Consolidating Free Government in the New EU
For the new democracies in Europe’s east that will officially join the European Union in May 2004, EU membership is significant in terms of history, symbolism, national security, economic and political stability, and the rule of law. Each of these matters has, at one time or another, dominated debate in Eastern Europe over the years since the Berlin Wall fell, and considerations related to each have affected the process of democratic consolidation in the region.
In the first half of the 1990s, the hope of seeing their countries gain EU membership shaped the behavior of postcommunist elites. Admission would mean “a return to the West”—something that many East European politicians often described as their most important goal. In saying this, such leaders were in tune with the peoples of the region, who expected EU membership to confirm their historical affiliation with the West and their distancing from the bad old days of Soviet rule.
Events, however, revealed that both publics and leaders were nursing inflated expectations. Far from being invited to join or rejoin the West quickly, Eastern Europe was left to wait while Western Europe took its time and avoided any semblance of hurry as it considered the possibility of enlarging the EU eastward. Repeated postponements of enlargement had a sobering effect on easterners. Their early enthusiasm faded as they began to realize that they were more eager to join the EU than the EU was to have them as members. And yet the protracted accession process taught some worthwhile lessons. It made East Europeans gradually realize that the gap between their countries and the West was much larger than they had believed in the heady immediate aftermath of the communist collapse. The EU’s massive and complicated membership requirements—the so-called acquis communautaire—also proved useful by giving easterners a set of standards by which they could measure the shortcomings of their own fledgling democratic polities and market economies. The complex upshot of all this was a degree of disillusionment, perhaps, but also a healthy new spirit of sobriety that made East Europeans ready to think more broadly and deeply than before about what embracing democracy and markets would truly have to mean. In other words, the EU had begun playing a positive role in the strengthening of East European democracy even before the official accession process began. The mere prospect of being considered for EU membership helped to advance the cause of reform and promote moderation and stability in what had once been the volatile “shatter zone” of smaller European peoples dwelling uneasily between Germany and Russia.
After 1918, with the Habsburg Empire gone and Russia wracked by civil war, famine, and revolution, Central and Eastern Europe became more exposed to German power. Some countries did attempt to foster popular rule or at least liberal governance—Czechoslovakia rates particular mention in these respects—but the obstacles were formidable and the interwar years were hardly a springtime for democracy even before Hitler’s 1933 accession to the German chancellorship froze democratic prospects throughout the region. After the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich came Soviet Russian hegemony, borne on the bayonets of the Red Army.
Happily, the new democracies that have emerged since 1989 have faced a far friendlier situation. Not only are all of their neighbors either established or new democracies, but Europe-wide and trans-Atlantic institutions have offered powerful incentives and encouragement to assist with the task of establishing free and popular governments. The EU’s move to sign “association agreements” with the new democracies, for instance, opened numerous avenues of cooperation, particularly in the area of trade. The economic reorientation of the new democracies away from the Soviet Union and toward the EU gave them the stability that they needed to solidify their democratic institutions.
The EU also cooperated with other prodemocratic institutions, most prominently the Council of Europe. The Council is far easier to join than the EU, and thus Council membership appeared to aspirant countries as almost a precondition for gaining EU admission. The Council requires all applicant countries to meet certain standards of democratic functioning as well as basic requirements of the rule of law. Meeting those criteria was an important exercise in building democracy. Also working alongside the EU to strengthen East European democracy was the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE). With resurgent nationalism looming large after four decades of communist rule, the OSCE’s efforts to monitor the situation of minorities and peacefully resolve ethnic conflicts were a great boon to the whole region. In particular, the OCSE and later the EU did yeoman work in dealing with problems arising from the presence of large Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania as well as in easing tensions in the Baltic states between ethnic Russians on the one hand and Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians on the other.
