Austria's Haider affair gave the EU an 'emergency brake'

Ben Crum, lecturer and political scientist at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, told EurActiv that it is unlikely that article 7 will ever be used: "The Haider affair left the EU governments with a big hangover, so they will think twice before doing that again. Article 7 will stand to represent a historic episode in EU, but as such it will probably remain a dead letter." 

However, Crum stresses its great importance as an informal 'socialising' instrument that may have contributed to bringing the Italian, former far right politician Gianfranco Fini  (Alleanza Nazionale) into the political mainstream. When Fini was appointed as deputy prime minister in 2001, it created some uproar in European media and political circles, but it did not get anywhere near the Haider situation. And from 2002 Fini even represented the Italian government on the Convention that prepared the Constitutional Treaty: "Cooperating with Fini proved a much better strategy than making him a black sheep. Now he is a respectable statesman. It would all have worked differently if he had been isolated."

Crum also sees article 7 as an important part of a revived value debate in the EU, that was also reflected in the Constitutional Treaty. He calls article 7 a sort of an "emergency brake" that will cast an informal shadow of the workings of the EU member states: "Like Qualified Majority Voting in the Council it doesn't have to be used concretely to make a difference. I see article 7 looming in the background as a value benchmark. In the past over Slovakia, and in the short term future over Bulgaria and Romania's membership bids. It also applies to the present affair with the CIA camps." 

Marco Incerti, Research Fellow at CEPS, Brussels, told EurActiv: "The bottomline is that the informal sanctions only made the situation worse, because the Austrian citizens felt they were being treated unfairly, also in comparison to other states which had had similar problems, and according to some studies, it is at that time that Austrians began to be more eurosceptic. The argument was: how can an undemocratic organisation like the EU mingle in the internal democratic processes of a sovereign state? And indeed, once isolation ended, the FPö problem went away on its own."

Incerti sees the subsequent creation of Article 7 as useful since it gave EU a more solid basis to deal with similar future cases: "It also gave a more political dimension to the Union, since beforehand you had various economic criteria to comply with in order to be a member of the club, but there was no possibility to assess the democratic credentials of a country. In this sense, the article was also seen as the necessary corollary to the Copenhagen criteria. Paradoxically, up until then one could judge the democratic merits of countries that were trying to join the club, but not those of the member states that were already in. Having said that, it is not clear whether member states will ever find the political courage to implement the measures foreseen therein. The point is that by now there are many member states that have to grapple with extremist parties, Belgium has the Vlaams Belang for example, and for them it is often more convenient to turn a blind eye, because they realise that at some point it could be them in the hot spot."

Cécile Leconte, of Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris  takes a highly critical view of the legacy of the Haider affair in the publication Western European Politics (vol.28): "EU leaders...were unwilling to uphold the principles initially evoked against the FPÖ as soon as it involved political costs and when it turned out that it might one day backfire against their own country. As a consequence of this dilemma, the threshold of political acceptability inside the EU has been lowered; every coalition partner now seems acceptable as long as it does not commit concrete violations of human rights. The EU is now less likely to take steps against national governments or leaders that might openly contest its fundamental values."