Enforcing consensus? The hidden bias in EU democracy promotion in Central and Eastern Europe (original) (raw)
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The Eastern Enlargement of the European Union: Challenges to Democracy? 1
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Recent scholarship assesses the impact of the European Union's conditionality on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in a contradictory way. On one hand, the EU is perceived as a key agent of successful democratic consolidation and on other hand, the return of nationalist and populist politics in new member states has been explored in the context of the negative consequences of the hasty accession that undermined government accountability and constrained public debate over policy alternatives. This article explains this puzzle of the ambiguous effects of the EU's politics of conditionality, which promoted institutions stabilizing the horizontal division of powers, rule of law, human and minority rights protection, but which neglected norms and rules of participatory and/or popular democracy.
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Although the European Union (EU) has in many ways supported democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, it has also imposed new constraints on the functioning of democracy. The article explores the indirect impact of EU integration on the Eastern applicant countries by exposing the underlying logic of enlargement and analyzing the implications of that logic for democratic politics. The empirical analysis focuses on the preaccession process of one of the new member states, Estonia, but it also examines the overall EU policy toward Eastern candidates, pointing to the limits of enlargement as a form of democracy promotion. It highlights that the principles and norms that dominated enlargement-most notably inevitability, speed, efficiency, and expertise-constrained democratic politics in the applicant countries and limited their EU accession to a narrow sphere of elites and experts. The author links the findings with the democratic deficit in the EU and draws some conclusions concerning future prospects of democracy in and democracy promotion by the enlarged EU.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The recent research on EU’s role in democratization in the post-communist world has been primarily concerned with its new member states of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the prospective member states. A great deal of knowledge is now available on EU’s impact on members or prospective members, but little stays known about EU’s influence on democratic development in the neighborhood beyond the accession orbits. This paper makes an inquiry into the effect of European policies on democratic processes in a country which is not impacted by conditionality for EU accession but where the promise of European integration is nevertheless seen as an important factor affecting political developments. The particular focus of this paper is on the state of inter-institutional accountability within the frameworks of the democratic constitution in Armenia. This rather narrow concentration on constitutional structures is stipulated by the nature of the major European policies and instruments put into effect in the remote neighborhood. As it will be explicated further in the text, these policies and instruments predominantly rely on the reforms of macro-political democratic institutions at the same time as the democratic achievements are largely measured by reference to the formal institutional reform.
W.Sadurski, Accession’s Democracy Dividend: The Impact of the EU
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One of the important motives that has inclined many in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to favour strongly accession to the EU has been the conviction that, once in the Union, their own states will become more robustly democratic. The hope has been that the EU will provide extra protection against authoritarian or totalitarian temptations, that it will help fight corruption, and that it will improve the quality of public administration and the system of justice – put simply, that accession to the Union will help improve and consolidate democracy, the protection of human rights, and the rule of law. At the very least, it is expected that the accession will make new member states more resilient against crises and potential upheavals; that it will add extra protections against a possible slide into chaos so that, even if it will not add any positive features per se, it will at least help cushion democratic institutions against the worst threats should a crisis situation arise – that it...