Description
This article examines the circumstances under which a country will accept and internalize, or reject, the importation of democratic norms from an external actor. It specifically focuses on the roles played by civil society organizations in Hungary and the Czech Republic in internalizing the norms of the European Union, both during and after their periods of accession to the EU. Traditionally, much of the research on democratization and norm internalization assumes that the more engaged and developed civil society networks in a country are, the more likely it will be that that country will successfully democratize and/or internalize the transmitted norms. This article problematizes this assumption by arguing that in the case of Hungary and the Czech Republic, the opposite is more likely true: that the emergence of a large and well developed civil society network in Hungary in 2002 actively impeded the internalization of the norms transmitted by the EU, thus facilitating the country’s authoritarian turn in 2010. In contrast, the weakness and comparative irrelevance of Czech civil society in the 1990s and 2000s has contributed to (an admittedly tenuous and fragile) stabilization of the transmitted norms in the country.
