The European Union’s failure to address the autocracy crisis: MacGyver, Rube Goldberg, and Europe’s unused tools

ABSTRACT This article dismantles the myth that the EU’s failure to respond adequately to the rise of autocratic member governments has been due to its lack of adequate tools. The EU has used this excuse repeatedly to justify engaging in what Laurent Pech calls a new instrument creation cycle – reacting to attacks on democracy and the rule of law not by deploying existing tools but by wasting time creating new ones. The repetition of this cycle has resulted in the creation of a Rule of Law Rube Goldberg machine – a redundant assemblage of mostly useless instruments ostensibly designed to help the EU address backsliding. The pointlessness of many of these tools is underscored when we look closely at the few simple but potentially powerful, MacGyver-like tools that the EU has had at its disposal all along, but which EU leaders have failed to use robustly to defend democracy.