Challenging EU Governance: Democratic Backsliding in the Enlargement Region

In the wake of the EU integration of ten new member states from Central and Eastern Europe between 2004 and 2007, enlargement was hailed as a particularly powerful tool of EU external governance. A decade later, democratic stagnation and instances of outright democratic backsliding among both recent EU entrants and candidate countries have cast a shadow on the EU’s ‘transformative power’ in the enlargement region. Bringing together Europeanisation research and comparative democratisation literature, the paper proceeds through a paired comparison of Hungary, Poland, Serbia, and Macedonia, highlighting a common pattern of executive expansion through a gradual dismantling of domestic mechanisms of accountability. It argues that the difference between democratic backsliding in the pre- and post-accession contexts is therefore not one in kind, but merely in discourse: whereas political leaders in member states openly defy the EU, candidate country leaders cloak their programs of democratic regression in terms of stability or necessary centralisation. Both manifestations threaten democracy and the rule of law, and pose a severe challenge to EU institutions. The paper feeds into current discussions about the role and limits of EU conditionality as a tool for domestic transformation in member states and contribute to debates on EU governance more broadly.