The European Union’s failure to address the autocracy crisis: MacGyver, Rube Goldberg, and Europe’s unused tools

ABSTRACT

This article dismantles the myth that the EU’s failure to respond adequately to the rise of autocratic member governments has been due to its lack of adequate tools. The EU has used this excuse repeatedly to justify engaging in what Laurent Pech calls a new instrument creation cycle – reacting to attacks on democracy and the rule of law not by deploying existing tools but by wasting time creating new ones. The repetition of this cycle has resulted in the creation of a Rule of Law Rube Goldberg machine – a redundant assemblage of mostly useless instruments ostensibly designed to help the EU address backsliding. The pointlessness of many of these tools is underscored when we look closely at the few simple but potentially powerful, MacGyver-like tools that the EU has had at its disposal all along, but which EU leaders have failed to use robustly to defend democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• democracy
• autocracy
• rule of law

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. And even when delegating authority to the Commission, member governments in the Council have in recent years pressed the Commission to take a more relaxed approach to enforcement, as Tommaso Pavone and I show in our recent work on the decline in the Commission’s use of infringement procedures (Kelemen and Pavone 2022a).

2. Strictly speaking, there is no requirement that Article 7.1 be triggered before Article 7.2 is triggered, but it is generally understood that in practice member states would not trigger Article 7.2 until after they had triggered Article 7.1 and that had not resulted in the resolution of the systemic breach of Article 2 values.

3. Regulation (Eu, Euratom) 2020/2092 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2020 on a General Regime of Conditionality for the Protection of the Union Budget.

4. Tweet available at: https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status/1526198093124886528?s=20&t=FJiXewt1v0ELctZtVnONCg

5. Tweet available at: https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1526193863890706432?s=20&t=FJiXewt1v0ELctZtVnONCg