Abstract: Recent scholarship assesses the impact of the European Union's conditionality on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in a contradictory way. On the one hand, the EU is perceived as a key agent of successful democratic consolidation, and on the other, the return of nationalist and populist politics in the new member states has been explored in the context of the negative consequences of the hasty accession that undermined government accountability and constrained public debate over policy alternatives. This article explains this puzzle of the ambiguous effects of the EU's politics of conditionality, which promoted institutions stabilising the horizontal division of powers, rule of law, human and minority rights protection, but which neglected norms and rules of participatory and/or popular democracy.

Introduction

It is taken for granted that the so-called eastern enlargement of the European Union (EU) has supported the establishment of democracy in the candidate countries. The EU has often been perceived as the key agency that promoted and strengthened democracy in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). However, the most recent developments in several CEECs, namely the return of nationalist and populist politics to the core of several governments in several countries, has cast doubts on the state and the quality of democracy in these countries.