Party Positions, EU Leverage and Democratic Backsliding in the Western Balkans and Beyond

Transcription

1 Party Positions, EU Leverage and Democratic Backsliding in the Western Balkans and Beyond For presentation at the conference: Rejected Europe. Beloved Europe. Cleavage Europe? European University Institute, May 2017 Milada Anna Vachudova, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill When studying political change in post-communist Europe, scholars have for nearly 30 years now expected democratic progress. It was evident very soon after that many post-communist states were simply transitioning from one form of authoritarian regime to another. Still, scholars expected that states fortunate enough to become credible future EU members would eventually become EU compatible liberal democracies and their membership in the EU would only strengthen them. Some hailed the EU s preaccession process as the most successful democracy promotion program ever implemented by an external actor. Others expected that, even where the EU turned its back, social movements could bring democratic improvement further eastward. Now, across the EU s post-communist candidate and member states, the trend of democratic progress has been replaced by a trend of democratic backsliding. Early standard bearers of democratization Hungary and Poland are leading the way. For its part, the ongoing effectiveness of EU leverage on remaining candidate states is being questioned even as the EU is held liable for weak rule of law in some new EU members, and for allowing if not abetting the backsliding of the Hungarian and Polish governments. The goal of this paper is to shed light on one of the key drivers of domestic political change: when and why political parties change positions. I argue that among the EU s postcommunist candidates, EU leverage still has an important role in shaping party positions. As the adapting model predicts, political parties are moderating their positions and adopting EU-compatible agendas because they calculate that this is necessary to win elections and hold power. For some candidate states, however, EU leverage has been hobbled by something blocking the usual incentives for parties to moderate their 1

2 positions. In these cases Isee high polarization in the party system as strongly nationalist party positions remain electorally rewarding. I also show that democratic backsliding is associated with this kind of polarization of the party system where one or more ruling parties stakes a strong position defending and speaking for the nation. This serves the dual purpose of legitimizing the concentration of power, and deflecting attention from corruption and poor governance. While the temptations of polarization can be felt across the region, there is substantial variation in outcomes across candidate and member states Our empirical analysis is on the four states of the Western Balkans Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia that are still in the candidate status or have only recently joined the EU. But I also situate these cases in the broader regional context seeking lessons about democratic backsliding and countering force of the EU that can travel and inform our thinking about East Central European cases as well. Among the EU s post-communist members I also see that democratic backsliding goes hand in hand with polarization on the matters of identity, social and cultural politics. Indeed, Hungary s party system leads the way in its extreme polarization alongside the success of its ruling party in dismantling important institutions of liberal democracy. The rest of this paper is organized in five parts. The first presents our theoretical expectations about when parties change positions in ways that may help shape regime type. The second describes how, as part of a wider body of work, I measure the positions of political parties in post-communist party systems using the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and what kind of variation I find on backsliding and polarization. The third explores party change consistent with the adapting model and democratic resilience. The fourth section looks at party change that deepens polarization and goes hand in hand with democratic backsliding in candidate states. The conclusion explores whether postcommunist party systems are prone to cycles of polarization and backsliding, and whether the EU both causes strong nationalist positions to be more appealing, and can have a role to play in making them less appealing in its member states like it sometimes does in its candidate states. 2

3 1. Parties Change Position: Adaptation and Polarization The most important harbingers of domestic political change are arguably changes in the positions held by major political parties. In this section Ilay out our theoretical framework for understanding how and why political parties have changed position in postcommunist Europe and when to expect that such changes will be accompanied by democratic backsliding. Adapting to Join the EU The study of EU leverage has generally focused on how the EU pre-accession process has changed domestic policies, laws and institutions but not what positions parties take, and how they compete with one another in the party system. The adapting model holds that party systems of EU candidate states follow a predictable evolution over time and this is caused by participation in the EU s pre-accession process. In almost all cases, major political parties have responded to EU leverage by embracing agendas that are consistent with EU requirements in the run up to the launch of negotiations for membership. In other words, this reduces polarization in the party system by making strongly nationalist party positions electorally much less rewarding. As a consequence, the party systems at least for a while have reflected a consensus on the general course of policymaking since joining the EU is a foreign policy goal with such substantial domestic requirements (Vachudova 2005; 2008). The underlying logic is that during this period political parties need to adopt EU-compatible agendas in order to win seats and stay in the political game. For two decades now the basic equation underpinning the enlargement decision has not changed: The substantial benefits of joining the EU and the costs of being excluded create incentives for post-communist governments to satisfy the EU s comparatively vast entry requirements. Membership brings economic benefits and also a geopolitical change of fortune through the protection of EU rules, a new status vis-à-vis neighboring states, and a voice in EU institutions. These benefits continue to be substantial despite the financial crisis and the loss of confidence that have plagued European integration since

