Containing Autocracy in Europe

In terms of containment, it is important that agents of backsliding not be empowered in EU policy-making and law (as when Hungary and Poland blocked the EU Multiannual Financial Framework as a response to the proposed economic conditionality mechanism of the coronavirus recovery fund in 2020). A major constraint when seeking to contain autocratic actors in EU policy-making and law are the processes in EU treaties themselves, which have very little room for so-called ‘militant democratic’ responses. Picking up the argument I made in Chapter 4 on the normative incoherence of Article 7, this chapter proceeds on two fronts with the challenge of containment: ideal-theoretically, it discusses and analyses different proposals for the containment of autocratic actors in the EU that would require changing the EU Treaties. Such reforms may not be feasible in the short term, but help fix the metric with which to judge non-ideal responses, and could help shape the eventuality (discussed in Chapter 8) of a reformed EU 2.0. Non-ideal-theoretically, I analyse political strategies for side-lining autocratic actors in the EU. Political (as opposed to militant) containment combats the projects of autocrats in the democratic arena. For instance, a proposed EU Commissioner can be rejected by the European Parliament, as with the rejection of Hungarian nominee Laszlo Trocsanyi in September 2019. By tackling democratic backsliding on the political rather than the militant plane, such strategies of containment are less in tension with fundamental values than targeting legislative participation through militant democratic measures.