Multiple Democracies in Europe

The Eastern Enlargement of the European Union has generally been taken to involve the political integration of the post-communist societies into existing European structures and cultural forms. In this reading, the new member states were required to adopt the institutions of a liberal democratic regime (the hardware) as well as a liberal political culture (the software) in order to develop successful democratic regimes and to become eligible for EU membership. The overall understanding of this process of democratization and Europeanization gives the impression that it is about a relatively straightforward transition towards a ‘known’ destination of a European standard of liberal democracy, with a related civic culture. Little attention is paid to how alternative understandings of democracy, or democratic imaginaries, might have played a role in the democratic transformations, neither at the moment of regime change in 1989 nor emerging during the political transformations. This paper argues that in order to understand the specific types of democratic regimes and their political cultures that have emerged in the region, as well as the specific nature of Europeanization in this process, it is necessary to take a cultural-historical approach in which the emphasis is on political struggles over democratic ethics or orientations, and their institutionalization in specific structures, such as constitutions. In the first part of the paper, such an approach is developed, while in the second part, an empirical-comparative account will be given of the political cultures in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. It will be concluded that although the Europeanization of these societies has entailed institutional convergence around a European ideal, a differentiation of political cultures and democratic imaginaries has taken place, both within societies and between them.