4 (Vachudova 2014). The dynamic of the EU enlargement process is still asymmetric interdependence: the candidate states stand to gain more from joining the EU than do existing members (Moravcsik and Vachudova, 2003). Candidate states in post-communist Europe where regime change in was followed by illiberal democracy or authoritarianism have been the most interesting. For key parties in these states, pushing for EU accession is a marker of significant moderation in their agendas, including support for democratic standards and economic reform. Here adapting has usually come in two rounds: In the first round, reform-oriented parties in opposition to the authoritarian ruling parties rally around a pro-eu agenda and adapt to it, often changing their positions on issues such as ethnic minority rights and domestic reform. Joining the EU becomes an important focal point for cooperation among disparate actors opposing the authoritarian regime. In the second round, the authoritarian and anti-eu parties themselves adapt their agendas to fit with liberal democracy and EU requirements, realizing that this is the only way to get back into the electoral game. Changes in the positions of major parties in Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia all fit the expectations of the model (Vachudova 2008). I show in this paper that the adapting model continues to predict party change in the Western Balkans. In those states where EU leverage is able to work more or less normally, I see substantial changes in party positions over the last decade. Indeed, party system change is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the argument that EU enlargement continues to play an outsized role in democracy promotion in the region. As predicted, in Croatia and Serbia, major political parties fundamentally changed their agendas to make them EU-compatible, and governments implemented significant policy changes to move forward in the pre-accession process. This is especially striking because a decade ago Serbia seemed liked the most polarized and the least likely candidate for Europeanization in the whole region. This is not to say that some political parties in Croatia and Serbia are not tempted by the spoils of polarization and democratic backsliding Iturn to now, only that the EU process has helped to hold them in check. 4

5 Democratic Backsliding in the Age of Polarization Post-communist EU members and candidates that are suffering from democratic backsliding all seem to share one characteristic: the embrace by one or more ruling parties of intense if not extreme appeals to safeguard the interests of the nation. These parties campaign and win elections by calling for a return to national grandeur and conservative social values while promising to defend the nation from its enemies and taking center stage among those enemies in most cases is the EU. Political competition on socioeconomic issues has been almost entirely eclipsed by competition on identity and values. It is by claiming to defend the nation that the leaders of these ruling parties build the political cover to concentrate power and dismantle liberal democracy in a deliberate way. I show in this paper that this kind of polarization goes hand in hand with democratic backsliding both in EU candidate and in EU member states. By incentivizing political parties to moderate their nationalist appeals and to prioritize economic and institutional reforms, EU leverage pushes party systems away from this kind of polarization but it doesn t work for all candidate states, and it can t, by definition, work in the same way for states after accession. What is democratic backsliding? In a recent article Nancy Bermeo defines it as the state-led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy (Bermeo 2016, 5). Democracy consists of multiple institutions that do not necessarily all emerge at the same time in the process of democratization (Ziblat and Cappoccia 2010), and they are necessarily dismantled at the same time in one broad stroke. Democratic backsliding therefore usually involves multiple smaller attacks on particular democratic institutions that lower the quality of democracy, and over time they can add up to a hybridization or outright reversal of the regime type. Some of the common moves involve expansion of formal and factual power of the executive at the expense of the institutions of horizontal accountability (O Donnell 1998) and abuse of state resources to tilt electoral competition in the favor of incumbents. Importantly, as Bermeo also highlights, in the contemporary era these are often moves undertaken by popularly elected governments that then hide behind this electoral mandate to present its anti-democratic moves as the will of the people (Bermeo 2016). 5

6 Why would high polarization put democracies at risk? After all, is not democracy put in place, precisely, so that strongly opposing social and political coalitions can be institutionally accommodated (Przeworski 2003)? However, classical democratization literature has also long commented on the indispensable role of the basic social consensus, in particular consensus about the legitimate boundaries of national community. Whether lines of legitimate national community are drawn based on reified ethnicity or along the ideological lines drawn by a party or parties claiming monopoly on representing the nation, a political game where one or both sides see the adversary as a political enemy to be excluded or eliminated rather than as a political opponent to be one-upped can easily dissolve into a no-holds-barred conflict. It follows that a particularly troublesome form of polarization is the one that eliminates cross-cutting cleavages and turns them into overlapping ones (Lijphart 1968). It is not so much the hardening of opinion on a single issue, but rather the reorganization of opinions on different issues along specific identity markers that makes polarization such a difficult problem to solve (McCoy and Rahman 2016). This is exactly the pattern that Iare seeing in most cases of democratic backsliding in the post-communist region. Party polarization in them is unusually high and widening along the tan-gal axis while it is at the same time all but disappearing on the economic left-right axis (see Figures 1 and 2). Furthermore, polarized and exclusive political identities amplify problems of weakly institutionalized democracies (Huntington 1968). In a recent survey of all the cases of outright democratic reversals in the Third Wave cases, Haggard and Kaufman (2016) identify institutional weakness as the most consistently found precipitating factor. According to them (2016: 227) institutionalization is about: the degree to which the interactions among major political actors are coordinated around common political expectations (Haggard and Kaufman 2016, 227). In particular, in democracy such coordination relates to the expectation that electoral winners will not use their victory to undermine the prospects of repeated and open competition on the relatively equal playing field (Levitsky and Way 2010). Haggard and Kaufmann liken the dynamics of weakly institutionalized democracies to a security dilemma. As in any security dilemma, jointly optimal solutions are unlikely if players do not have a strong bond of trust that are unlikely 6

