Even though the rule of law as a foundational value of European integration has been taken for granted in the Member States, along the presumption that ‘once a democracy, always a democracy’, “this optimistic presumption proved to be wrong,” our Research Affiliate Petra Bard and Viktor Zoltan Kazai write in their article for The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.
Regarding Hungary, they argue that, when addressing the country's compliance to the formal rule of law requirements, the EU institutions have not fully exploited all potential tools. To develop that idea, they analyze the differences between the formal and the substantive conceptions of the rule of law, and the main advantages of dedicating more attention to the formal requirements. They situate their argumentation in the context of autocratization processes unfolding now in the EU.
This article was published in the special issue Theory and Practice of the Rule of Law, co-edited by our researchers, Dimitry Kochenov, Barbara Grabowska-Moroz, Joelle Grogan and Laurent Pech.
Read the full article here.