What impact does the European Union (eu) have on the development of the rule of law in South Eastern Europe (see)? The author of this article argues and shows that the eu has: 1) a positively reinforcing (healthy) effect with regard to judicial capacity and substantive legality, i.e. the alignment of domestic legislation with international standards, and 2) a negatively reinforcing (pathological) effect with regard to judicial impartiality and formal legality (the inner morality of law). The author explains the pathological impact of eu-driven rule of law reforms by referring to the eu’s deficient reform approach and to unfavorable domestic conditions, which in their interplay reinforce certain reform pathologies (legal instability, incoherence, politicization) that undermine the rule of law. The main argument is supported by a mixed method study. A quantitative indicator-based analysis measures rule of law development across four key dimensions on the basis of a variety of data (e.g. survey-based indicators, cepej data, and a unique dataset on legislative output). Additionally, the author draws on a number of qualitative interviews that he conducted with magistrates from see and representatives from the eu, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Council of Europe. The author concludes from these findings that external rule of law promotion in weak rule of law countries is not transformative, but rather reinforces systemic deficiencies that undermine the rule of law.

Recent scholarship has exposed the "eu's pathological power", which has undermined the creation of the rule of law in South Eastern Europe (see) and beyond. This paper discusses the "pathological turn" in Europeanization studies by identifying and providing evidence for several "pathologies of Europeanization", i.e. legal and political deficiencies related to rule of law reform, such as legal instability, lack of generality and enforcement, and increased politicization. These pathologies result, among others, from a deficient approach of the eu to rule of law promotion and assessment. In particular, the author highlights three main fundamental problems of Europeanization in the area of the rule of law: 1) valuing quantity over quality; 2) partisan empowerment of domestic change agents; and 3) biased assessment of the rule of law. These problematic issues are further clarified on selected country examples of reform failure from see and the 2012 "rule of law crisis" in Romania. It is argued that given the eu's inability to objectively assess and effectively promote the rule of law, the eu should either abstain from evaluating rule of law or radically revise its approach and methodology, for instance by following the policy advice provided in this paper.

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Background: the historical and intellectual development of the study of the Roma in Central and Eastern EuropeHow the Roma historically emerged as a topic of academic study The Roma, a population group that includes many of Central and Eastern Europe's most socio-economically vulnerable citizens (see EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2012: 80-81, OSCE 2013, World Bank 2013, are not a new topic of study in the social sciences. For a long time, however, the plight of the region's Roma populations did not receive much attention from either politicians or academicians. In anthropology, for example, the Roma were often the subject of amateurish folklore (Stewart 2013), a fact that may have been related to the particular image attached to them -they were depicted as 'social outcasts and scapegoats, or, in a flattering but far from illuminating light, as romantic outsiders' in many accounts (Lucassen, Willems and Cottaar 1998: 1). In the 1970s and 1980s more sophisticated anthropological and sociological accounts of Romani communities (Acton 1979, Okely 1983, Puxon 1977, Ulč 1988 increased the profile of what came later to be known as 'Romani studies', which is now a broad interdisciplinary field attracting attention from scholars from a variety of specialisations from across the social sciences and the humanities (Acton 2000, Guy 2001, Matras 2012. Current research efforts include not only small-scale ethnographic investigations but also large-scale studies focusing on the socio-economic position of the Roma, which highlight, for example, issues of employment (e.g. Kertesi and Kézdi 2011), housing and residential segregation (e.g.