7 between political parties in a highly polarized systems based on mutually exclusive identities. Among the EU s candidate states in the Western Balkans, two states stand out in terms of backsliding and also polarization: Bosnia and Macedonia. For these states, the EU has not been able to transform its potential leverage into strong incentives for politicians and parties to behave in ways that are consistent with qualifying for EU membership. In both cases, this is due to an extraordinary and unique barrier to EU leverage: For Bosnia, it is the structure of political competition reified by the Dayton institutions, and for Macedonia it is the abiding Greek veto on any progress in the pre-accession process before the resolution of the long-standing naming dispute. Bosnia has stagnated: there is little or no connection between election results and whether ruling parties deliver on progress toward EU membership; as a result, their attestations of EU support are virtually meaningless. Macedonia, by contrast, is a most worrying case of backsliding in the Western Balkans: The ruling party has all but abandoned liberal democracy and moved to institutionalize authoritarian rule. In both countries ruling elites profit from the status quo: To protect it, they keep the EU at bay. Making progress in the EU accession process would threaten their ability to extract such high rents from the state, and possibly even open them up for prosecution for past crimes. As a result, ruling parties make no efforts to shift the substance of party competition and in Macedonia this has meant taking steps to make it less likely that the Greece will drop its veto. 2. Measurement: How do we know how parties change their agendas? I use the Chapel Hill dataset on the positions of national political parties that depicts the structure of political competition in the EU s post-communist candidate states, and sheds some light on how political parties bundle different issues. 1 The dataset provides the position of each party on European integration, as well as its position on two dimensions of political competition: the left/right economic dimension, and the gal/tan cultural dimension. 1 For post-communist Europe, the dataset for 2006 includes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Dataset and codebook are available at: 7

8 Gal stands for green/alternative/libertarian (or socially liberal) and tan for traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (or socially conservative, though this label tends to underplay the authoritarian and nationalism positions of the tan parties in the east). This dataset is built using expert surveys: A team of researchers asks experts usually academics specializing in political parties or European integration to evaluate how party leaders defined the positions of their political parties on European integration, and on three ideological dimensions for European political parties. The time point of reference for the figures in this paper is 2007 and 2014, and the analysis is confined to parties with two percent or more of the vote in the national election the most proximate prior year. Before I turn to the Western Balkans, it is useful to understand how, in broad strokes, parties in post-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 (here, the east ) tend to adopt different combinations of party positions than the older EU member states ( the west ). Parties that combine left and tan positions are almost absent from the west. The presence of these parties in the east is a strong legacy of communist party rule, which combined extreme left-wing economic ideology with strong authoritarianism and nationalism. Since 1989, this communist magnet has held parties in the left-tan quadrant. Meanwhile, the EU magnet has helped pull parties into the rightgal quadrant, since joining the EU required governments to implement free market reforms and to safeguard the rights and freedoms of all of their citizens, including ethnic and other minorities (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009). Ican see in Figure 2 (below) that support for European integration in the east is correlated with party positions that are economically right and socially gal (meaning socially liberal). Opposition to the EU is concentrated in the economically left and socially tan quadrant and hard left and hard tan positions are never combined with support for European integration. This is consistent with earlier research on that finds that pro-europeanism in the East is concentrated among parties with right and gal positions, and anti-europeanism among left and tan parties (Kopecký and Mudde 2002; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2005; Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004). This is distinct from the West, where pro-european attitudes are associated with left and gal positions and anti-european attitudes with right and tan positions (Marks et. al 2006). 8