The Process of Accession
To gain EU admission, each candidate country had to meet numerous criteria by means of a highly structured process. This process covers 31 areas (known in EU parlance as “chapters”) that are specified in the acquis communautaire. Each candidate country had to enter into extensive negotiations with EU officials in order to prove that it would be able to meet EU standards and conform itself to the acquis. The European Commission closely monitored each candidate in order to verify that all were moving toward political stability, economic transformation, a secure rule of law, and the ability to implement EU laws and standards. The Commission issued a formal published report on each country’s progress at least once a year. Critical comments in these reports were often directly or indirectly concerned with the quality of democratic and market-based practices and institutions, and so served as an aid to reform. Among the ills that the EU progress reports have helped to alleviate, one must count the mistreatment of the Roma minority in the Czech Republic, the authoritarian tendencies apparent in the Slovakian government under Premier Vladimir Mečiar (199?–9?), and the discrimination faced by Russian-speakers in certain of the Baltic states. The EU also strongly denounced politically motivated corruption, and criticized the manipulative and illiberal way in which the public media were run in Hungary and Slovakia.
The EU’s attention to the process of economic transformation was equally important for the stabilization of democratic institutions in candidate countries. While stock-market and privatization transparency, banking reform, anticorruption measures, and simplified bankruptcy laws might not at first glance seem to have much to do with democratic consolidation, in truth they all helped greatly to give democracy solid underpinnings in Eastern Europe.
As they started down the path of economic transformation, all the candidate countries had to overcome rampant corruption, dubious privatization deals, and questionable banking practices under which money was loaned solely on the basis of political connections. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the so-called voucher privatization process took place in a political environment in which little or no attention was paid to the rule of law. In Hungary too, the law was bent in the case of some privatization deals, and Latvia’s banking system virtually collapsed in the mid-1990s. The EU carefully recorded everything that could not meet the standards expected of members, and urged remedies. It was partly thanks to EU pressure that the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia all gradually cleaned up and stabilized their banking systems. In some cases the EU was also critical of the inefficiencies and the structure of some East European economies. For example, it carefully monitored the size of the farming sectors in all candidate countries. Poland came under heavy criticism for not doing enough to streamline its bloated, inefficient farming sector. In this case, EU self-interest (an unreformed Polish farming sector would soak up hefty agricultural subsidies) fueled policies that made excellent sense on the merits. State subsidies for certain products—especially steel—and murky laws regarding government procurement orders also became targets of the EU’s darts, which drove home important lessons about the need for evenhanded rules of competition. As late as mid-2003—after it had already been invited to join the EU—the Czech Republic was coming in for severe criticism over its unclear laws on tenders for government orders.
Stable expectations are essential to market-based democracy. Cronyism, corruption, insider speculation, rent-seeking, and other forms of self-dealing undermine such expectations and must be checked if law-based popular government is to flourish. Making the economic environment more transparent and forcing candidate countries to make everyone in the market play by clear and universally applicable rules were among the EU’s key tasks in postcommunist Europe. The first wave of economic reform in those lands had spawned a class of new entrepreneurs who often grew rich and influential by “gaming the system.” Exploiting legal loopholes or bypassing inconvenient laws altogether, these politically connected entrepreneurs relied heavily on questionably run (and in some cases, still state-owned) banks for loans of ready cash with which they could buy politicians, or even entire political parties. In some East European countries, this patronage racket and its associated fraud had become a public scandal grave enough to erode popular confidence in the democratic order. Against all this, the EU’s granitic insistence that such practices had been, were, and always would be intolerable promoted gradual improvement and with it, a restored confidence in democracy on the part of the candidate countries’ citizens. Perhaps more fundamentally still, the EU’s principled stand taught ordinary people that a market economy depends on the rule of law, and that the two must remain indivisible.
