EU’s ‘Eastern discontents’ – when ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ politicisation collide – the case of Romania in the future of Europe debate

Abstract

Over the past decade, the wave of successive crises that hit the EU has tested the EU’s legitimacy and resulted in increased EU politicisation. In the period between the Brexit referendum up until the 2019 European elections, several CEE member states (such as Poland and Hungary and to a lesser extent Romania) contested the EU for breaching their national sovereignty, claiming that their countries’ values and identities are ‘threatened’ by the EU’s interference. In this article, we analyse the case of Romania’s clashes with the European Commission between 2017 and 2019 on the topic of rule of law backsliding. We analyse these discursive clashes in connection to the country’s first Presidency of the Council, as an illustration of the increased politicisation placed in the overall context of the Future of Europe debates. The empirical part is based on a chronological account of selected qualitative data about how this national-supranational ‘power struggle’ unfolded in the studied period. The findings show that in the case of Romania two forms of politicisation coincided and collided - one that was ‘bottom-up’, marked by highly polarised national politics and an East–West division and another that was ‘top-down’ - defined by the tensions inside EU’s own political dynamics between the Council and the Commission.