Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Programme at Carnegie Europe, where he works on EU foreign policy and on issues of international democracy. He is also a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Carnegie in July 2013, he was the director of the European think tank FRIDE. He has held positions in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as an EU Marie Curie fellow. He was a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, from 2012 to 2013. Youngs has authored 12 books. His most recent works are Europe Reset: New Directions for the EU (I.B. Tauris, 2017), Europe’s Eastern Crisis: The Geopolitics of Asymmetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and The Puzzle of Non-Western Democracy (Carnegie, 2015).

The European Parliament elections in May 2019 are a red letter day for European democracy

Worries over European democracy are certainly justified.

A number of respected international indices show that democratic quality is deteriorating in most EU member states.1 Liberal personal rights have been compromised more in...