Book Description
Abstract: The European Union (EU) and domestic "change agents" have promoted the rule of law in post-Soviet Europe with varying results. While the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) succeeded in establishing the rule of law, Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) did not. Why did EU-driven legal, judicial and anti-corruption reforms not produce the rule of law in the latter group? I argue that divided elites (reformers) in laggard EaP countries engage in detrimental political competition that creates incentives to misuse the law, the prosecution and judicial structures as "political weapons". The result of this power struggle is an erratic reform process which produces reform pathologies of Europeanization (e.g. legal instability and incoherence, reinforced fragmentation and politicization) that undermine the rule of law. Instead of serving as an external check on rule-of-law abusing reformers, the EU empowers reformist but unaccountab