Democracy promotion and safeguarding after accession: Does the EU matter?

Democracy is one of the founding values of the European Union (EU) and a guiding principle in its external relations. Over the last three decades the Union has emerged as one of the major democracy promoters. There is a broad agreement in the literature that a credible membership perspective is key to understanding the success of the EU’s soft power. However, Eastern European countries, hailed as democratization success stories, have recently witnessed some of the largest and the fastest declines in democracy in the world. The dismantling of democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland has not only cast a shadow over the transformative power of EU enlargement policy, but also fundamentally undermined the assumption about the positive impact of EU membership on democracy. These developments have sparked a lively discussion about the role of the Union in safeguarding democracy in EU member states. Nevertheless, research remains largely confined to the Union’s responses countering democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. The question whether the Union can strengthen democracy in EU member states has been largely neglected. With the aim to reorient the debate about the role and impact of the EU on democracy, the article proposes a novel framework to study how the EU influences democratic politics in its member states. The paper analyses the effectiveness of the EU’s instruments towards Bulgaria and Romania. As the laggards of the Eastern enlargement, they had to comply with more demanding EU conditions and faced more rigorous scrutiny. Importantly, upon accession Bulgaria and Romania became the only member states subject to post-accession EU monitoring through the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM). The CVM is not only the longest-running and the most sophisticated, but also the first EU instrument aimed at enhancing the quality of democracy after accession. The article builds bridges between the literature on Europeanization, the scholarship on democracy and democratic backsliding and anti-corruption studies and makes three key contributions to academic and policy debates. Firstly, the study challenges the dominant approach in the literature that the EU can only have an impact on democratic reforms before accession. Secondly, in contrast to the existing literature which largely focuses on a single set of issues: either weakening of the rule of law, corruption and state capture or media capture, the study explores the interlinked nature of these democratic deficiencies. As the mechanism has been in place for more than fifteen years – it provides a good time frame to trace and assess the effectiveness of the CVM beyond the nature of the legislative reforms with a focus on policy outcomes and their sustainability. Finally, the study reflects on the effectiveness of the CVM and its wider implications for the Union’s internal and external policies.