Should the EU Protect Democracy and the Rule of Law inside Member States?

Abstract

Against the background of recent developments in Hungary, the article discusses the question whether the European Union ought to play a role in protecting liberal democracy in Member States. First, it is argued that the EU has the authority to do so, both in a broad normative sense and in a narrower legal sense (though the latter is more likely to be disputed). The article then asks whether the EU has the capacity to establish a supranational militant democracy; here it is argued that at the moment both appropriate legal instruments and plausible political strategies are missing. To remedy this situation, the article proposes a new democracy watchdog, analogous to, but more powerful than, the Venice Commission. Finally, it is asked whether EU interventions would provoke a nationalist backlash. There is insufficient evidence to decide this question, but the danger of such a backlash probably tend to be overestimated.

Monitoring and Enforcement of the Rule of Law in the EU: Rhetoric and Reality

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Europeanization and the Rule of Law: Towards a Pathological Turn

“…The exposure of fundamental problems and pathologies of Europeanization reveals the pathological turn in European Studies (Börzel and Pamuk 2012;Mendelski 2014Mendelski , 2015. The awareness of the pathological effects of eu conditionality is particularly timely as several politicians as well as legal scholars argue that the eu has the legitimacy and potential tools to evaluate rule of law in membership countries (see Müller 2015;Closa and Kochenov 2016;Jakab and Kochenov 2016;Bogdandy and Sonnevend 2015). This argument seems premature given the eu's lingering rule of law evaluation deficit.…”

A two‐tier conception of European Union peoplehood: A realist study of European citizens’ bonds of collectivity

“…The EU, moreover, has been facing serious enforcement issues when Member States, such as Hungary and Poland, diverge from liberal democratic norms. 74 Thus, somewhat paradoxically, EU citizenship primarily structures relationships between EU citizenries rather than between individual EU citizens.…”