The European Endowment for Democracy

Despite having considerable experience in democracy promotion, e.g., through development assistance, the Arab Spring and social unrest elsewhere in its neighborhood caught the European Union and EU Member States (EUMS) by surprise, struggling to devise a strategic response. New challenges called for a new approach. At the same time, Central and Eastern European countries, having entered the EU just a couple of years earlier, were actively seeking ways to exert their influence on European policies. To do so, Poland submitted a proposal for the establishment of a new instrument—the European Endowment for Democracy (EED)—with the aim to provide “support for the unsupported” in a timely and flexible manner. The crisis in Ukraine, which started 2 years after the inception of the EED, appeared to be both a testing ground and a great opportunity for the EED to prove its worth.