The second party system brought the emergence of velvet dictatorships with façade democracies. Velvet dictatorships work with the dominance of soft power instead of hard power, with a weak and formalist democracy façade instead of a genuine system of checks and balances. The authoritarian governments have acted systematically, and have elaborated a ‘masterplan’ to demolish this European democratic order step by step, as a de-Europeanization process. In this three-stage model, 1) the state machinery, 2) judiciary and intermediary institutions and 3) civil society and cultural institutions have been the consecutive targets. For the de-Europeanization and de-democratization project the hard populist regimes needed the image of an internal and external enemy, and therefore they propagated hatred and xenophobia. In this way, ‘protecting’ national sovereignty and traditional European values became the main campaign slogan of the hard populist elites in order to achieve strong legitimacy in the age of uncertainty.
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Frontmatter
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PART I EUROPEANIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION OF ECE IN THE OLD WORLD ORDER
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PART II THE COLLAPSE OF ECE DEMOCRACIES IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
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Back Matter
