The Myth of Democratic Backsliding in Central Europe

Debates about democratic backsliding mirror reductionist views about post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Both are predicated on normative assumptions that proved too optimistic, or indeed misguided. After 1989, as Jürgen Habermas famously put it, the nations of Central Europe simply needed to ‘catch up’ with the West. The process of post-communist transition was seen as a unidirectional journey at the end of which these nations would become indistinguishable from their western neighbours. This inaugurated what Ivan Krastev termed the ‘age of imitation’, which came to an end with the rise of self-proclaimed ‘counter-revolutionaries’, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. Yet, contrary to this overly simplistic narrative, there was always more to post-communism than emulating the West. In the same way, there is more to post-EU-enlargement Central Europe than self-inflicted democratic regression. The aim of this paper is not to downplay the extent of the current democratic dysfunction in Central Europe. There are well-founded concerns about the erosion of the rule of law (particularly in Poland and Hungary), high levels of corruption (including in Slovakia and the Czech Republic), and freedom of the media in all post-communist countries. However, these problems are not new. The unspoken premise of democratic backsliding is that the countries of Central Europe were becoming ever more democratic; a process that was to be consolidated by their entry into the European Union in 2004. That premise was flawed. Indeed, the EU’s role in strengthening democracy in Central and Eastern Europe has been more ambiguous than is commonly understood.