Getting Eastern Europe Wrong? Reassessing Europeanisation, Democratisation and Backsliding

Abstract

The relatively recent scholarly consensus that liberal democracy, under the watchful gaze of EU monitors, was rapidly consolidating in the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe now seems a long time ago. If democratic databases had started recording democratic erosion almost from the day that EU Accession was confirmed for much of the region in 2004-7, then Hungarian PM Viktor Orban’s July 2014 speech in which he explicitly rejected liberal democracy in favour of building an ‘illiberal nation-state’ arguably stands as the past decade’s emblematic moment. Most scholars now agree that nearly all states of the region (with honourable exceptions in the Baltics and perhaps Slovenia) might reasonably be considered unconsolidated democracies, some even hybrid regimes: a stark contrast with the euphoria and expectations of democratic transformation of the past two decades. Much newer scholarship either considers causal mechanisms that might explain how and where democracy erodes more quickly or slowly – often subsumed under the label ‘backsliding’ – or whether democratic progress was ever as advanced as the EU and the prevailing scholarship of the Accession period had imagined (hence scepticism of the ‘backsliding’ label in some quarters). Indeed, following Bela Greskovits’ distinction between ‘backsliding’ and ‘hollowing’ (Greskovits 2015) there is further scope to disentangle the varied class of empirical phenomena often subsumed together under these labels. In a similar vein, it is worth considering what the discipline of political science itself can learn from the ways that the narrative of the successful democratic transformation of the region came to crowd out and marginalise more ambivalent and often more critical accounts of democratic progress in the period just before and after EU Accession. Another fruitful line of inquiry concerns lessons to be drawn by the EU (and external democracy promoters generally) from the reversal of its expectations for the region. What, if anything, could the EU have done differently in the pre-Accession period and how can these lessons possibly be applied both to illiberal governments now inside the union and candidate countries currently also mired in democratic malaise? On the other side of this equation, we might also consider the role of pro-EU liberal parties that once enjoyed the privilege of being the EU’s preferred partners in their respective countries. These have in some cases lost the support of electorates and in others have adapted in an illiberal direction to reap, even to lead, the populist wave in their respective countries. To what extent are populist governments in EU states cooperating across borders to block EU measures against or even, more ambitiously, to recast the character of the European project itself? Given that liberalism thus stands at such a low ebb that illiberal norms rather seem to be consolidating in some states, what lessons can the remaining or emergent liberals in the region learn from the reversals of the recent past? Which social or political actors if any might lead any renewed push for liberal democratic transformation?

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