Fake it ‘Til You Make It: Europeanisation of New Democracies as an Opportunity and a Liability

Central Europe’s recent political history challenges some of the guiding assumptions about European integration. The ultimate aim of the integration project was not simply to forge ever more unity, but rather to deliver a Europe that was ever more firmly committed to liberal democracy and the rule of law. On this score, the EU’s record over the past two decades is rather mixed, and not just amongst Europe’s new democracies. The process of conditionality that engendered the ‘age of imitation’ (Ivan Krastev) has resulted in a backlash against liberalism that has gained traction in both ‘new’ and ‘old’ member states. The central contention of this paper is that this backlash has been partly caused by the actual process of European integration. To be sure, the prospect of EU membership greatly strengthened pro-Western, democratic forces in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time, the euphoria triggered by the collapse of communism in 1989 re-energised the European project in a way that turned it into a potential liability. While Fukuyama’s bold proclamation about the ‘end of history’ was widely criticised, Europe after 1989 moved ever more towards a ‘political messianic venture par excellence’ (Joseph Weiler), which was to demonstrate that nation states were largely obsolete. It was in the 1990s, that Europe took a turn towards a more ideologically based project of a borderless polity that was to be delivered via the Single European Currency and the Schengen Treaty. Both these projects have failed to deliver the desired goods – equalising economic conditions across the European continent and creating a truly transnational polity. Liberals in Central Europe became so successful in emulating their Western counterparts that like them they ended up alienating their electoral base. Instead of strengthening democracy in Europe, they may have unwittingly contributed to its decline. This is the liability of Europeanisation, which has been skilfully exploited by those political leaders who defy the West European elite consensus. Viktor Orban’s talk about ‘illiberal democracy’, for example, is not merely oxymoronic; rather it is a deliberate provocation that amounts to a highly effective political strategy with both domestic and a wider European appeal. ‘Fake’ Europeanisation brought about a series of political challenges that are all too real.