9 Figure 1: Positions of Political Parties in Post-Communist Europe, 2006 What is striking is how few anti-eu parties exist in 2006 in the states whose parties are shown in Figure 1: the eight post-communist EU members that had just joined the EU in 2004 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia), and in the two that were about to join it in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania). In 2014, the Western Balkan states are engaged in the EU s pre-accession process or have recently joined (Croatia in 2013). In broad strokes, the way that parties in the Western Balkans position themselves in 2014 similar to these ten. Support for EU membership is associated strongly with GAL positions on the social axis, and with centrist or right-wing policies on the economic axis. Whereas in the mid 2000s the region had several parties opposing the EU that combined TAN positions with strongly leftist ones, nowadays most of the opposition to the EU comes from socially conservative or nationalist parties with rather centrist economic outlooks. In the four Western Balkan states in this study, the transformation of party systems has been 9

10 more complicated than in the ten earlier post-communist EU candidates before and during their negotiations for EU membership. Looking at how party positions have changed from 2007 to 2014, fewer parties take strongly left positions on economic policy, but more parties are hard TAN, meaning they take strongly nationalist and socially conservative positions. We see two different kinds of party system change taking place in the Western Balkan states while they have been engaged in the EU pre-accession process. In Croatia and Serbia, office-seeking parties have responded to strong incentives to change and moderate their positions in order to become EU-compatible. In Bosnia and Macedonia we see instead the capture of the state by rent-seeking, nationalist parties. Unpacking the relationship between polarization and democratic backsliding To gain a rough indicator of which of our core Western Balkan cases are backsliding and which are not, I use the Nations in Transit yearly scores compiled by the Freedom House. Despite the weaknesses and relative lack of methodological transparency (Munk and Verkuilen 2002), Freedom House reports particularly region-focused Nations of Transit edition have the advantage of being more sensitive to incremental erosion and partial dismantling of democratic institutions that have not (yet) crossed the threshold of clear regime reversal that would register in the scholarly datasets such as Polity or Democracy and Dictatorship. Nations in Transit reports reveal that with their scores practically unchanged since 2007, Croatia and Serbia, although not perfect, have demonstrated remarkable degree of democratic resilience throughout the years of continental-wide crisis that has affected them strongly. By contrast, ratings for Bosnia and Macedonia have considerably deteriorated over the same period. Moreover, whereas Bosnian scores have slowly crept downward in the steady stream of downgrades Nations in Transit mostly attributes to the acts of omission, Macedonia has been downgraded at a faster rate and mostly due to the acts of commission by its own popularly elected government. Since political parties are usually the key proximate cause of domestic political change, I map out the intensity and dimensions of party political competition in post- 10

11 communist region. Figure 2 uses CHES data to map the policy spread between the largest party of government and the largest party of opposition along the two axes of competition. Figure 2: Polarization as Policy Spread Between Largest Party in Government and Largest Party in Opposition Figure 2 reveals an interesting clustering of cases with backsliding democracies Macedonia and Hungary exhibiting high levels of identity based polarization along the gal-tan axis. Poland too already has a relatively high level of gal-tan polarization in 2014, which has doubtless become even higher since the 2015 election of its Law and Justice government with its controversial socially conservative initiatives. Bosnia seems to be standing on its own as a case with exceptionally low levels of polarization along either axis. But this impression is misleading because the main axis of polarization in Bosnia is an ethnic one with leading parties from different ethnic groups strongly opposing each other at almost every step exactly because they are similarly ideologically positioned on our TAN axis. 11

12 A more nuanced picture can be gained by unpacking Bosnian ethnically fragmented party system to look at the patterns of polarization within each ethnic block. Our Figure 3 reveals highly polarized TAN axis among the political parties that primarily compete over ethnic Bosniak vote. This is because Social Democratic Party and Democratic Front take socially liberal values and promote a form of inclusive Bosnian nationalism that is at odds with more ethno-religious and conservative positions of other Bosniak parties, and in turn at odds with almost uniformly strongly TAN ethno-nationalist parties of Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs. Figure 3: Polarization as Policy Spread Between Largest Party in Government and Largest Party in Opposition, Bosnia Separated Out 12

13 3. Adapting for Accession: Croatia + Serbia I sketch in this section how political parties in Croatia and Serbia have responded to EU incentives by moderating party agendas and creating in the party system a convergence around EU-compatible positions in key areas. CROATIA In Croatia in 2007 accelerated preparations for EU membership had already pushed several parties away from hard tan positions and toward gal positions. After Croatia joined the EU in 2013, however, one or two important parties have become more nationalist. In Serbia in 2007, we see the typical post-communist axis of political competition, with parties spread between strongly tan and economically left parties and those that have embraced more culturally progressive gal positions along with more right positions associated with implementing liberalizing market reforms in Serbia. Serbia is stuck in 2007 with a highly polarized parliament and major parties rejecting EU integration. In 2014, in contrast, we see how two major parties the Socialists and the Progressives have adopted dramatically more gal and economically more centrist positions while switching from opposition to support for European integration. 13

