To be clear, Poland is not yet Hungary, the EU’s other major backsliding headache. Law and Justice has only a small parliamentary majority, not the supermajority needed for a Hungarian-style constitutional rewrite. Protesters have been more assertive and quicker to take to the streets. Nor does Poland have a powerful far-right party like Hungary’s Jobbik waiting in the wings to claim the role of “real” opposition if the ruling party falters. Poland’s opposition may yet manage to use social movements as a rough-and-ready substitute for weakened constitutional checks and balances — and may perhaps eventually make a winning return at the polls. But even in this (far-from-certain) best-case scenario, the country’s institutions are likely to emerge from this period badly damaged. [...]
What this story misses, however, is that while political elites and their electorates may have responded to the EU’s incentives in the desired manner, this process told us almost nothing about whether or not the norms underpinning liberal democratic institutions were being embraced. A decade on from accession, we’re seeing the consequences of this hollowed-out incentivizing: The failure of the EU to foresee that institutional reforms in Eastern Europe had to be accompanied by policies aimed at instilling such norms as political equality, individual liberty, and civic tolerance has left liberal democratic institutions catastrophically vulnerable. [...]
Could things have been done differently? At the time, the union clearly realized the need to set democratic and human rights conditions for Eastern European candidate states. In hindsight, it could have pushed harder for direct social change, giving the reform of high school history textbooks or positive on-the-ground outcomes for minorities the same priority as the detailed monitoring accorded to intellectual property, financial services, and veterinary regulations. Ethical criteria, to be sure, are not as easy to monitor as legal ones, and pressing for satisfying evidence of social change might have made the accession process longer and slower, and local nationalists angrier; in some cases there may have been no accession at all. But as illusions about the EU’s ability to accelerate and anchor democratization in Eastern Europe fall away, the divided union finds itself confronting these cultural conflicts anyway — this time from a position of far less leverage.
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