Europe's Other Democratic Deficit: National Authoritarianism in Europe's Democratic Union

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The European Union (EU) has a democratic deficit, but not the one we thought it had. For years, many scholars of European integration have argued that the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, due to the lack of public engagement and political accountability at the EU level and the absence of a common public sphere or common demos characteristic of national democracies.¹According to this view, the increasing transfer of authority from democratic national governments to an undemocratic EU constituted a threat to democracy across Europe. While EU-level politics certainly has democratic shortcomings, these have been grossly exaggerated in the literature,²and the heavy focus on them has distracted attention from the threats posed by democratic deficits at the national level in some EU member states. With some EU member states now sliding towards authoritarianism, we can look back with nostalgia on the days when scholars believed the greatest threats to democracy in Europe stemmed from the EU's own democratic shortcomings. Today, clearly, the greatest threats to democracy in Europe are found not at the EU level, but at the national level in the EU's nascent autocracies.

From its inception, the EU was conceived as a union of democracies, and it eventually made it explicit that states wishing to join the union would have to possess 'stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities'.³European leaders understood that national democracies would vary in profound ways, and they did not presume to impose a uniform model of democracy. Yet, member states did commit themselves in the EU treaties (Treaty on European Union (TEU),⁴Article 2) to uphold a set of core values, including democracy, pluralism and the rule of law, and they established a mechanism (TEU, Article 7) to sanction states that breached these democratic values in serious and persistent ways.⁵Recent episodes of 'democratic backsliding'⁶in Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and other EU member states⁷have led many observers to conclude that these core democratic values were under threat. These developments remind us that the EU may have a vital role to play in defending democracy and the rule of law in member states where these values...