EU: SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN THE FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS
4 T HE ECE POLYCRISIS AND THE DEEP DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY (2009–201)
In the second period it turned out that the catching-up process lost its direction, since the main trend was the quantitative and not the qualitative economic growth, namely in the outdated GDP terms and not in the terms of the emerging knowledge economy. Hence, the main aim of economic development was – and still is - reaching the “past” of developed countries and not joining them for them in building their “future” by the innovation driven economy with sustainable development. The constant and rather chaotic transformations produced an increasing reform fatigue and resistance against the necessary changes. The rising drastic social polarization at the end of the 2000s resulted in a credibility crisis that meant the end of permissive consent.
The global crisis produced a special ECE polycrisis as a cumulated crisis, therefore the controversial EU-ECE relationship can only be explained in its full complexity by outlining briefly the long term changes in the polity, policy and policy dimensions that indicates also the specific situation in the early 2010s. In the polity the decline of democracy with the transition to authoritarian rule began in the early 2010s and this process has led to the various kinds of autocratic political systems in ECE. The initial crisis of the crisis management has resulted in a marked divergence from the EU mainstream development not only in macro- political terms of “illiberal democracy” (Orbán 2014), but in the complete structure of polity, i.e. also in meso- and micro-political as well as in socio- political and cultural dimensions (Balcer 2017), generating a relative civilizational backsliding in the well-being terms. In politics there was an abrupt change between the first and second generation of party systems with the emerging hard populism and extreme right parties. It has been accompanied by the dominance of the traditionalist narrative with the politics of historical memory and hard Euroscepticism. The ECE societies have been polarized between winners and losers as well as between the relative catching up in the “West of East” and the absolute impoverishment in the “East of East”. The “velvet dictatorships” have built up an effective socio-political power pyramid and through the soft power of their mediaworks they have successfully manipulated the elections (Knight 2018; Buti and Pichelman 2017).
In policy the governments turned to austerity measures with the radical disinvestment into the social and human capital, and this relative backsliding of socio-economic situation has produced an increasing credibility crisis resulting in low trust societies. Basically, there has been a relative decline in the public services – first of all in education and health care – given the needs of the new innovation driven economy and society that has produced “the social disinvestment state” (Lendvai-Bainton 2018). It has also been a manifest regression compared to the Western way of life in social security for the large majority, and even more in the life perspectives for youngsters that has
unleashed a mass exodus of young and talented people and with this loss of most valuable internal resources the ECE region has drastically diminished its catching up capacity in the near future. The mass emigration of the talented young people from the less developed member states will increase the Core-Periphery Divide: “The loss of young highly educated people may create yet other challenges, such as impairment of innovative capacities needed to sustain economic growth.” (Fernandes and Vandenbroucke 2018, 4–5).
In the EU there is a two level game in all respects, namely polity, politics and policy theoretically has to be treated both at the EU and membership levels. Actually, it is only the policy dimension that has been managed and discussed at the EU level, otherwise there is a false myth of national sovereignty that has not allowed for the discussions about the quality of polity and politics in the individual member states. The democratic order has been conceived automatically given at the membership level, therefore the democratic system has been exclusively discussed in the EU as the participation of the EU citizens in the EU institutional system. No doubt that the elaboration, maintenance and development of the “EU democracy” with the large citizen participation is a vital issue, nevertheless the exclusive focus on this issue produced a situation in which the EU institutions and the public opinion has realized only very belatedly the de- democratization process in ECE. The European Parliament has made several efforts to create a DFR mechanism to investigate the Democracy, Fundamental Rights and Rule of Law in the member states, but it has always failed because of the resistance of the most member states. The Economic Europe has new and again defeated the Political Europe, therefore the authoritarian challenge if ECE has come as a surprise of the old member states.9
Altogether, the global crisis especially hit hard the ECE region, therefore the divergence of the ECE from the EU mainstream in Europeanization and Democratization became manifest already in the second period. The de- democratization process began in the new ruling populist parties, which introduced the counterproductive austerity measures cutting the investment into the future. While the gap between the quantitative versus the qualitative catching up had been latent in the first period because the main task had been the transition to the market economy and its minimal consolidation, this gap was brutally widening in the second period. The contrast was the most evident in the Polish case, where the GDP grew even in the crisis years, still the disinvestment into social and human capital continued or even increased. So under the pressure of global crisis the ECE region did not turn to the innovation driven development that was the basic necessity for the global competitiveness, but it has reinforced the efforts of the controversial GDP-based economic growth. In the early 2010s due to the pernicious effects of the global crisis there was a general backsliding of middle class - especially the lower middle class - in the ECE countries, and the increasing inequality with the rise of “precariat” strata produced the authoritarian challenge. Although after the global crisis there was a tsunami, a master wave of neopopulism worldwide, this authoritarian challenge with hard populist parties appeared earlier and was stronger in ECE than elsewhere, since the global crisis hit hard the fragile ECE economies and societies, even if it was not noticed by the EU institutions and experts. All in all, the polycrisis was deeper in ECE than in the old member states because they were more vulnerable in socio-economic and political terms, being newcomers in market economy and democracy, not yet reaching the early consolidation and not finding the proper 9 There have been repeated attempts in EP from Tavares Report (EP 2013) through the DRF control
mechanism (EP 2016) to the Sargentini Report (EP 2018) to condemn the de-democratization in ECE.
way of Europeanization before the outbreak of the global crisis. The socio- economic crisis in the early 2010s unleashed a vicious circle between low trust and poor governance and resulted in a deep Core-Periphery Divide by the second half of the 2010s.