EU Rule of Law Conditionality: Democracy or ‘Stabilitocracy’ Promotion in the Western Balkans?

Kmezic, Marko

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91412-1_5

Cited by 33 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Established Western political elites have found working with ruling coalitions in Eastern Europe convenient. Especially in the Balkans, the EU has, in effect, propped up corrupt regimes with authoritarian tendencies through the enlargement process in the interest of maintaining stability in a previously volatile region (Bieber 2018;Kmezić 2019). In the European Parliament, the European People's Party (EPP) and the Social Democrats (SD) have downplayed domestic opposition to ruling Eastern European coalitions responsible for state capture in order to continue benefiting from the votes that these corporate parties bring to the tally.…”

Section: The Conspiratorial Turn In the Fight Against The Oligarchy I...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Marinov¹,

Popova²

2021

Perspect. polit.

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At the start of the pandemic, it looked like the biggest COVID-related threat to democracy, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, was executive aggrandizement. This focus, however, may lead us to overlook a bigger threat to Eastern European democracy. We argue that Eastern European democracies’ original sin of state capture has been exacerbated by the rise of conspiracy theories, whose stock has only increased with the addition of COVID misinformation. Eastern European voters struggle to differentiate between the true political conspiracy that enables private interests to control the state and conspiracies without empirical basis, such as COVID denialism, world government, or political correctness as a tyrannical plot. As a result, conspiracy theories enable the state capture camp to divide the reformist opposition and maintain their grip, while simultaneously claiming that they are governing competently and in line with European values. We use an original survey from Bulgaria and a GLOBSEC 2020 cross-national survey to explore this hypothesis. Finally, we draw some theoretical implications from the empirical evidence for assessing the nature of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe. We call for more research on the conspiracy cleavage as a factor in explaining backsliding processes.

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Section: The Conspiratorial Turn In the Fight Against The Oligarchy I...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Marinov¹,

Popova²

2021

Perspect. polit.

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“…In the Western Balkans, the conditionality mechanism is still in force, yet the expected positive influence on democratisation as in the CEE accession process failed to materialise (Schimmelfenning 2008;Schimmelfennig et. al 2006;Vachudova 2005).Consequently, scholars have recently started to emphasise the presence of unfavourable structural conditions in the Western Balkan countries and assessed the EU's responsibility in a critical way (Elbasani 2013) tion of the EU being more interested in "stabilitocracy" than democracy (Bieber 2019;Kmezić 2019). The term denotes the current EU's strategy towards the Western Balkans which focuses more on security conditions on the ground and interstate disputes, in order not to experience violent escalation in Europe's backyard.…”

Section: Političke Perspektivementioning

confidence: 99%

Threats to Democracy

Petrović

2021

Polit. perspekt. (Online)

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Right-wing populist governments in Central and South-eastern Europe are currently abusing the emergency caused by the pandemic in order to extend their power and influence over institutions through legislative changes. The governments in Poland, Serbia, Slovenia and Hungary have raised fears by their measures to either establish authoritarian regimes and/or to reassert their grip on power during the Covid19 crisis. This text is intended to give an insight into the measures of the ruling right-wing populist parties (PiS in Poland, SNS in Serbia, SDS in Slovenia and Fidesz in Hungary) during the pandemic. On the one hand, the article intends to show that the individual governments have misused the crisis to bring independent and/or state media under their control, to conclude corrupt deals between the ruling party and government-related companies and to put pressure on other independent institutions.

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“…But this ensured that the process of focusing on rule of law reforms contained a few blind spots that were impossible to detect should one choose to focus solely on the acquis. Since the EU itself never clearly defi ned the rule of law − considering it to be a meta principle on which the EU was founded 40 − it never scrutinised any of the 'old Member States' in this regard. 41 In order to resolve this problem, the EU fi nanced many independent observers, mostly coming from civil society organisations that were to identify these shortcomings and report on the situation.…”

Section: The Move From the Acquis To Substancementioning

confidence: 99%

The European Union’s Rule of Law Promotion in the Western Balkans: Building a Rule of Law Constituency

Hogic

2020

CYELP

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This paper deals with the failures in the promotion of the rule of law in the six countries of the Western Balkans that are in different stages of their EU accession process. Drawing on concrete examples from more than two decades of rule of law promotion through the enlargement circles, the paper identifi es the different evolutionary stages of this undertaking. It fi nds that the current dominant paradigm of rule of law conditionality concerning the benchmarking of progress in the areas of Chapters 23 and 24 of the acquis fails to tackle state capture as the main structural obstacle to the rule of law in the Western Balkans. The paper proposes that this situation is to be improved by re-imagining rule of law promotion as an effort focused not merely on standards but on building a rule of law constituency. Four different approaches to rule of law promotion that have been less frequently used so far are offered: legal mobilisation, institutional strengthening, the politicisation of anti-corruption, and economic development. The paper concludes with refl ections on the realistic reach of the proposed interventions into efforts to promote the rule of law, arguing that while imperfect they remain necessary in order for the project to succeed.

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EU Rule of Law Conditionality: Democracy or ‘Stabilitocracy’ Promotion in the Western Balkans?

Cited by 33 publications

References 21 publications

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Will the Real Conspiracy Please Stand Up: Sources of Post-Communist Democratic Failure

Threats to Democracy

The European Union’s Rule of Law Promotion in the Western Balkans: Building a Rule of Law Constituency

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