The global decline of democracy has been making headlines, from challenges to liberal democracy in long-established democracies through populist candidates and parties, such as Trumpās elections, Brexit, and the rise of the far-right in Western Europe, including the Lega in Italy and the Alternative for Germany. In Central Europe, conservative governments, such as in Hungary and Poland, have been eroding rule of law and democratic safeguards. Turkey and Russia have become more authoritarian, while the former has continued to hold competitive elections. In this context, the democratic decline in the Balkans is not an exception but part of a broader trend that takes on a variety of forms, depending on the regional context (Kriesi and Pappas 2015; Greskovits 2015; Plattner 2015).
This book is offering an in-depth analysis of how rising authoritarianism in the Western Balkans became possible, how they are part of the larger global trend, and what explains regional specificities. Without falling into the trap Balkan particularism, this book argues that authoritarian decade of the 1990s in the region provided an important template and structural features that facilitated the increasing authoritarianism in recent years. Much scholarship on post-Yugoslav countries during the 1990s focused on the wars and the accompanying nationalism. While this is an important characteristic of the region during that decade, the wars cannot be explained by primordial nationalist hatreds, but the selfish use and abuse by political and intellectual elites to advance their own power, influence, and wealth (Gagnon 2004; Gordy 1999). The key question in understanding the conflicts was thus how authoritarian elites were able to take and retain power, rather than interpreting nationalism as a natural force.
When discussing the renewed increase of authoritarian patterns, this book does not make the argument for Balkan exceptionalism, and many of the features identified in it are recognizable to scholars working on the crisis of democracy and patterns of authoritarianism around the world. What motivated my research on the Balkans was never the regionās exceptionalism, but rather as a site to observe global phenomena. Thus, this study of Balkan autocrats is based on two foundations. First, the merit of examining the patterns and dynamics of authoritarian regimes in depth in a particular region allows this book to identify regional patterns. While there is space for global comparative research, the local context is the dimension to which this book can contribute. Second, the countries of the Western Balkans share certain features that allow one to study them together. They share a socialist and mostly a Yugoslav heritage, experienced war, or the consequences of state collapse; and the countries discussed in this book have not been able to join the European Union (EU), or in the case of Croatia, joined relatively recently (2013). To policymakers, they are known as the āWestern Balkansā, a term that always seemed awkward for linking the loaded term āBalkansā1 with the positive association of āWesternā and grouping countries reluctant to be lumped together. As joining the EU seems also to mean leaving the term behind, as has been the case of Croatia, it could also be the āRestern Balkansā (BiEPAG 2014), the countries that are not in the EU yet. Many similarities exist between the Western Balkans and the āEastern Balkansā, that is, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Central Europe and there is merit to a broader comparative scope (Solska et al. 2018). What unites the countries explored in this book is the process of EU integration which sets it apart from countries already part of the union and thus not restricted by conditionality and those outside a formal accession process and equally less monitored and observed by the EU, such as Eastern European countries like Ukraine or Moldova. Structurally, with accession and conditionality at least formally in place, no group of countries is at least formally under greater pressure to adopt democratic institutions and comply with the rule of law requirements of the EU than the Western Balkans.
The recent rise of interest in what has been termed ādemocratic regressionā, āde-democratizationā, or ādemocratic reversalsā has shattered the implicit assumption of the near teleological progression from autocracy to democracy, via the unfortunate but temporary āpurgatoryā of hybrid regimes (Bermeo 2016). Not only have solid autocratic regimes not moved toward hybrid regimes, but hybrid regimes also have proven to be resilient and even regress toward authoritarianism (Turkey). The de-democratization in previously consolidated democracies (Hungary and Poland) highlights that democratization is not a one-way street, not even when they are universally considered āconsolidatedā and thus the termās implicit assumption is misplaced. Like its twin concept of reform, it assumes that change will lead to more democratic and progressive governance. Instead, āregime changeā may better capture how political regimes became democratic or authoritarian and mostly move within a large gray zone.
Making sense of these global and regional trends is challenging, as critical perspectives on democratization run the risk of ending up equally uncritically assuming universal regression, without exploring regional variation and different causes. Democratic regression is not universal, and some countries have become more democratic in the past decade.
When discussing democratic backsliding or regression and authoritarian regimes, we need first to define what we mean these, as they are often widely and confusingly used. Democratic backsliding, or alternatively de-democratization of democratic decline is best understood as the movement of a regime with democratic features away from democracy toward greater authoritarianism. If political systems are conceptualized along an axis ranging from totalitarian regimes to advanced democracies or polyarchies, democratic backsliding thus denotes any movement toward higher levels of authoritarianism but stops short of reverting to outright authoritarianism. Instead, the new regime type falls into a wide range of hybrid regimes. This is distinct from the democratic breakdown, which denotes when a regime moves toward outright authoritarianism (Tomini and Wagemann 2018). Democratic breakdowns have long the subject of research in the field of democratization (Linz 1978), while democratic backsliding has only emerged more recently, as greater attention has emerged on hybrid regimes that constitute the bulk of political systems around the world, between the fully consolidated democracies and consolidated authoritarian systems.
The other key concept to understand authoritarian patterns in the Balkans, as this book will discuss, is the regime type that emerges. If democratic backsliding describes the process and is thus dynamic, competitive authoritarianism and other terms to denote the regime type are rather static, describing how a regime is, rather than its trajectory. As this book will highlight, this dichotomy between static regime types and processes that lead to changes is possibly too rigid. Regimes fluctuate over time, in particular, if they are part of the large bracket of hybrid regimes. The shift from a liberal democracy to a hybrid regime is a stark step, and the breakdown of authoritarianism is usually caused by a large event, such as revolution, military intervention, a coup, or at least the death of a dictator. The drifts toward more or less democracy or authoritarianism in the zone between can depend on several factors and occurs gradually. However, these changes matter. Most countries are neither liberal democracies nor full authoritarian systems, and a shift entails less civil rights, citizen participation, and also restricted opportunities in changing governments.
The hybrid regimes are often labeled by the flaws in democracy, such as the concept of defective democracies (Merkel 2004) or competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2010). Both terms are not fully satisfying, as they measure the regimes against the ideal type. This presupposes, implicitly or explicitly that they are a deviation from either type rather than a regime type of its own (Bogaards 2009)....