The EU's Backsliders.(World Affairs; EUROPE)(European Union)

Byline: William Underhill

Countries will do anything to get into the European Union. But once they're in, it's a whole other story.

Getting into the European Union can be a grueling business. on the official checklist: strong protection for minority rights, respect for the rule of law and the ability to run a competitive market economy. In practice, that means not just rewriting statute books but also slashing budgets, shutting down unprofitable state-owned industries and trimming socialist-era welfare schemes. For the latest batch of newcomers--the 12 nations admitted in 2004 and 2007, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe--it took as many as 10 years of tireless political wrangling to win their place in the Brussels club.

And after? The incentive to push through reforms diminishes. A kind of reform fatigue sets in, and states have little appetite for further confrontation. In Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, voters punished the government coalitions that pushed through the changes by voting them out of office. "Everyone wanted to be in the EU. They just didn't want the reforms that went with it," says Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

Some have even slid backward since accession. Until it was ousted last year, the Polish government threatened the independence of the civil service and the central bank by awarding top jobs only to government loyalists. Similarly, Slovakia, which had shown enormous promise by successfully pushing through a battery of economic reforms, is now ruled by a shaky coalition that includes hard-line nationalists, responsible for some bitter outbursts against the country's Hungarian minority. Earlier this year the government drafted a law that would allow the Culture Ministry to fine the press for publishing information deemed to support behavior unacceptable to society. "This thoroughly contradicts basic democratic principles such as the separation of powers and freedom of speech for the media," says Balint Molnar, deputy director of Freedom House Europe, a pro-democracy pressure group.

Indeed, countries throughout the region are struggling. The annual "democracy scores," produced last year by Freedom House, measure performance in a range of categories including judicial independence and combating corruption, and found no evidence of improvement ...