Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PaG 5 (4) - The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe
PaG 5 (4) - The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe
PaG 5 (4) - The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe
Article
The Illiberal Turn or Swerve in Central Europe?
Lenka Bustikova 1, * and Petra Guasti 2
1School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA; E-Mail: lenka.bustikova@asu.edu
2 Democratic Innovations Unit, Goethe University Frankfurt, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany;
E-Mail: guasti@soz.uni-franfkurt.de
* Corresponding author
Abstract
Scholars are coming to terms with the fact that something is rotten in the new democracies of Central Europe. The cor-
rosion has multiple symptoms: declining trust in democratic institutions, emboldened uncivil society, the rise of oligarchs
and populists as political leaders, assaults on an independent judiciary, the colonization of public administration by polit-
ical proxies, increased political control over media, civic apathy, nationalistic contestation and Russian meddling. These
processes signal that the liberal-democratic project in the so-called Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland
and Slovakia) has been either stalled, diverted or reversed. This article investigates the “illiberal turn” in the Visegrad Four
(V4) countries. It develops an analytical distinction between illiberal “turns” and “swerves”, with the former representing
more permanent political changes, and offers evidence that Hungary is the only country in the V4 at the brink of a decisive
illiberal turn.
Keywords
Czech Republic; democracy; democratic consolidation; Eastern Europe; Hungary; illiberalism; nationalism; Poland;
populism; Slovakia
Issue
This article is part of the issue “Populism and the Remaking of (Il)Liberal Democracy in Europe”, edited by Lars Rensmann
(University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Sarah L. de Lange (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Stefan
Couperus (University of Groningen, The Netherlands).
© 2017 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).
1 On disruptions see Bernhard and Karakoç (2011); Hanley and Sikk (2016); Deegan-Krause and Haughton (2009); Haughton and Deegan-Krause (2015);
Stanley and Czesnik (2016); Stanley (2008); cf. Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski and Toka (1999).
2 On backsliding see Dawnson and Hanley (2016); Greskovits (2015); Huq and Ginsburg (in press); Rupnik (2007); Hanley and Vachudova (2017); cf.
Grzymala-Busse (2017); Levitz and Pop-Eleches (2010); Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017).
constitution, take over the state media, eliminate the power of foreign investors, discredit the opposition and the civil society, change the electoral
rules (Zalan, 2016).
12 To demonstrate the effect of EU conditionality we follow Hagopian (2005) and measure three dimensions of democratic quality—strength, effective-
ness, and constitutionalism. We transform the six governance dimension of the World Governance Indicators (WGI) into three dimensions: WGI’s voice
and accountability and political stability as a strength of democracy; governance effectiveness and regulatory quality as democratic effectiveness; the
rule of law and control of corruption as constitutionalism. We select WGI as it offers the longest sequence of indicators for the CEE region. The period
between 1996 to 2015 encompasses both the pre-accession, accession and post-accession. We acknowledge that quality of democracy and quality of
governance are overlapping concepts.
In Hungary, all democratic indicators decreased between 4. Illiberal Swerving and Refugee Crisis
1996 and 2015. Over time, Hungary performed best in
2002 and 2003 (the height of the EU pre-accession lever- The refugee crisis increased contestation over
age) and worst in 2015 as PM Orbán continued his con- sovereignty issues and polarized the electorate. Driven
struction of an “illiberal democracy”. In Poland and Slo- by populist political voices and unbalanced media re-
vakia, all indicators have strengthened over time. Slo- porting, public opinion in all V4 countries is strongly
vakia was the second weakest of the V4 in 2015, but the opposed to the reception and integration of refugees
reason lies in its unfavorable 1996 ranking—significantly (Guasti, 2017). Opposition to the EU refugee reloca-
lower than that of the other V4 countries. Slovakia tion quotas is usually couched in logistical terms—CEE
started as a laggard, and over time experienced signif- countries are not prepared to integrate migrants, it is
icant growth and improvement. Its strongest year was argued. Others argue that Muslim immigration repre-
2005 (the “catch-up” period) and its weakest year was sents a security threat and a health risk. These argu-
2000 (Fico’s first government). ments persist in spite of the fact that V4 countries have
Poland seems to be immune to swerves, but its devel- previously integrated migrants without significant diffi-
opment has been exceedingly volatile: negative between culties. The Czech Republic integrated thousands of mi-
2004 and 2006 (first PiS term) and positive in 2014 (be- grants from Bosnia (Muslims) and Ukraine and Moldova
fore the crumbling of the Civic Platform). Given the signif- in the 1990s. Poland has taken in thousands of Chechen
icant progress that the Law and Justice government has refugees (Muslims) over the last two decades. Hungary
made in implementing its illiberal reform program, the was the second largest recipient of refugees from the
2016–2017 data for Poland will certainly reflect this de- Yugoslav wars. None of these actions led to political po-
cline.13 The Czech Republic was the strongest performer larization. The number of refugees seeking asylum in the
of the V4 group in both 1996 and 2016. The dip between all V4 countries after 2015 seems well within these limits.
1996 to 1998 is due to the Opposition Agreement, which And still, the salience of the national sovereignty issues
was a failed attempt by the two major political parties has increased significantly, and national politicians have
to transform the Czech political system by strengthening turned against the EU to stay in power.
its majoritarian elements. Similar to Poland, we expect a In 2016, the EU tried to introduce quotas for the dis-
sharp downward trajectory after the October 2017 elec- tribution of refugees to various countries but met with
toral victory of ANO. strong opposition from Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Re-
Illiberal swerves are episodic, temporary and re- public (and Romania). In May 2017, the Hungarian and
versible, whereas illiberal turns represent more perma- Slovak governments disputed the EU refugee quotas at
nent shifts in the state’s political orientation. While the European Court of Justice, arguing that the quotas
Poland, the Czech Republic and especially Slovakia have are a pull factor for refugees, that they exceed the pow-
improved over time, whether despite or because of illib- ers of the EU and that they undermine the sovereignty
eral swerving, Hungary has worsened over time. of CEE states. In July 2017, the European Court of Justice
13We expect most indicators to decrease significantly, reflecting the multi-faceted character of the PiS project, targeting the country’s Constitutional
Tribunal, judiciary, public media, public administration and the armed forces, and indication private media and non-governmental organizations will
become targets in the near future.
100.0%
75.0%
50.0%
25.0%
0.0%
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
PL SK HU CZ EU
Figure 2. Trust in the EU in V4 countries between 2004 and 2017. Source: Eurobarometer.
Note: Trust to EC used here as a proxy for trust to EU.
Lenka Bustikova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies and an affiliate of
the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Arizona State University. Her
research focuses on party politics, voting behavior, clientelism, and state capacity. She is the recipient
of the 2015 Best Article Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s European Pol-
itics and Society Section, for her article “Revenge of the Radical Right”, and also the recipient of the
2017 Best Paper Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democra-
tization Section, for her paper co-authored with Cristina Corduneanu-Huci “Patronage, Trust and State
Capacity: The Historical Trajectories of Clientelism”.
Petra Guasti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Unit “Democratic Innovations” at
Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). Her main research focus is democracy, more specifically the
growing tension within the system of representative democracy in respect to its legitimacy. She stud-
ies structures, actors, and processes that enable more participation of citizens, leading to more inclu-
siveness of representative democracy. Her work was published in Democratization, Communist and
Post-Communist Studies and European Political Science.