The Missing Link: the Interplay of De-Europeanisation and Autocratisation in EU Member States and Candidate Countries

The nature of the link between Europeanization and Democratization has been the object of a long and fruitful debate among scholars both in European and Democratization studies, in particular regarding CEECs, the Balkans and acceding countries. More recently, in light of recent political developments in some EU member states and candidates, opposite phenomena, in the form of de-Europeanization and autocratization started to receive increasing scholarly attention. However, the possible causal link between de-Europeanization and autocratization remained understudied. This paper is a first attempt to theorize the causal link between these separate but supposedly interlinked processes. To do so the paper offers an original definition of de-Europeanization and develops an analytical framework for studying this relatively new phenomenon. The main hypothesis of this paper is that in cases where there are strong constraints and instruments of control of the EU in the field of democracy and Rule of Law, the process of autocratization is expected to be accompanied or preceded by a weakening of these constraints, in the form of a de-Europeanization process. In a nutshell: the more the democratic conditionality of the EU is strong, the more the process of autocratization in a country is expected to be preceded by a process of de-Europeanization that frees the country from these constraints. In the first section, the paper discusses the two concepts, de-Europeanization and autocratization. In the second part the paper critically discusses the type of relationship existing between the two and introduces the role of democratic conditionality for understanding and delineating this interaction. Finally, in the third part the paper uses four empirical illustrative cases (Hungary and Poland as Member states, and Serbia and Turkey as candidate countries) in order to prove the validity of our initial hypothesis about the possible causal relationship between the two phenomena.