Diverging trends in 2004 accession states show how fragile Central-Eastern European attachment to western political models really is

It is now over a decade since the 2004 enlargement which brought eight states in Central and Eastern Europe into the EU, alongside Cyprus and Malta. Craig Willy writes that while most of these states greeted EU accession enthusiastically, political trends have been diverse in the decade since. While some countries, such as Poland, have embraced a largely ‘Western’ political model, other states such as Hungary have started to move in the opposite direction. He argues that these developments illustrate how fragile the attachment to the EU and Western institutions really is in Central-Eastern European states.