This was a lesson that even some East European leaders who seemed favorably disposed to classical liberal insights had to learn. In the early days of freedom after the Wall fell, anticommunist sentiment brought to power people who called themselves liberals but who made the mistake of thinking that the best way to create a market economy was to show as little concern for the legal framework as possible. Václav Klaus, who was finance minister of what was then Czechoslovakia (he is now president of the Czech Republic), was confident that the “invisible hand” of the market could be relied on to sort things out without much help from the law, while some of his associates spoke of the need “to run away from lawyers.” The results of such neglect of the law were quite alarming: Fraud and other economic crimes, plus the unnecessary failures of viable firms, marred this period.
Many of the new entrepreneurs learned how to operate in a legal “twilight zone.” It is no coincidence that many of them were, and still are, opposed to EU membership. Clear rules and evenhanded competitive conditions are anathema to them. The EU’s insistence on playing by the rules has diminished the influence of such people, who had created what former Czech president Václav Havel once called “mafioso capitalism.”
The EU also used its annual progress reports on aspirant countries to document how the rule of law was faring in their midst. All candidates received numerous EU requests to speed up judicial reforms—not only to remove judges and prosecutors with compromised records from communist times but also to make East European legal systems run more efficiently. As a result, every candidate country adopted (whether wholesale or in amended form) laws whose promulgation was designed to bring the judicial system into line with EU standards. Likewise, the EU checked on whether and how quickly various candidate countries absorbed the acquis. Dozens of laws had to be adopted or amended to meet EU requirements. This could be a challenge for parliaments already overburdened with work on numerous other pieces of legislation tied to economic and political reforms.
Since new or reformed laws mean little without effective implementation, it was also necessary to investigate the administrative capacity of aspirant countries and their ability to work with EU institutions. This meant depoliticizing and professionalizing civil-service bureaucracies by introducing merit-based criteria for advancement while uprooting nepotism, misfeasance, and inefficiency. The Herculean character of such an undertaking can well be imagined, and some countries put it off until the very end of the accession talks. The Czech Republic, for instance, adopted a new civil-service law just weeks before the December 2002 Copenhagen summit at which it was officially invited to join the EU. Another aspect of the reform of state administration systems was decentralization. Not only the Czech Republic but also Poland and Slovakia created regions (and regional governments) under EU pressure. Such reforms promise to strengthen democracy by bringing government closer to the people.
Partly in connection with its promotion of state decentralization in Central and Eastern Europe, the EU has funded various civic projects, groups, and initiatives through a program known as PHARE. The EU’s time and money has also gone into educational efforts aimed at teaching local officials and civic activists how to strengthen civil society and improve governance. These initiatives have made an impact, and democracy has been the better for them. Since domestic funding is so hard to come by, many worthwhile civic projects and groups in postcommunist countries would simply not exist were it not for the help they get from the EU and various other Western funders, including U.S. foundations.
A Downside for Democracy?
There are those in the postcommunist East who argue that the EU accession process has gone forward without a truly democratic debate in the candidate countries. In truth, these critics claim, the EU acquis are not negotiable, and candidate countries have had to accept EU dictates as the price of membership. Another line of criticism, heard from groups within the political elite in every Central or East European country, holds that the fledgling postcommunist democracies needed more time to define themselves and internalize democratic values before knocking on the door of the EU club.
Such arguments are not without some validity. Democracy is more than just a set of rules and formal institutions. Even countries in which democratic procedures such as elections, checks and balances, and the rule of law function fairly well may not be very democratic. There is a side of democracy that is intangible and cannot be easily quantified. Qualities such as tolerance, a preference for open dialogue, and respect for minorities cannot be conjured into being by even the soundest institutions and best-administered democratic procedures. Much depends in the short run on leaders who set the tone of public discourse, and in the longer run on the education of citizens who will carry the democratic spirit within themselves.
The EU has been much better at encouraging institutional changes than at promoting a truly democratic discourse. In some ways, the latter goal has been almost inevitably out of the EU’s reach, as such discourse often depends on various countries’ histories and traditional political cultures. Critics of the EU have argued that casting the new democracies in the role of pupils who more or less blindly follow instructions from Brussels has not been conducive to democracy. President Klaus of the Czech Republic reacted to the referendum in which Czechs endorsed EU membership by saying that it was a pity his country had not taken more time to enjoy its recently regained sovereignty and independence. Hungary’s former premier Victor Orban voiced similar sentiments.