14 Figure 4: Croatia s Party System, 2007 and 2014 Croatia already joined the EU in 2013, and its party system has changed in fundamental ways several times. As predicted by the adapting model, Croatia s party system experienced a dramatic change after 2000, not just with the ousting of the vicious authoritarian regime of Franjo Tudjman but also, crucially, with the transformation of the agenda (if not the membership) of his extreme right-wing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party. The HDZ embraced democratic reforms and preparations for EU membership. This was perhaps easier than in neighboring Serbia because Croatia s belonging to Western Europe had never been questioned by the HDZ (Subotic, 2010), because the West supported Croatia in Operation Storm, and because the destructive grip of authoritarian forces was somewhat weaker (Dolenec, 2013). After the HDZ recaptured power at the end of 2003, Prime Minister Ivo Sanader led a government that put preparations for EU membership at the heart of its governing program and that included 14

15 reforming the judiciary and bolstering institutions to fight corruption (Konitzer, 2011). 2 What Sanader did not apparently consider, however, was that these more independent institutions might go after him. He was indicted on a colorful array of corruption charges and, in November 2012, he was sentenced to ten years in prison by a Croatian court (Barlovac, 2012). When Croatia joined the EU in 2013 there were still problems, of course, including quite high levels of organized crime and corruption, and the absence of efforts to encourage refugee return among Croatia s erstwhile Serbian minority (see European Commission, 2013a). Celebrations attending the 2012 verdict of the ICTY freeing former general Ante Gotovina on appeal showcased the dark side of Croatian nationalism, and Croatia must be judged on how it pursues war crimes trials at the domestic level. A cynic can look at Croatia and say that it is simply the beneficiary of relative economic prosperity and of ethnic cleansing that removed the Serbian minority in But the removal of the Serbs forced nationalist politicians in Croatia to move on from ethnic scapegoating and tend to domestic reform in response to the expectations of their voters for a rising standard of living and a more efficient state. Sanader s reform of the HDZ party is consistent with the adapting model that expects leaders of post-authoritarian parties to moderate party agendas in order to stay in the political game and then pursue reforms that the EU now insists include building independent institutions in order to move forward in the pre-accession process (Vachudova, 2008). (But this sequence of events (affectionately called Sanaderization ) may be less likely going forward as entrenched and corrupt political leaders in the region, not wishing to join Sanader behind bars, come to see EU-led institutional reform with greater caution.) In late 2015, first elections after Croatia joined the EU returned to power HDZ under the leadership of Tomislav Karamarko who spent previous few years promoting to the party leadership a few people from the more extreme nationalist wing of the party. HDZ benefited from the inability of the ruling SDP to provide an effective response to the economic crisis that marked the majority of its mandate. Additionally, HDZ has in the years in opposition reinforced its alliance with uncivil society (Kopecky and Mudde 2 On the HDZ s turn back to nationalism after it lost power in 2011, see Jović,

16 2003) consisting of war veterans associations and deeply conservative Catholic circles. While HDZ clearly benefited in the electoral campaign from the added space for nationalist rhetoric provided by the country s new status of an EU member state, such approach has quickly proven unworkable as a governing platform. Street protests and infighting with the minority coalition partner a new political party called MOST and gathering ideologically heterogeneous coalition of independent local mayors quickly led to snap parliamentary elections less than a year later. HDZ again won a small victory but this time led by a new leader Andrej Plenkovic whose credentials as a moderate were mostly built on his Pro- European reputation, built up over the years of service in Croatia diplomatic corps and in a couple of years as one of Croatia s newly elected MEPs. SERBIA The behavior of Serbia s largest formerly authoritarian parties was, in 2012 and 2013, also strongly and, for some, unexpectedly consistent with the adapting model as these parties made satisfying difficult EU requirements a priority. It is interesting to explore why a consensus on qualifying for EU membership was slow to develop among Serbia s main parliamentary parties, but now, rather suddenly, it is almost without opposition in Serbia s parliament. The answer rests chiefly with the electoral and economic calculations of key politicians in Serbia s previously nationalist and anti-western parties who launched a successful strategy of EU outbidding after Serbia s main reformist party, the Democratic Party (DS), was in fact slow to adapt fully to a pro-eu agenda on some issues. 16

