Podcast: "Complicity by omission"
Tom Theuns on why the EU must be able to expel autocracies
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Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations following his re-election despite two impeachments and four criminal prosecutions are a reminder that even mature democracies like the US can backslide.
Trump’s most ambitious ideologues look to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—a much younger parliamentary republic—as their template for a successful unpicking of liberal democracy. In Hungary, the backsliding began in 2010, just six years after accession to the EU. Over 14 years, Orbán’s successive administrations have consolidated clientelist power through ten constitution rewrites, a clear-out of the judiciary, direct and indirect acquisition of media outlets, electoral gerrymandering, referendums to influence elections, and monopolised political advertising.
The EU’s response to this creeping autocracy in its nest has been so inconsistent and accommodating that Orbánism has become a model for other members – most obviously for Robert Fico’s government in Slovakia but also for ruling parties in Italy and the Netherlands. Orbánism is even sapping one of the EU’s most potent soft powers - bending applicants into liberal democracies - just as the membership queue extends from the Western Balkans to Ukraine and Moldova into the Caucasus. Only last week, fresh from stealing an election, Georgia’s prime minister declared his government’s “ambitious goal to become a member of the European Union by 2030”.
How long can this continue in a union whose founding treaty declares that is built on “the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” as well as “pluralism, non-discrimination [and] tolerance” (Article 2)?
Not long, argues Tom Theuns in Protecting Democracy in Europe: Pluralism, Autocracy and the Future of the EU - out on 21 November. Standing by while one of their fellow members transforms into an “illiberal democracy” on the way to full autocracy should never have been an option for the EU and its institutions. “They don't necessarily make a material contribution to democratic decay but they are nevertheless complicit by omission,” he tells me in a New Books Network podcast.
“Member states have pooled certain competencies together,” he says. “The result of that is that European citizens in each member state are co-governed by the governments of all other member states to the degree that they're subjected to laws which are co-decided at the European level. So, if one of the actors of that process is an autocratic actor, then the resulting laws and policies that are decided at that level are no longer democratically legitimate to the extent that they were before. So there’s a direct impact on the legitimacy of European law and policy as it applies even domestically to citizens”.
Inadequate as it is, the EU’s existing rulebook can and should be used to bring Hungary and any other backsliders into line. However, the EU’s institutions and citizens – especially those in the backsliding state – need to know that expulsion is a possibility even if this is excluded from the treaties. Hungarian “citizens themselves are still very committed to EU membership so where membership itself is on the table, you could hope that there's a politicisation around these policies of democratic decay and democratic backsliding which would hopefully change the outcome,” he says.
To make this threat credible, Tom Theuns and Merijn Chamon have designed a makeshift expulsion mechanism by which the EU’s liberal democracies would follow the British example and use their Article 50 rights to withdraw from the union. They would leave together and found an “EU 2.0” free of autocracies but with a clear expulsion mechanism written into the new treaty. “Ultimately I think it's untenable as a member state or a country committed to liberal democratic norms to indefinitely be associated in this quite entangled … complex way with a stable autocratic country”.
Tom Theuns teaches political theory and European politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science.