It is not entirely clear, however, that the accession process impeded real democratic discussion in the candidate countries. It is possible to argue that the EU has been offering the new democracies its know-how and helping them with the work of institutional modernization, which is an unavoidable task for any country unwilling to lapse into stagnation and isolation. The EU did not set any limits on what could be discussed or how debate could be conducted in the candidate countries.
While democracy in its fullest sense goes beyond institutions, there is nonetheless a significant link between institutional democracy and democratic behavior. It is easier for people raised under nondemocratic conditions to become democrats in an environment of full-fledged institutional democracy than in an environment that retains authoritarian features or is riddled with corruption. The same is true of the relationship between democratic attitudes and the rule of law. After all, the rise of a modern civil society—an important school of active democratic citizenship—is closely tied to the emergence of the modern concept of the rule of law. The effect of the EU and its “dictates” on Central and East Europeans’ internalization of democratic values may never be definitively determined. Yet it is clear that without EU involvement, the modernization of political institutions, the strengthening of the rule of law, and the creation of a transparent market economy would have taken much longer in Eastern Europe than they actually did.
The EU’s critics in the candidate countries worry that joining could end up harming democracy at home. According to Euroskeptics both east and west, the EU has turned increasingly bureaucratic and seen its democratic deficit deepen over the past 15 years. Why hand over any more chunks of national sovereignty to such an entity? Democracy is tied intimately to national states, and cannot fare well on the supranational level. There is no Europe-wide demos on which to base the project of creating a politically united continent. A deeper political union can only mean a bigger democratic deficit. Institutions that subsist above the level of the nation-state lack direct democratic legitimacy. The democratic national states that comprise the EU are thus being increasingly dictated to by unelected bureaucratic elites.
This is a serious argument. Versions of it can be heard in all the candidate countries, with opposition to further European integration running strongest in the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Hungary. Supporters of integration take the view that the democratic deficit is not intrinsic to the EU, but rather is the by-product of the long string of half-baked compromises that created this odd hybrid of intergovernmental organization, confederation, federation, and supranational institution. Reforming EU decision-making structures to make them more like those found in democratic nation-states will eliminate or at least greatly reduce the democratic deficit. Change will be needed anyway because an EU that has gone from 15 to 25 members will not be able to function if current decision-making structures are retained.
Euro-optimists, for their part, remain unconvinced by the claim that the creation of a European political nation must precede the building of a European political union. We simply do not know how and at what moment political nations form, they maintain. Can their creation be accelerated or even initiated by a proper institutional framework? Was there a single political nation clearly in being in the British North American colonies south of Canada at the time of the War of Independence, or did it take a new constitution plus decades of experience with it before the people of the United States could be spoken of as forming one political nation? The EU today is not only enlarging, but also debating the possibility of a written constitution of its own. Under these circumstances, the new members must do more than calculate the (chiefly economic) advantages and drawbacks of membership; they must also engage in a real discussion about democracy in the EU. Such conversations can be heated and even acrimonious, but they are also helpful in many ways. They clarify for the general public in each candidate country the meaning of some complicated notions related to the functioning of democratic systems. Issues such as looking for a democratic consensus in Europe on foreign policy or security issues have been debated as widely as the proposed shape of the EU’s top institutions. Relations between small and big states are also a subject of intense discussion.
The process of debating a new European Constitution in each member state may turn out to be an interesting lesson in democracy, especially for the new members. The politicians and the general publics in the east will follow with great interest how the Constitution is debated in the west, and will note carefully the procedures (a referendum? a vote of parliament?) that are used to approve or disapprove the document. The Czech Republic already seems to be moving toward a national referendum on the European Constitution; some of its neighbors in the region may follow suit.