17 Figure 5: Serbia s Party System, 2007 and 2014 Over the last decade, the axis of competition in Serbia shifted dramatically (Dolenec, 2013). The populist and extreme right-wing Radical Party split in 2008, with Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić bringing many party members into the new Progressive Party (SNS). Nikolić proclaimed that it was his support for Serbia s integration into the EU that forced a split with his former extreme nationalist party. Meanwhile, already after the 2008 parliamentary elections the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the party of Slobodan Milošević, had under its new leader, Ivica Dačić taken up the opportunity to come back to power through an unlikely coalition with its erstwhile main foe Democratic Party. In the process, SPS has also adopted an agenda supporting Serbia s membership in the EU and successfully expanded its basis of support beyond the aging group of Milošević s core supporters. After the May 2012 parliamentary elections, the Progressive Party and the Socialist Party formed a coalition and Dačić became prime minister, marking a full return to power of Milošević's associates. 17

18 Democratic Party (DS) government in power since 2008 had long presented themselves at home and abroad as the only hope for a reasonable, pro-western, pro-eu government for Serbia. But their track record of compliance was actually mixed: With extremists opposing them at every turn, they counseled the EU and the US to expect only modest gains and then, bit by bit, delivered these gains in highly significant foreign policy areas such as cooperation with the ICTY, remembrance in Srebrenica, and the regulation of relations with neighboring Kosovo. What Tadić and the DS did not deliver, however, was domestic reform. Instead, changes to the judiciary filled it with DS acolytes; party control and the sale of jobs in the public sector increased; the media was largely under DS control; the oligarchs acted with impunity; and there was little progress in improving Serbia s business environment. This all created an opening for newly reformed SNS to advertise domestically and internationally that it could deliver where DS had failed. By the time 2012 elections came even some earlier strong supporters of DS started to believe as the adapting model predicts that this may turn out to be true. After Serbia s new coalition government led by the Progressive and Socialist came to power, there was evidence that it had made major policy changes in order to move forward in the EU pre-accession process. Serbia s most powerful politician, the Progressive leader Aleksandar Vučić, explained that Now we have to pay for it all - Kosovo, corruption, public debt (B-92, 2013). The most consequential breakthrough was an agreement between Kosovo and Serbia that integrates the institutions of the Serbian municipalities in northern Kosovo into the Kosovar state in exchange for a degree of local autonomy (see Bechev, 2013; Lehne, 2013). For this, the Serbian government was rewarded by the European Council with a start date for Serbia s official accession negotiations in January Meanwhile, despite economic stagnation, support for the EU among Serbian citizens was rising in 2013, with polls showing that an accession referendum held today would pass with around 65% of the vote, similar to the margin in 2012 in neighboring Croatia. Opinion polls also showed that Progressive Party voters were following the government s lead and becoming more supportive of an agreement on Kosovo and of European integration (IPSOS, 2013). Much remains undone in Serbia, from prioritizing domestic war crimes trials, following up on the anti-corruption cases that have been started in the early days of Vucic s 18

19 mandate, downsizing the state to building independent state institutions and freeing the media. Moreover, over the last two years SNS government has increasingly engaged in worrying behavior. These involve, harsh language used against any critics whether in opposition, in media, or in civil society, widespread abuse of state resources in electoral campaigns, and concentration of power in Vucic s hands regardless of his formal position in the state. Fragmentation of Serbian opposition after the change of power in 2012 has left EU without credible alternative interlocutor, precisely in the days when Serbia has found itself directly on the Balkan migrant route. SNS seem to be exploiting this situation, as well as the points it has earned internationally for its relatively cooperative approach on Kosovo, for the kind of moves that if left unanswered could result in democratic backsliding in Serbia in the future. But looking back at two decades of post-communist transition we see that sometimes it is the post-authoritarian parties that enact the most difficult reforms, in part to lend credence to their new identity. In the longer run, the adapting model played itself out since ultimately the incentives of EU membership combined with the popularity of joining the EU among Serbia s electorate compel most if not all major parties to shift their agendas to make them EU compatible. Much to the irritation of the current government, EU officials even if in a lower tone have not kept silent about its abuses of power, and in combination with Serbia s robust civil society this gives hope that the country will remain on the democratic trajectory. 4. Polarization Without Accession: Bosnia + Macedonia BOSNIA In Bosnia positions on ethnicity and territory have kept most parties in the tan quadrants. Meanwhile, competition along the economic left-right axis is virtually absent. This means that Bosnian parties are competing almost entirely on issues related to identity, despite the country s stultifying problems with economic development and corruption. After years of nationalist and increasingly authoritarian government, it is even harder to imagine political competition and new government policies bringing comprehensive reform 19

