EU Leverage and Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe: the Case of Romania

Abstract

This article examines the effectiveness of European Union post‐accession leverage to contain democratic backsliding in the Member States by employing as a case study the EU's intervention concerning the impeachment of the Romanian President Băsescu in July 2012. It is argued that a set of domestic factors, such as political miscalculations, tensions within the ruling coalition and opportunistic actions, facilitated the success of EU material leverage to halt democratic deterioration in Romania. The comparison drawn with the anti‐democratic turn in Hungary demonstrates that facilitating domestic conditions, available in the Romanian case but lacking in the Hungarian one, can affect the exercise of EU post‐accession leverage to contain democratic regression in the Member States.

Ambiguity and interpretive politics in the crisis of European values: evidence from Hungary

“…Although scholars see the disregard for fundamental values as especially pronounced in Hungary and Poland, they have found cause for concern elsewhere as well. The Czech Republic (Hanley and Vachudova 2018), Romania (Dawson and Muir 2012;Sedelmeier 2014;Iusmen 2015) and Slovenia (Bugarič 2015) are among the new member states that are accused of playing fast and loose with the EU's standards. 2 A plethora of labels have been suggested to capture these events (Daly 2019).…”

Governance and Institutions: The Insidious Effect of Chronic Crisis

“…The outcome of the Romanian case was a welcome contrast to the Commission's inability to prevent democratic backsliding in Hungary. It also reflected the peculiarities of Romania's situation, with the government being particularly susceptible to EU pressure (Iusmen, 2015;Kelemen and Blauberger, 2017, p. 318;Sedelmeier, 2014). After all, the Commission continues to operate the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism to help Romania and Bulgaria make progress in the fields of judicial reform, anti-corruption and (for Bulgaria) combatting organized crime, ten years after those countries joined the EU (European Commission, 2017).…”

Assessing the performance of the European Union in Central and Eastern Europe and in its neighbourhood

“…For countries like Bulgaria and Romania, the internal accomplishments acquired during the push for accession may also prove reversible given the shifting approaches of domestic political elites (Ganev 2013;Tanasoiu 2012). In addition, the European Commission has found it more and more difficult to assert its influence in a post-accession setting and struggles to develop instruments that would prevent further democratic back-sliding in Central and Eastern European member-states (Iusmen 2015;Sedelmeier 2014). Roch (2017) discusses how Twinning, used for pre-accession candidate states became an ENP tool meant to foster institution-building, internalising certain pre-designed features that are not adequate policy-learning tools for the new contexts it seeks to address.…”