Conceptual blueprints Over the last decade, and particularly following the transformation in world politics since 1989, ‘good governance’ became a term in inflationary use both by comparativist and international relations scholarship. Although its longevity may be questioned by those adhering to the rather more conventional analytical foci of economic liberalisation and democratisation, its pertinence has been consistently hailed by those subscribing to the promotion of flexible but value-driven patterns of (collective) rule-making. This paper aims at throwing light on the nature and aspirations of the European Union’s (EU) involvement with the promotion of political change in the Mediterranean, through the newly-instituted Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), known also as the Barcelona Process [1]. Clarifying some conceptual and definitional problems confronting the ‘good governance’ approach to Euro-Mediterranean politics and society will be central to the development of a more profound understanding of the emerging regional formation. A distinction crucial to the line of argument advanced in this paper is between democratisation and good governance. Grosso modo, the former refers to the process of attaining a democratic end-product with reference to the actual governance of a polity or political community or, as the case of the EU qua ‘sympolity’ clearly illustrates [2], of a plurality of polities locked together in a system of mutual governance. In this sense, the democratisation philology emphasises the institutional means by which democratic principles and processes are to become part of a polity’s modus operandi, with the view to establishing conditions of public accountability, political legitimacy - both input- and output-oriented - and active citizen participation. Although no consensus definition of democratisation (either as a process, strategy or otherwise) can be said to exist, central to its attainment are, inter alia, the praxis of competitive periodic elections, individual and/or collective executive accountability, meaningful legislative representation of the demos (whether single or composite in nature), a participatory civil society, and the rule of law (with or without a formal/written constitutional expression), to mention a few. This list could well be extended to include a variety of good democratic practices and procedures in the workings and composition of domestic institutions of governance, principles referring to some form of separation of powers, citizenship rights (and duties), respect for human and minority rights, promotion of associational-type organisations, policy responsiveness to the collective citizen body, and so on. The problem associated with the ‘democratisation approach’ to the promotion of political change in a state or group of states is that its substantive component and desired end-situation - ie, democracy - is intimately linked to the Western (liberal) political tradition. Hence, employing the language (and assorted value spheres and normative orientations) of democratisation might not be entirely, partly or at all appropriate as a guide towards the promotion of substantive political change in other parts of the globe, such as North Africa, the Middle East or South East Asia, whose component polities are characterised by different belief-systems, cultural traditions, political practices, civil and military arrangements, principles of economic development and organisation, social structures and conceptions of the ‘good polity’ as compared to the average Western liberal state. Good governance on the other hand, seen primarily as a flexible policy structure or framework of rule, aims at distancing itself from absolute notions of democracy and democratisation, focusing instead on a set of norms and rules that are associated with what can be taken as a system of working relations based on the following constitutive elements: policy and decisional openness and transparency, public accountability, lack of corruption, the institutionalisation of civil society, the socio-political dimensions of legitimacy, civic competence, individual and collective liberties, minority and human rights, efficient public-sector management, equitable distribution of public resources, dialogical or deliberative political processes, the independence of the judiciary, the conception and enactment of well-articulated laws, and so on. What it lacks, therefore, as opposed to the democratisation strategy, is a clear focus on a final product of the process of change, be it transitory or transformative, linear or erratic, domestically driven or externally controlled. Instead, good governance may well focus on issues of political liberalisation, inter-faith or inter-cultural dialogue, and socio-economic governance, without however democracy being logically or necessarily located at the end of a continuum, whose poles are represented by ‘non-democracy’ (encompassing a variety of autocratic, authoritarian or totalitarian regimes) and full-blown democracy (or, as some realist democratic theorists would probably have it, polyarchy). The general point to make is that the good governance approach forms the basis of a particular type of socio-political agenda informed by notions of mutualism and reciprocity, rather than by the universal applicability of liberal-democratic ideals in the sense of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisation’ thesis. Its is above all an instrument for capacity-building in furthering inter-systemic convergence, without however subsuming the participating collectivities into an absolutist ideology of good (or better) democratic practice. Thus, central to the development of a more profound understanding of the emerging Euro-Mediterranean system is the need to acknowledge both the normative and procedural qualities of embedded diversity, difference and, where necessary, policy differentiation, as opposed to cross-systemic uniformity and, as the liberal-democratic canon often implies, principled universality. Above all, good governance does not easily become, to borrow from Niblock’s analysis, ‘subject to allegations of cultural bias’ [3]. Finally, despite the fact that, much like democratisation, no general agreement exists in the acquis académique as to what good governance comprises, unlike democratisation, it ‘constitutes a more diffuse and less directly challenging manifesto … emphasise[s] values and practices which are not absolutes … [and] enables concern with democracy to find expression through less direct but nonetheless significant channels’ [4].
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