By Murad Nasibov*
European Union (EU)-Azerbaijan relations have seen a remarkable change in the past decade and a half. Although the EU aimed for a partnership founded on normative values and standards of governance, human rights, and democracy in the late 2000s-early 2010s, the relationship has gradually developed into an exclusively strategic one. On the one hand, this shift is a reflection of changing regional realities at which Azerbaijan has arrived: a reorientation of energy and connectivity routes – the “Middle Corridor” that puts Azerbaijan at the heart of the trade from the EU to Central Asia and China. On the other hand, it reflects the unfolding dynamics in the broader international system, often framed as the rise of multipolarity, and the EU’s recognition of geopolitics in its response to these changes.
The normative agenda of the EU used to be the cornerstone of its relationship with the countries of the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan was no exception to this. Brussels’ policy supported institutional reform, civil society building, and legal approximation, using tools and instruments of the European Neighbourhood Policy and its sub-regional component, the Eastern Partnership. But this was a normative vision that started to break down when Azerbaijan rebuffed seeking a closer political association with the EU. Its rejection of an Association Agreement – of the kind Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine have signed – was a fundamental break in value-based cooperation, which Azerbaijan characterized as “asymmetrical” in nature.
What emerged instead was an increasingly mutual recognition that strategic interests, not shared political values, would be the foundation of the relationship. The annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 made it a wake-up call for European policymakers, bringing to light once again the fact that Europe’s eastern neighbourhood is very fragile. The events that followed, including the Second Karabakh War in 2020 and the reestablishment of full Azerbaijani sovereignty of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, have only hastened this trend, even though they also temporarily revived harsh criticism from the European Parliament to the address of Azerbaijan.
Nowadays, Azerbaijan plays a crucial role in the EU’s emerging strategic calculus. Viewed for so long as just one of several sources of fossil fuel, Baku has suddenly become a key provider of fuel diversity for the EU. The war in Ukraine has broken up European illusions of energy interdependence with Russia. More recently, Azerbaijan has set plans in motion to export green energy to Europe through an ambitious undersea cable project across the Black Sea. Apart from hydrocarbons, Azerbaijan, due to its geographical location, constitutes an indispensable part of the so-called Middle Corridor, which links the landlocked regions of China and Central Asia to the markets of Europe via the Caspian Sea, South Caucasus, and Türkiye. As geopolitical tensions upset more conventional northern options, this corridor provides a new path that avoids both Russia and Iran. The EU’s newfound enthusiasm for the resource-rich and strategically vital expanse of Central Asia largely rests on Azerbaijan’s position as a gateway to it.
Azerbaijan’s newly found confidence on the regional scene is based on its increasingly close strategic ties with Türkiye, a NATO member and a rising regional power. Together, the two countries wield influence not just across the South Caucasus but in Central Asia as well, where Azerbaijan is frequently cited as an example of pragmatic rule and independent foreign policy. Powered by energy development, logistical embedding, and security alignment, Azerbaijan’s policy balancing toward this vacuum of Russian influence has opened the way to the currents in the emerging order of post-Soviet Eurasia.
The most recent military confrontation between Israel and Iran in June 2025 has only reaffirmed the strategic value of Azerbaijan. In a region of endemic instability, Azerbaijan, seen by many as a rare land of stability, may offer the only feasible means to create a new east-west corridor through the South Caucasus. This safe connection is further vital as Brussels examines long-term connectivity projects connecting the European and Asian landmasses.
A peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the potential of being initialled before Armenia’s 2026 elections, could open the path to wider reconciliation. The normalization of Armenia’s relations with Türkiye, as well as expanded trilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, could present an opportunity for continued EU engagement in the South Caucasus. Such a change would even help in reducing the consequences of Georgia having been diversifying its foreign policy lately at the cost of severing relations with Brussels.
