The problem with this story is that it cannot be verified and that the causality it presumes is probably false. It can, therefore, hardly serve as a usable policy blueprint to be applied around the globe, which is what some of its proponents imply.

The hypothesis that the EU enlargement significantly contributed to the successful democratic transition of Central Europe is impossible to be corroborated. It may easily be the case that the real causality was completely reverse: Rather than the EU enlargement bringing democracy to Central Europe, the countries that were most likely to become democratic - thanks to their favorable cultural, geographical and political predispositions - were eventually admitted as EU members.

No one can really say that without the EU and NATO enlargement the Central European countries would not have become viable democracies. After the Cold War ended, all societies in the region endorsed as their supreme goal the "return to Europe," by which they meant joining the West as its integral part. Central Europeans firmly believed that, in spite of four decades of Soviet captivity, the West was their natural home and that they had always been culturally Western. They understood their EU and NATO membership just as a component of their overall strategy of confirming their Western identity. In other words, they saw their membership in Western institutions as a status symbol demonstrating to the world what they already knew - that they were Western democrats.
The post-Cold War democratization of Central Europe (of which EU and NATO membership was a result, not the cause) thus seems to be based on some deeper cultural and social preconditions that may be missing further east. If this was not the case, the EU would now include Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. But these countries have never sought EU membership as a status symbol because they do not have the ambition to be seen as Western. This sets clear limits on EU's alleged democracy promotion capacity.

Moreover, the idea that the perspective of EU and NATO membership was the driving force behind the democratization of Central Europe is rather patronizing. Paradoxically, this point was raised by some of the harshest critics of the 1990s NATO enlargement. Michael Mandelbaum, for example, argued that justifying the NATO expansion by the need to "stabilize" and "democratize" Central Europe (which was what the Clinton administration claimed to be doing) was pointless because the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had been firmly democratic not only long before they were finally admitted to NATO, but even before it became clear that NATO would be enlarged. Central Europeans thought the same but kept their mouths shut in order not to undermine Clinton's determination to enlarge the Alliance. The case for analogous criticism of the EU is even stronger as it admitted its first post-communist members much later than NATO.

Another trouble with seeing the EU as a great democratic promoter is the organisation's own contested democratic record. One does not need to fancy Europe's EU-phobic fringe to be aware of the European Union's acute "democratic deficit" and the way the technocratic nature of the organization compromises the constitutional separation of powers as well as democratic choice and control - the murky practice of repeating popular referendums until the weary and bullied voters deliver the "right" answer is just one example.

Instead of promoting democracy, the very process of EU integration ("do what Brussels says and no questions") seriously constrained the democratic politics of the aspiring Central European members. As Kristi Raik showed in her article, the blitz imposition of some 80,000 pages of the EU legislation on the applicant countries "limited their EU accession to a narrow sphere of elites and experts." It may have been good in many cases but it was not very democratic.

This all may sound too academic. It is, however, very relevant for our understanding of whether the democratization of Central Europe can successfully be reproduced further east, let alone elsewhere around the globe, and of what role is played by the cultural context of the places to be democratized. The Western policy of democracy promotion has not died with the Bush administration. But if the aircraft carriers are to be simply replaced by the legend of the miraculous power of bureaucratic institutions, the endeavour may end up no better.

Jan Jires is a Ph.D. candidate at Charles University in Prague and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC.