Abstract :
[en] Bulgaria joined the European Union (EU) on 1 January 2007, together with its fellow EU-accession laggard Romania, even though various problems continued to afflict the country’s still fragile democracy. This meant that further transformative efforts were necessary and the EU introduced a special supervision mechanism to catalyse further political reforms related to the corruption and rule of law problems of the country. However, the “transformative power” of the organisation turned out to be limited and did not manage to induce definitive and irreversible reforms, even though its efforts generated various positive developments on the ground. Domestically, these processes were related, among other things to the particularly puzzling case of the never-ending reform processes of the Bulgarian judicial system. While the country implemented numerous reforms from the mid-1990s onwards, these changes seemed far from achieving their goal of a functioning judiciary. Even though more than ten governments worked on new legislation in this area, and despite the external pressure, the country did not achieve a satisfactory rule of law record and the reform efforts continue to the present moment. This rather bleak state of the art prompts an important question that remains answered: why after years of constant domestic reforms, and extensive EU reform pressure, the Bulgarian judiciary still exhibits significant nonconformity with established norms and standards and what are the causes for this stalled reform process?
In order to account for this puzzling situation, this study seeks to build a novel explanatory framework that theorises the Bulgarian case and provides insights for other relevant cases in which processes of political reforms appear to reach a point of stasis, experiencing neither perceptible progress nor strong backtracking. Drawing on insights from the literature in the fields of Europeanization and democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), this study explores why, when and how judicial reforms stall. The reform difficulties are explained through the integration of the weaknesses of the EU’s own approach in tackling rule of law problems in CEE, the strong resistance of domestic veto players to adopt new rules and the inherent weaknesses of the actors demanding change. By coupling the impact of these exogenous and endogenous factors for the implementation of democratic reforms, a “stalled reform” model, absent so far in the literature, is crafted in order to capture the interactions and the dynamics among the various actors in this process. Furthermore, this model also demonstrates how these actors generate countervailing pressures which cancel each other out and thus produce the outcome of interest.
Formulated in this way, this study makes several contributions related to the relevant academic literature, but also to the work of the policy community dealing with the rule of law problems in Bulgaria and the wider region. On the conceptual level, it theorises in a novel way political processes in countries that are “stuck” in their democratisation efforts. Empirically, it provides a detailed analysis of Bulgaria’s protracted judicial reforms and the country’s stalled democratisation. The study provides important lessons and recommendations for the EU’s approach to strengthening the rule of law and democracy in its members and membership candidates and as regards the elaboration of more solid reforms in the area.
