Romanian Journal of European Affairs (Dec 2023)
The 2022 Conditionality Regulation as a Turning Point in EU’s and Hungary’s understanding of the Europeanisation
Abstract
The research conducted for this article has explored the controversy between the EU and Hungary surrounding the interpretations of the Europeanisation process: to what extent do they diverge, and to what degree do they converge? Both before and after its 2004 accession to the EU, Hungary has tried to follow the EU’s approach towards liberal democracy. And yet, from 2010 onwards, the state has developed an illiberal political and legal system. This fact revealed a rift between Hungary and the EU. The research questions focused on the problem of the trajectory of the systemic deterioration of democracy in Hungary, the EU’s reaction to this situation and its decision to apply a conditionality mechanism in 2022. The main hypothesis of this research is that the EU’s reluctance to use more severe sanctioning tools after 2010 has helped Hungary utilise the EU funds to develop an illiberal democratic state which diverges from the EU’s concept of Europeanisation. The research methods we have employed are: the quantitative and the qualitative methods, synthesis and analysis of facts, the comparative method, and the neo-institutional approach. The results and conclusions allow us to state that until 2022, the EU has been unable to force Hungary to obey the rule of law and other liberal democratic principles, though it has made some efforts in this direction. The worsening of the economic situation, after the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of the war in Ukraine, determined the EU to create a conditionality mechanism that correlates the access to EU subsidies with the observance of the EU rules.
