from within the EU, both among insiders and outsiders to European policymaking, taking as a conceptual reference the Working Paper on Democracy Learning Loop Concept, developed in the framework of the Horizon Europe project SHAPEDEM-EU (Achrainer and Pace 2024). First, the paper provides an overview of who speaks about Lebanon in Europe, both inside and outside the EU institutions. Second, it maps the contestation of EU democracy support practices, considering whether discursive change has coincided with three phases of European engagement: post-2005; post-2011; post-2019. Based on the works of Jones and McBeth (2010) and Stone (2012) on narratives in the political and policy spheres, the paper identifies two main clusters of narratives into which to categorise different specific types of contestations, based on the different identification of the EU as the ‘problem’ (villain) and/or the ‘solution’ (hero). To do this, the paper is based on the qualitative discourse analysis of twenty-nine motions for resolution in the European Parliament between 2005 and 2024, and eight in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in October and November 2024. The data is further enriched by open-source information on EU democracy support to Lebanon.