When speaking about democracy in the EU, it is helpful to use Fareed Zakaria’s distinction between democracy as a set of procedures and democracy as constitutional liberalism.1 When it comes to democratic procedures, there is no question that the way decisions get made within EU institutions is a far cry from the way they get made within democratic nation-states. And yet there is also no denying that the EU is a powerful force for constitutional liberalism. The individual rights of all people living in EU countries are fully protected. In fact, a comprehensive Charter of Fundamental Rights is part of the new draft European Constitution. The EU has also developed a set of independent institutions of its own, such as courts and the European Central Bank, that are protected from political pressure.
In fact, Zakaria uses the example of the EU to show that in modern democracies, with their populist leanings, institutions shielded from electoral pressure can be bulwarks of democracy—as long as they have received their delegated powers in a democratic fashion. He rightly points out that “unelected” EU institutions have played a crucial role in promoting unpopular but necessary reforms that elected politicians would never have dared to advance on their own.2 In fact, politicians in each candidate country have repeatedly cited EU requirements in order to defend the introduction of unpalatable reforms.
Democratic Consolidation after Accession
The process of democratic consolidation in new member states will not, of course, end with their accession to the EU. Indeed, as the cases of Greece, Portugal, and Spain suggest, the process of adjusting to the standards of developed democracies will take years. All the new members will be adding a new institutional dimension to their respective polities in 2004 when they elect their first deputies to the European Parliament. Depending on the outcome of discussions surrounding the European Constitution, the new members may also have seats on the EU Commission to fill. Judges from new member states will sit on European courts; and each new member country will send several hundred people to Brussels to work in the EU bureaucracy. Most important, each new member country will be represented on the European Council and the Council of Ministers, the EU’s two top decision-making bodies.
In all likelihood, this share in responsibility for the fate of the EU will have a moderating effect on domestic politics in the new member countries. Politicians from each new member state in Central or Eastern Europe will have to learn to work with politicians from the other 24 states. Domestic politics and European politics will become intertwined in new and complicated ways, and when it comes to European issues, the line between foreign and domestic policy will become blurry.
A country’s membership in the EU means that its law courts and judges operate within a broader European context. Decisions of European courts affect the work of courts in each member state. Individual citizens in each new member state will also have avenues of appeal to European courts. Already today, hundreds of people from candidate countries have cases pending at the European Court for Human Rights. The free movement of people and labor within the EU will also have significant implications for consolidating young democracies, as people from both old and new EU countries travel for work or schooling and experience more person-to-person contacts with fellow Europeans. This is sure to influence what people in the new member states—and especially youth—expect from democracy.
By 2006, all new member states should be fully integrated into the so-called Schengen area, meaning the zone within the EU where internal borders between participating states no longer physically exist. This will, of course, make travel and exchange of experience much easier. For example, the Czech Republic, which only 14 years ago was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, will be, along with Luxembourg, one of two EU countries to have no physical borders. The country has no coastline to protect as an external EU border and all of its neighbors will be EU members. Czechs will be able to travel to Portugal or Sweden, for example, without having to pass any border controls.
The Legacy of the Past
One problem that the EU may be able to help with only indirectly is that of facing the past without evasions or illusions. Every Central or East European nation has “unfinished business” from its decades under communist rule. Some of these unsettled historical issues directly affect relations with neighbors as well as the quality of democracy. All former Soviet satellites, for example, need to be more open to fair and probing inquiries that ask to what extent communism was a system imposed by external Soviet power and to what extent it enjoyed internal support. What is more, no nation in the region has seen any serious public consideration of the question of collaboration by its citizens with Nazi Germany. Poland and the Baltic states, especially, have legacies of anti-Semitism that cry out for honest examination. Poles have begun to discuss this problem recently, but more needs to be done.
