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In the early 2020s we live in the transition period between two world systems, the Old World Order (OWO) and the New World Order (NWO), in a deep ‘polycrisis’. Therefore, the term transformation has recently appeared in official EU documents as well as in political science literature. The transition to the NWO has begun with this crisis management and it will produce a radical transformation of the entire global architecture in the 2020s. In its conceptual framework this paper focuses on the contrast between ‘de‑coupling’ and ‘de ‑risking’, as it has been explained very markedly in the recent speeches of the president of the European Commission, Ursula van der Leyen (EC 2023a), and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan (The White House 2023). This contrast symbolises the US policy, concentrating more on cutting or reducing connectivity among the various policy fields, versus the EU policy turning them safe and interdependent. These approaches represent the US and EU attitude in the emerging New World Order, and primarily in their relationships to China.

All ECE countries have covered the same historical trajectory of ‘the third-generation autocracy’, but Hungary has been reaching its ‘perfection’, since the two-thirds, constitutional supermajority in the Hungarian case has allowed for the Orbán regime to complete this ‘reverse wave’ in all fields of society and turning it into a zombie democracy. The conceptual frame of this paper is that the decline of democracy and the turn to autocratisation can be presented in ECE in the three big stages of the Easy Dream, Chaotic Democracy and Neoliberal Autocracy in the three corresponding decades. The paper concentrates on the third stage in its three shorter periods taking 3–4 years as the De­Democratisation, Autocratisation and De­Europeanisation. The Hungarian case has been presented in this paper in a comparative ECE view as its worst-case scenario that also sheds light on the parallel developments in the fellow ECE countries.

This paper treats East-Central Europe as a region and investigates its common historical trajectory in the last decades. After 30 years of systemic change and 15 years of EU membership, it is high time for the re-evaluation and reconceptualization of the Europeanization and Democratization process in ECE. It is the key to understand the false start as the original sin in democratization and the reasons of ECE divergence from mainstream EU developments in order to prepare the redemocratization process. The progress of the Europeanization and Democratization process in ECE has been widely described in official documents, but for a balanced and complete picture it is necessary to present also the De-Europeanization and De-Democratization process from the very beginning. Basically, after the collapse of the bipolar world order in 1989, the Eastern enlargement was an economic and political necessity as a substantial part of the EU deepening and widening policy. The EU needed the extension of its economic space and political system that had also been pre-programmed in the mission statement of the Rome Treaty. At the same time, the new member states (NMS) needed the “Return to Europe” for their reintegration into the Western world. However, the capacity for this extension was actually missing on both sides, and it has remained so during the last 30 years of systemic change or the 15 years of EU membership. Altogether, this controversial process has produced a colorful picture of successes and failures in all NMS that will be analyzed in an ECE context.

The Europeanised, progressive intelligentsia in East-Central Europe (ECE) made a fundamental mistake in the nineties that amounts in some ways to the ‘treason of intellectuals’ and the basic reassessment of these naïve illusions has only begun nowadays. Motivated by the radical change in the ‘miraculous year’ (1989) the progressive intellectuals uncritically accepted and supported the Europeanisation in that particular form as it entered into the chaotic days of the early nineties, since they naively thought that its negative features would automatically disappear. In good faith, they created an apology for the established neoliberal hybrid and they sincerely defended this perverse Europeanisation against the increasing attacks of the traditionalistnativist narrative. With this action they have been unwillingly drifting close to the other side by offering some ideological protection for the ‘really existing’ neoliberal hybrid instead of criticising this deviation from genuine democratisation in order to facilitate its historical correction. However, due to the emergence of the neoliberal hybrid, the ‘external’ integration by the EU has resulted in the ‘internal’ disintegration inside the ECE member states. There has been a deep polarisation in the domestic societies and after thirty years the majority of populations in the ECE countries feel like losers, and they have indeed become losers. This controversial situation needs an urgent reconsideration, which is underway both in the EU and in the ECE as a self-criticism of the progressive intelligentsia. Thus, this paper concentrates on the reconsideration of the main conceptual issues of Europeanisation and Democratisation in ECE.1

Analyses of populism in East -Central Europe (ECE) necessarily depart from the general crisis of representative democracy in the EU and describe the ECE as a specifi c regional case reflecting the failure of the catch -up process. The first part of this article adopts this “classical” approach and considers the backsliding of ECE democracy alongside the rise of populist identity politics in the global context. In the second part, I turn to the historical trajectory of ECE populism as a “nested” or two -level game in the EU context of ECE developments. The third part of this article outlines the main contradictions in this process that has led to what I call the Juncker paradox. To understand this paradox, we need to return to what the Commission noted in the early 2010s as the Copenhagen dilemma: aft er the EU accession of ECE states, the EU had no means to control rule -of -law violations and, in fact, supported autocratic populist ECE regimes through European transfers. This article explains the worsening of this situation in the late 2010s as the EU polycrisis caused Juncker’s Commission to focus on Core -based priorities and marginalise rule -of -law violations in ECE. This inaction and neglect have produced a special case of negative externalities - the Juncker paradox - that has largely been counterproductive and further strengthened anti -EU populism in all ECE countries, especially Hungary and Poland. Despite this situation, I conclude that Juncker’s 2017 State of the Union address should be a turning point in the EU’s policy towards ECE; in particular, it should promote a better understanding of the regional situation and more effective enforcement of the rule of law.

In recent decades, the most remarkable feature of East-Central European (ECE) states has been their engagement in a deconsolidation process that necessitates the reconceptualising of European Studies and the theory of democracy. In the early ’90s, during the “revolution of high expectations,” consolidation was the key term in the conceptual framework of the transitology paradigm, but this approach was questioned increasingly in the 2000s and rejected in the 2010s. In its place, deconsolidation was introduced as one of a wide array of similar terms referring to the decline, backsliding or regression of democracy and later as one of a whole “other” family of opposite terms like (semi-)authoritarian system and competitive/elected autocracy. Indeed, rather than a transition to democracy, a tendency to transition to authoritarian rule has been observed in the ECE states in general and in Poland and Hungary in particular. In the last quarter century, the twin terms of Europeanisation and democratisation, which denote normative approaches, have been the main conceptual pillars of analyses of the ECE states. It turns out, however, that the opposite processes of de-Europeanisation and de-democratisation can now also be observed in these countries.

This theoretical paper discusses the controversial development of civil society in the new member states (NMS) over a quarter century of systemic change and after 10 years of EU membership. In doing so, it attempts to elaborate a new conceptual framework for the decline of top-down democracy and the return to democratisation as a bottom-up process. This study of the bumpy course of NMS civil society analyses the gap between large formal legal institutions and small local informal ones and emphasises the need for participatory democracy if democracy in the NMS is to be sustainable. In fact, in this quarter century, two faces of informal institutions have emerged, reflecting the tension between genuine civil society organisations and large corrupt clientele networks. The mass emergence of these “negative” informal institutions has led to a situation of state capture and a democratic façade often analysed in the NMS academic literature. The study concludes that after the political and policy-learning processes of the last 25 years, there are now some signs of a participatory turn in the bottom-up process of NMS democratisation.

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