Authors

Discussion

The process of democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe has been described by many studies. The effects of this process on rule of law or more generally on the rule of law-based state are much less in the focus of attention. Informal practices and legal opportunism are undermining the rule of law-based state as well as democracy. In illiberal regimes informal processes such as “state capture” go together with “court capture”, the control of the judiciary (as it is the case now in Hungary, to a lesser extent also in Poland, and certainly also in more autocratic regimes in Eastern Europe). Put it differently: The control of the judiciary finds its counterpart and its «meaning» in the clientelist control of politics, the economy, and the state administration. This corresponds to what Sadurski has called the colonization of the State. Such developments show how fragile the newly created judicial institutions are, how little it takes to neutralize them in a politically polarized context which is less about European values than about political power. Based on several case studies (Hungary, Poland contrasted with more autocratic countries such as Serbia) the proposal is looking at the varieties of this “colonization” process, the causes of the weakness of rule of law structures in Eastern Europe and, finally, also at the resilience of the judiciary, the legal culture in a specific country.