Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe (Special Issue)

Over the past decade, a scholarly consensus has emerged that that democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is deteriorating (Kochenov 2008; Sedelmeier 2014), a trend often subsumed under the label “backsliding”. However, this emergent paradigm has focused disproportionately on the two most dramatic cases: Hungary and Poland (Müller Citation2014; Herman Citation2016; Kelemen and Orenstein Citation2016) and on the symptoms – executive aggrandisement and illiberal nationalism – that are most characteristic of the trajectories of those states. In bringing together contributions in this special issue, we attempt to correct for the empirical and thematic biases of this paradigm by examining democratic trajectories through the prism of cases other than Hungary and Poland in both Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and in nearby postcommunist regions, the West Balkans and the former Soviet Union (FSU). We use the term CEE as a matter of convention, to refer to post-communist states that are EU members, which – partly in consequence of EU accession – had been considered to be among the post-communist world’s more successful and stable democracies. The CEE sub-region has been one of the main focuses of the “backsliding” agenda, as democratic deterioration was unexpected and is weakly explained by existing scholarship. Introducing perspectives from the West Balkans and two non-EU countries in the FSU (Moldova and Ukraine) allows us to consider what the significant bodies of scholarship about failing or partial democratisation that developed there can tell us about CEE's present and future trajectories.