Czechs must fairly address the question of the Sudeten Germans—a group numbering about 3 million who had their property confiscated after World War II and were nearly all driven out of Czechoslovakia. The Poles live in a similar shadow, having displaced millions of ethnic Germans when Poland’s territory was shifted westward by Stalin in 1945, yet Poles have shown more openness about discussing this than have Czechs about the sullied chapter in their own national annals. When the Polish and German presidents recently issued a joint appeal for frank talk about postwar expulsions, it surprised Czech politicians. They, like Czechs generally, are loath to admit that what happened to the Sudeten Germans was an act of collective punishment, one of the biggest single campaigns of ethnic cleansing ever to take place on European soil, and a Stalinist measure that greatly eased the 1948 communist takeover. Czech politicians like to cite the sanction afforded the Sudeten expulsions by the victorious Allies at the Potsdam Conference of 1945, but this alibi cannot hide the truth that what Czechoslovakia did to its ethnic-German citizens was an act of free will.
The EU can perhaps be most useful by furnishing a framework for discussing troublesome issues such as these when they concern more than one nation. During the accession process, for instance, some German and Austrian politicians threatened to block the Czech Republic’s application unless Prague officially rescinded the so-called Beneš Decrees (the legal instruments that lent the color of authority to the Sudeten expulsions) and apologized for what the Sudeten Germans suffered. The EU’s response to this fraught confrontation was twofold: It commissioned an independent study which showed that the Decrees did not form a legal bar to Prague’s membership in the Union. At the same time, EU officials urged the Czechs to hold talks about the matter with Austrian and German representatives.
Similarly sensitive are the cases of the thousands of Central and East Europeans who acted as informers for the communist secret police. Various former Soviet satellites have dealt with this problem in different ways. The Czech Republic was perhaps most thorough, for it passed in 1992 a law prescribing “lustration” procedures to make sure that secret-police collaborators could be excluded from government posts. This measure prevented former communist agents from infiltrating new democratic institutions, but its premise of collective guilt and its rejection of the presumption of innocence sat poorly with the principle of the rule of law. Moreover, the lustration law did not fully address the much larger and messier issue of how Czechs had responded to communist rule. Only applicants for official jobs were affected, and the many forms of collaboration beside secret-police spying were outside the law’s purview.
Even with all the help the candidate countries have received from the EU and other international organizations, creating democracies fully comparable to those in the current member states looks to be a protracted process. While the modernization of institutions, the strengthening of the rule of law, and the increase in respect for human rights that have taken place under EU guidance are important, all postcommunist states will continue to struggle for a time to come with the legacy of long-term totalitarian rule.
The fair treatment of minorities, for example, cannot be fully guaranteed only by a proper legal framework and institutions. It depends to a large extent on how majorities choose to act, and on how strongly they let themselves be influenced by historical and other experiences. Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have all introduced measures to improve the situation of the Roma. Yet relations between majority populations and the Roma in those countries—formed by many years of mutual distrust and the authoritarian solutions favored by communist rulers—will remain difficult. In fact, the level of respect for minorities—ethnic, cultural, intellectual, and other—is still generally low in all the postcommunist countries that are to enter the EU in 2004. Democracy is still too often equated with simple majority rule. It is not well understood that any citizen may at a given moment belong to one or more “minorities,” and that democracy means respecting minority views and identities so long as these remain consistent with the rule of laws freely made and equally applied.
While he was serving as newly independent Czechoslovakia’s first president from 1918 to 1935, Thomas G. Masaryk used to lament that his country was “a democracy without democrats.” Much the same might be said about all the new democracies in Europe’s east today. A transition to democracy will have to take place in the minds and hearts of people. The EU may help to speed this by making it possible for them to dwell in a developed institutional democracy and by making it much easier for them to have extensive contact with citizens from longer-established democracies. But in the end, the real change will have to come from within each new member state. We should expect its speed to differ from one country to another based on national culture, traditions, and leadership. It may ultimately be time itself that completes the work, as rising generations across the region seek to make an honest peace with the difficult past and to embrace a more promising, peaceful, and democratic European future.
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1Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003), 18-20.
2Fareed Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 242-44.
Journal for Democracy - January 2004
