Zabihullah Rezaei; Ali Mohammad Haghighi
Volume 25, Issue 108 , March 2020, , Pages 1-32
Abstract
The ultimate goal of soft (normative or civil) power is to change the behavior of the actors in non-aggressive ways. Therefore, the effectiveness of the EU's soft power in post-communist ...
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The ultimate goal of soft (normative or civil) power is to change the behavior of the actors in non-aggressive ways. Therefore, the effectiveness of the EU's soft power in post-communist countries ought to be measured in terms of the concept of transformative power and the real roles the EU's plans and efforts have played in the transition process. EU’s transformative power in Central Asia, defined in terms of the solidarity of candidates (inside) and external governance (outside), pursues ambitious infrastructural goals whose effectiveness is evaluated in this research. This study is to answer the following questions: “What are the main leverages of EU's normative power trying to implement EU objectives in Central Asia” and “how effective have they been?” The immediate response is that "the main objectives of Europe's normative power in Central Asia are to transform Central Asian societies to function economically as full-fledged market economies and politically as democratic states. Since EU’s attempts pursuing these economic and political transformations in Central Asia have had little success, the effectiveness of EU’s normative power has gained little credit. Using descriptive-analytical and an inferential methodology and utilizing library research method based on objective-historical data and available evidence, this study has tried to shed light on the research hypothesis. While confirming the hypothesis, the findings of the paper have revealed that the Central Asian societies and governments economically prefer the Chinese state capitalist model to the full-fledged market economy model and politically consider the Guided Democracy Model to be superior to the Liberal Democratic Style proposed by EU.
