Evolution of the European Union Value Protection Mechanism: Cases of Hungary and Poland

Vlajnić Nikola (),

The mechanism for protecting European values, including the rule of law, was first formulated in the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997 and has gone through two revisions. Due to the lack of usage of the Mechanism because of the possibility of introducing harsh sanctions, the European Union adopted multiple supplementary regulations for the Mechanism in Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. These supplementary mechanisms were used in the case of Poland and Hungary, but they did not lead to a drastic improvement of the state of the rule of law in these countries. The goal of this paper is to understand the evolution of the protection of the rule of law in the European Union and the shortcomings of the existing mechanisms, as well as to consider proposals for increasing their efficiency. The primary reasons for this ineffectiveness are usually attributed to the intense politicization of the use of Article 7, the unwillingness of member states and Union institutions to use the Mechanism, the long duration of initiated processes, as well as the high stakes at play due to potentially very harsh sanctions. The proposal for the reform of the European Union by the Franco-German working group was designed as a way to deal with the mentioned shortcomings. The hypothesis of the paper is that the proposed reforms could increase the efficiency of the protection of the rule of law in the European Union, but that it is not likely for them to be adopted because they need to be accepted by all member states of the Union. The theoretical framework used to prove the hypothesis is liberal intergovernmentalism.

Keywords: Value protection mechanism, European Union, Hungary, Poland, European values, rule of law, budget conditionality, European Union reform