Illiberalism Within: Rule of Law Backsliding in the EU

Abstract

How should the European Union cope with Member States that no longer respect the basic values of the Union? This article reviews the responses of the major European Union institutions to Poland and Hungary as their governments removed checks on their power, eliminated the independence of judiciaries and failed to honour their European commitments. As the article demonstrates, the responses of EU institutions have so far been ineffective in bringing these Member States back into line with European values. We examine the various proposals that have been made to do better, concluding that there is promise in some legal strategies that are available now, but have yet to be tried.

Analysing instability as a future for an institutionalization process: the EU, Turkey and the issue of migration

“…For example, France, Austria, Germany, Denmark and Sweden reintroduced national border control despite the Schengen Agreement [108], and Italy has started to block foreign navy ships participating in the EU's migrant rescue missions as of June 2018 [109]. In addition to the migration issue, the Brexit and the Eastern European members' plea for more autonomy from the EU law (see [110]) also show the member states' tendency to develop different epicentres within the EU system according to their own priorities.…”

Foreground Liberalism, Background Nationalism: A Discursive‐institutionalist Account of EU Leverage and ‘Democratic Backsliding’ in East Central Europe

“…This has confounded earlier assumptions that democracy in ECE was – largely due to EU enlargement – well‐anchored and secure. The existing literature on ECE backsliding has focused heavily on the actions of illiberal national‐conservative governments in the two most problematic cases, Hungary (2010‐) and Poland (October 2015‐), and been framed in terms of how EU institutions and member states could or should respond to the challenge posed by such backsliding (Pech and Scheppele, ; Sedelmeier, ).…”

Perpetually “partly free”: lessons from post-soviet hybrid regimes on backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe

“…violating civil liberties) and/or decreasing competition outside of electoral periods with the aim of ensuring and aggrandising incumbent's executive power (Bermeo 2016;Dresden and Howard 2015;Levitsky and Way 2010a). Pech and Scheppele (2017) also discuss "rule of law backsliding" and judicial capture where public authorities with large parliamentary majorities, at least in the cases of Poland and Hungary, seek to change electoral rules to create clear majorities and, thus, maintain their hold over power. Further, Greskovits (2015) distinguishes between backsliding and hollowing.…”