After some delay, the Polish government, controlled by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, has finally responded to concerns raised by the European Commission about its legislative attack on judicial independence, but it is still refusing to cooperate and has not announced “any concrete measures to address the issues raised,” said Frans Timmermans, the commission’s first vice president.
It remains to be seen if the EU will use the political and economic tools at its disposal to sanction the Polish government. We believe it should — resolutely and swiftly.
The PiS’ efforts to bring Poland’s courts under political control violate the EU’s fundamental democratic values and threaten its governance of the single market. At this point, continued inaction on the EU’s part could threaten the project of economic integration altogether.
Market integration among economies at different levels of development relies primarily on regulatory standardization.
The single market works because an entrepreneur in the Netherlands and an entrepreneur in Poland can both expect to be governed by the same rules, regardless of whether they are selling goods or investing in Italy, Hungary, France or Bulgaria. These agreed rules are enforced not just by EU courts and bureaucracies, but also by national courts in the member states.
However, the EU’s framework for enforcing common rules does not automatically confer the same benefits to each member state.
When market integration was pursued in earnest in the 1980s, it was agreed that member states with less developed economies would be entitled to transfers until they had caught up with the bloc’s average level of development. Today, such transfers represent about a third of the EU budget and 2 to 5 percent of GDP in the recipient economies.
This arrangement was meant to reduce disparities among EU members to the point that transfers would no longer be needed, but it always had a crucial weakness — the EU has only limited authority to control the domestic institutions in charge of ensuring that recipient nations spend the funds appropriately, and a nation’s judiciary is chief among those institutions.
We have researched how evolving state capacities affect economic development in 17 central and eastern European nations, and we found that autonomous judiciaries are of central importance.
Capable, independent courts are the prime movers behind the development of a professional state bureaucracy. Without judicial oversight, there is no guarantee that supervisory agencies will monitor and enforce the rules of market competition effectively and impartially.
We have also found that increased judicial autonomy boosts economic development in nations even before they have joined the EU.
When a nation’s courts become more reliable and predictable, its exports tend to increase and become more technologically complex soon thereafter.
By the same token, judiciaries can hinder economic development if they are not independent or reliable. When domestic firms cannot count on courts to issue fair and consistent rulings, they will conclude that success depends less on entrepreneurship than on cronyism or loyalty to market incumbents. Accordingly, they will invest less and shy away from innovation.
Hungary’s recent experience demonstrates that if incumbents do not fear judicial oversight, they will engage in predatory behavior toward weaker market participants, thereby capturing larger segments of the economy. This ultimately results in declining public revenue, which forces the government to look for other ways to finance basic public goods. To keep the economy afloat and remain in power, the government will become all the more reliant on EU transfers.
The Polish and Hungarian governments have turned the worst nightmare of the single market’s founding fathers into a reality. In both nations, the institutions that could help domestic actors to benefit from market integration are being undermined — to say nothing of citizens’ rights and opportunities — even as the illiberal regimes causing this erosion continue to receive EU funds.
This state of affairs has exposed the limits of EU-level control over how the bloc’s money is spent within member states — and it shows that the development of domestic institutions can be reversed all too easily.
When the single market was created, many assumed that it would provide ample incentives for domestic firms and policymakers to develop sound national-level institutions, to capitalize on lucrative new opportunities, but that assumption’s flaws have now been laid bare.
The tragedy in Greece after the financial crisis a decade ago showed that incumbents will not necessarily take it upon themselves to develop strong institutions. In Poland and Hungary today, we are learning that illiberal governments will even go so far as to weaken their own nation’s institutions for political gain.
The time has come for the EU to take bold action before other member-state governments try the same trick.
Laszlo Bruszt is sociology professor at the Central European University in Budapest and at Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. Nauro Campos is economics and finance professor at Brunel University London and a research professor at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of
RSS