ABSTRACT
This article contributes to the growing debate on democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), by expanding on Béla Greskovits’s distinction between backsliding and hollowness, suggesting ways to broaden and specify the concept of hollowness, and discussing the relationship between hollowness and backsliding. Estonia and Latvia provide illustrations of two stable democracies, which nevertheless have consolidated tendencies for an elite-driven and ethnic-majority-driven democratic process hollowed out of its democratic contestation. This is what I call “technocratic” and “ethnic” hollowness. This double hollowness consolidated during EU accession, which created a favourable context for well-positioned ethnic majority elites to push forward ethnocentric and neoliberal agendas while restricting the space for debating them. However, far from a symptom of backsliding in the sense of a regression into authoritarianism, double hollowness is in fact central to these democracies’ stability. Such stability will have to be destabilised in order to improve their democratic quality.