20 to Bosnia, whatever the formal positions of Bosnia s parties on joining the EU. This makes Bosnia another difficult case for the adapting model as Bosnia s consociational institutions give each ethnic block veto power over any major reform, while at the same time preventing political competition over ethnic boundaries. This creates terrible incentives for politicians, regardless of political turnover, because each new leader quickly discovers that provoking interethnic tensions only to present themselves as saviors of their own ethnic groups is enough to win them votes. Figure 6: Bosnia s Party System, 2007 and 2014 While in the war Bosnian Serbs as well as Bosnian Croats launched a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian Muslims (who also committed war crimes against Serbs and Croats though on a far lesser scale), today politicians representing all three ethnic groups appear to be cooperating fully in preserving a status quo that immiserates all Bosnians. The engagement of citizens and interest groups in politics is even weaker than in Serbia and Montenegro, making the costs for politicians of not complying with EU requirements even lower (Džihić and Wieser, 2011). Politics has been reduced to mono- 20

21 ethnic platforms and backroom deals among party leaders and these leaders preside over authoritarian structures that doggedly pursue personal and party agendas at great cost to the citizens (see Bieber, 2011; Reeker, 2013). What citizens of Bosnia get is poor governance at great expense and the institutions are especially dysfunctional on the Federation side where the entity government shares power with 10 cantonal governments. In June 2013 citizens turned out for unprecedented protests aimed against the country s predatory political class and its huge governance failures (see Štiks, 2013; Bieber, 2013), at a time when protest movements against the misuse of power were also taking hold in Bulgaria and Turkey. These protestors, however, failed to channel the energy of the protests into reshaping Bosnia s political parties. In part because they avoided engaging with existing political parties or starting new ones, the protestors did not succeed in changing the status quo. -- Need to sum up briefly the very complicated arguments about why Bosnia is controlled by elites that prefer the status quo to moving towards the EU. MACEDONIA In Macedonia, the nationalist parties emerged in opposition to the communist system. Therefore, up until about 2008, we see in Macedonia an axis of political competition that resembles in some ways Western Europe (see Rovny 2011). However, since 2008, EU (and NATO) integration for Macedonia has been completely blocked by the Greek veto. This has practically eliminated competition among parties along the economic left-right axis. Also, the formerly EU enthusiast VMRO-DPMNE have taken a much more ambivalent position toward joining the EU. Having built up their nationalist credentials and virtually out of reach EU leverage, the VMRO-DPMNE government is taking steps toward building an authoritarian regime. 21

22 Figure 7: Macedonia s Party System, 2007 and 2014 Macedonia was long considered a success story in the Western Balkans as its separation from the former Yugoslavia and the presence of a large ethnic minority did not lead to protracted violent conflicts. On the heels of the early successes in implementing the Ohrid agreement on decentralization and reconciliation after a brief inter-ethnic conflict in 2001, the European Council in December 2005 approved Macedonia s application for candidate status. At the time this made Macedonia the only Western Balkan country after Croatia to achieve that status. Parliamentary elections in 2006 brought to power the right-wing VMRO-DPNE and its new leader Nikola Gruevski on a ticket that promised to accelerate the integration of Macedonia into the EU. While other countries of the region have made progress toward EU accession, however, Macedonia still has not yet even received a date for the start of negotiations. The crucial obstacle for Macedonia has been the unresolved name dispute with its southern neighbor Greece. After the breakdown of yet another round of negotiations in early 2008, the Greek government decided to use its leverage to obstruct 22

23 Macedonia s integration into the EU and NATO. First, to a great disappointment of Macedonian government and public, Macedonia was not invited to join NATO alongside Albania and Croatia in Similarly, the Greek threat of veto derailed Macedonia s EU ambitions despite the EU Commission and the European Parliament recommending repeatedly that negotiations with Macedonia should begin without delay. Riding a tide of disappointment over these developments, the VMRO-DPNE government intensified its nationalist and nationalizing campaign. Airports and football stadiums were renamed after Alexander the Great and his father Filip. The government produced itself or supported the production of hundreds of documentary films celebrating Macedonia s heroes over the ages from antiquity to more recent struggles of Slavicspeaking populations around Thessaloniki in the Greek province of Macedonia. Most controversially, the government undertook a large-scale re-development of downtown Skopje, building in only few years numerous classical-looking buildings and monuments to the pantheon of officially-approved heroic figures. This nationalizing campaign by VMRO-DPNE included strong anti-communist rhetoric that seeks to portray the opposition SDSM (the successor to Macedonian League of Communists) as a-national. Escalating authoritarian tendencies on the part of the VRMO- DPNE-led government have been evident for years in acts such as the closing of the main independent TV station and the temporary expulsion of opposition MPs from the work of parliamentary sessions in the winter of 2012/13. The real political bombshell that shook Macedonia, however, was the announcement in early 2015 of Zoran Zaev, the new leader of SDSM, that he has acquired hundreds of hours of secretly taped conversations of Prime Minister Gruevski with his closest associates. The tapes reveal many things: the widespread use of public resources to further the VMRO-DPNE s political goals; the intimidation and bribing of journalists and police investigators (including likely the cover up of a murder); the use of the security services to spy on political opponents and independent critics; and open disdain for the Albanian ethnic minority and its political representatives. The affair reinvigorated long-dormant SDSM supporters and in the late spring of 2015 Macedonia saw mass protests that occupied main thoroughfares of Skopje for weeks. Reflecting still widespread support for Gruevski and strong polarization of Macedonian 23

