The Eastern Enlargement of the European Union: Challenges to Democracy?¹

• Authors: Darina Malová , Branislav Dolný
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Recent scholarship assesses the impact of the European Union's conditionality on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in a contradictory way. On one hand, the EU is perceived as a key agent of successful democratic consolidation and on other hand, the return of nationalist and populist politics in new member states has been explored in the context of the negative consequences of the hasty accession that undermined government accountability and constrained public debate over policy alternatives. This article explains this puzzle of the ambiguous effects of the EU's politics of conditionality, which promoted institutions stabilizing the horizontal division of powers, rule of law, human and minority rights protection, but which neglected norms and rules of participatory and/or popular democracy.

Keywords

EN

democracy; democratic consolidation; EU conditionality; accession process; horizontal and vertical accountability

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 67-80

Dates

published

2008-06-01

online

2008-06-19

Contributors

author

Darina Malová

• Department of Political Science, Comenius University, Gondova 2 818 01 Bratislava Slovak Republic

author

Branislav Dolný

• Department of Political Science, Comenius University, Gondova 2 818 01 Bratislava Slovak Republic

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-008-0006-4