However, in the face of these obvious strategic convergences, one structural weakness persists: the lack of an updated legal basis for EU-Azerbaijan relations. Talks to replace the ineffective and outdated 1999 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement have been in progress since 2017, but there is still no deal in sight. And although progress has been achieved, sticking points persist — most notably on their scope of democracy and human rights. It remains to be seen whether the EU will tone down the norm-setting obligations – the respect for democratic principles, human rights, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law – in favour of codifying sectoral cooperation or Azerbaijan will have to accept them. Ultimately, there is a risk that even if this essential element clause is included in the agreement (usually in Article 2), which gives the EU leverage in relations, it can remain rather an unfulfilled rhetoric without substantiation in practice. In turn, energy, digital connectivity, customs integration, and post-conflict reconstruction are all expected to be prominent. Hence, the EU-Azerbaijan agreement in progress is an ultimate test to the EU democracy support agenda in the changing regional and global dynamics. It is as unlikely for the EU to give up this agenda altogether as it is unrealistic for it not to adjust to today’s geopolitical climate.
The EU-Azerbaijan relationship in 2025 is illustrative of a larger trajectory in EU foreign policy: the silent decline of the democracy support agenda in preference for interest-based pragmatism and transactionalism. This shift, which is characteristic of not only the bilateral EU-Azerbaijan relationship but also reflects a broader pattern in EU foreign policy, has significant implications for the EU democracy support agenda. Three broad implications can be highlighted.
Above all, it suggests a greater extent of conditioning of EU democracy support policy on transactional considerations. Such a conditioning can only promise the weakening of the resolve and components of EU democracy support. To compensate for this weakening in its democracy support agenda, the EU might seek to prioritise dialogue with target countries instead of applying strict conditionality. At this point, it is worth noting that EU conditionality as a mechanism has not been equally effective in the past. This variation has often been attributed to the weak leverage of the EU, among others. Empowered by its income from the export of natural resources and supported by regional powers, Azerbaijan has been one of such cases. Its geographic distance has further helped it reject any “asymmetrical” relationship with the EU, as was often remarked by Azerbaijan officials in the past.
Secondly, the EU might risk widening the gap between rhetoric and practice in its democracy support. While holding on to its democracy support agenda in its relations with third countries, the EU may not be able to deliver the promised support and become the hostage of this proclamation-capability gap. Several EU member states, above all – but not only – Hungary, have already been pushing for a more transactionalist agenda in EU foreign policy. The growing popularity of the right and centre-right parties in several EU member states and the increasing number of governments led by them make this upward trend in the conditioning of the EU democracy support on transactionalism more likely. Ultimately, the EU might reach a point where it feels the need to reframe its democracy support policy. The old saying “more for more” can be replaced by “more when we can”. Obviously, however, such a reframing would not happen without generating considerable consequences for the normative EU identity in the eyes of democracy activists both at home and globally.
Thirdly, the decline of the EU’s democracy support agenda in exchange for pragmatism and transactionalism can – and already does – cause greater discontent of those third countries in which the EU has pursued somewhat more effective democracy support action. In the South Caucasus region, such voices of discontent, often insincere, can already be heard very loudly among EU sceptics in Georgia. The EU’s reaction to Georgia’s authoritarian turn is considered by these EU sceptics to be harsher than it should be and unfair in the broader context of transactional, geopolitically induced relationships the EU has been developing in the wider region, including in Central Asia. Although these critics overlook the crucial distinction that Georgia, unlike others in the region, holds EU candidate status, this discourse of discontent risks gaining wider traction within Georgian society.
These discussions above demonstrate once again the importance of power and status of the EU in the international system with respect to taking seriously the democracy support agenda of itself and other democracy-support actors. However, the dichotomous view that the choice lies between an EU democracy support policy disconnected from pragmatic and transactional considerations, though with a high cost, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the abolition of democracy support altogether can be misleading. The EU can, instead, differentiate between not only its tools and instruments of democracy support policy but also in regard to their framing. It can, for example, deploy a more progressive framing, built on dialogue, mainstreamed in sectoral cooperation and integrated with the questions of societal resilience, while holding the traditional conditionality instruments ready for those cases when they would not effectively result in counterproductive outcomes and even generate unwelcomed effects. Such an approach, however, must not become an excuse for neglecting the EU’s fundamental values and should be continually reassessed to ensure that it contributes to resolving rather than deepening democratic erosion.
* Murad Nasibov is a postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Political Science, TU Dresden.