24 politics, the government organized its own counter-mobilization that led to some tense days in the streets of the capital city. The escalating political crisis prompted the EU to get involved: the mediation of the EU enlargement commissioner helped compel the two main political parties to agree on a timeline for snap elections that were supposed to diffuse the crisis. The VMRO-DPNE government, however, repeatedly reneged on the conditions for these elections spelled out in the agreement, using loyalists in Constitutional Court and largely ceremonial presidency to pardon all individuals connected to the VMRO-DPNE who were being prosecuted for various crimes including corruption and election-rigging. December 2016 elections brought a near even split in mandates between VMRO and SDSM, but partially prodded by the EU mediators of the crisis a coalition of ethnic Albanian parties decided to throw its support behind a new SDSM government that could move forward the naming dispute with Greece and accelerate Macedonia s membership bid. At the time of writing, however, VMRO backed president is abusing a purely formal procedure of giving a government-formation mandate to the SDSM leader as the representative of the new parliamentary majority and the country is in the midst of highly dangerous political crisis. 6. Conclusion Over time and thanks to EU leverage, the party systems of Croatia and Serbia have changed substantially. As predicted by the adapting model but as a surprise to many observers, the main axes of political competition in these systems shifted away from nationalism and toward a greater consensus in the party system on joining the EU. These systems have closely resembled those that were typical in the ten post-communist EUmembers around the time that they entered the EU in The question going forward for Serbia is how durable will be this consensus in the face of difficult policy decisions and future election campaigns at a time when the EU is so half-hearted about the enlargement project. In contrast, competition among the political parties Bosnia and Macedonia revolves mainly around appeals to nationalism and ethnic identity, with parties remaining as tan or becoming even more tan in 2014 than in In these party systems EU leverage has not 24

25 moderated major parties, moving them toward more gal positions and helping to shift the focus of political competition to economic issues. Based on what all post-communist party systems so far have looked when they started accession negotiations, Bosnia and Macedonia s party systems are no closer to joining the EU in 2017 than in Instead, they are highly polarized on the gal-tan axis, and resemble their counterparts inside the EU that are also experiencing substantial democratic backsliding. Indeed, post-communist EU members and candidates that are suffering from democratic backsliding all seem to share one characteristic: the embrace by one or more ruling parties of intense if not extreme appeals to safeguard the interests of the nation. Attacks on liberal democracy in Hungary today stand as a warning of what is possible in the EU. When Hungary was born a democracy in 1990 it already stood out for having a highly polarized party system with almost all competition on the gal-tan axis. The post-communist socialists joined with centrist liberals to form a cosmopolitan counter pole to the conservative parties that spoke for the nation including Hungarians abroad. Liberal democracy seemed robust enough in Hungary in the 1990s. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense to argue that the EU pre-accession process helped attenuate the polarization in the party system by forcing the conservative parties to soften their struggle for the nation just like it did in cases where nationalism went hand in hand with authoritarian rule in Slovakia, Croatia or Serbia. Today we see other party systems that are polarized like Hungary s Poland s is the most similar -- but democratic backsliding is playing out differently in each one due to variation in key domestic factors such as the design of institutions and the robustness of the opposition. For EU member states, the relationship with the EU may be increasing polarization instead of moderating it by giving nationalist politicians an external bogeyman to indict for a limitless menu of social, cultural and security-related injuries and threats. Meanwhile, EU membership tends to strengthen already strong governments, as they can use EU funds to reward loyalists and punish opponents (Kelemen 2017). Scholars generally agree that EU membership has improved how the state functions and how it regulates the economy; however, there are huge shortcomings, especially in curbing corruption, upholding the rule of law and safeguarding democratic standards (see Levitz and Pop-Eleches 2009; Levitz and Pop-Eleches 2010; Schimmelfennig, 2007; and Spendzharova and Vachudova 2011). It 25

26 is possible, however, that the same causal mechanisms at the core of the adapting model will play themselves out again in a weaker form: oppositions will rally around returning to good standing in the EU, and the costs of extreme nationalist party positions, electorally, will rise. 26

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