Brussels / Warsaw / Tbilisi — As the European Union grapples with the sluggish competitiveness of its single market, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is pressing member states to confront a quiet, self-inflicted enemy: gold-plating. The practice of adding domestic requirements, bureaucratic hurdles, and extra strings when transposing European directives into national law has long choked businesses across the bloc. Ironically, some of the EU’s newer post-communist members—and even non-EU states in the Caucasus—are now putting older members to shame on economic freedom, raising urgent questions about how future enlargement might impact deregulation. Main Facts The Push Against Gold-Plating: On October 12, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged EU leaders to sign a "pact against gold-plating," designed to halt the proliferation of national requirements tacked onto European laws. Poland’s Regulatory Burden: A recent high-profile Polish report catalogued 100 instances of gold-plating in sectors ranging from telecommunications to banking. Meanwhile, the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index ranks Poland last among the 27 EU member states. The Caucasus Outperform: Former Soviet republics Georgia and Armenia outrank a significant portion of the EU’s post-communist members in economic freedom, even as they align parts of their domestic frameworks with European standards. The Legislative Philosophy: The Soviet-era legacy of "socialist textual positivism"—the bureaucratic mindset that citizens must prove compliance and officials must certify every action—continues to haunt administrative cultures across Central and Eastern Europe. Chronology: From Soviet Bureaucracy to Modern Regulation The Soviet Legacy and the Dual Transition The roots of modern administrative overreach run deep into the 20th century. A popular Soviet-era catchphrase—derived from a 1930s satirical song by Vasily Lebedev-Kumach—warned: "Without a bit of paper you’re a bug; with a bit of paper you’re a person." This core philosophy, requiring endless official validation for basic civic and commercial existence, outlived the collapse of the Soviet Union. Czech jurist Zdeněk Kühn has extensively documented this "socialist textual positivism" in post-communist courts, questioning how much of this bureaucratic impulse survived the democratic revolutions of 1989. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the region was forced to rewrite its legal codes twice. The first wave aimed to construct market economies from scratch. The second wave, occurring in the run-up to the 2004 "big bang" EU enlargement, required candidate countries to absorb tens of thousands of pages of the acquis communautaire (EU law). Under intense scrutiny from Brussels, national administrations learned to treat EU directives as high-stakes exams. Anxious candidate governments, eager to prove their compliance, routinely over-delivered, writing far more domestic legislation than European legislators ever demanded. The 2025 Deregulation Push in Poland Decades later, the consequences of this over-zealous transposition became starkly apparent. In February 2025, Rafał Brzoska, founder of parcel-locker giant InPost, launched a major deregulation drive dubbed SprawdzaMY at the invitation of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. By May 2025, a comprehensive report by the DZP law firm identified 100 distinct examples of Polish gold-plating. Among them was Poland’s implementation of the EU’s DAC6 directive, which targets aggressive cross-border tax planning. While Brussels mandated reporting from July 2020, Poland applied its own rules starting January 1, 2019—a year and a half early—and expanded them to strictly domestic business arrangements under threat of multi-million-złoty penalties. (The domestic obligation was finally repealed on October 1, 2025.) Despite these bureaucratic excesses, change is underway. Grant Thornton’s tracking showed that Poland produced 12,400 pages of new legislation in 2025—a 12 percent drop from the previous year and the lowest volume in nearly two decades. By the close of 2025, 11 distinct laws born from the SprawdzaMY initiative had successfully cleared Parliament. Supporting Data: Economic Freedom Across the Region The disparities in economic freedom across Central and Eastern Europe—and beyond the bloc’s borders—are starkly illustrated by the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World report (using 2024 data). The EU Post-Communist Ranking Among the EU’s post-communist member states, performance varies dramatically: Estonia: 15th globally (a stellar performer, outranking Germany). Lithuania: 22nd. Czechia: 23rd. Latvia: 29th. Slovakia: 43rd. Hungary: 49th. Romania: 51st. Bulgaria & Slovenia: Joint 54th. Croatia: 64th. Poland: 65th (the lowest ranking among all 27 EU member states). When isolating the "Regulation" sub-index—which measures credit market, labor market, and business regulations—Estonia places 11th globally, Germany 23rd, and Poland down at 58th. Other regional states lag significantly further behind, with Slovakia at 90th, Romania at 96th, and Croatia at 107th. The Baltic success story is often traced back to radical, foundational reforms. Mart Laar, who took office as Estonia’s prime minister in 1992 at just 32 years old, famously admitted that his economic playbook consisted of reading a single book: Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. Assuming those principles were standard practice in the West, Estonia leaped into radical deregulation. The Caucasus Contenders: Tbilisi and Yerevan Surprisingly, former Soviet republics outside the EU often outpace its current members. Georgia: Ranked 26th globally in the Fraser index—outperforming every post-communist EU member except Estonia, Lithuania, and Czechia. In regulatory freedom specifically, Georgia sits 19th globally, four places ahead of Germany. Armenia: Ranked 38th overall, placing ahead of every post-communist EU member state except the Baltic states and Czechia, though its regulatory sub-index remains weaker at 101st. Georgia’s libertarian pivot began after the Rose Revolution under Kakha Bendukidze, who served as minister for the economy and reform coordination between 2004 and 2008, abolishing more than 80 percent of state licenses and permits. Even after signing an EU Association Agreement in 2014 and gradually aligning its economic legislation with Brussels, Georgia has maintained its position near the global top 30, despite current political friction that has led the EU to deem the accession process de facto halted. Armenia, which formalized its partnership agreement with the EU in 2021, announced ambitions through Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to pursue membership. However, Yerevan’s simultaneous membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union presents profound geopolitical contradictions that Prime Minister Pashinyan has openly acknowledged cannot be sustained indefinitely. Official Responses and Policy Actions Brussels Tries to Trim the Fat The European Commission is acutely aware that over-regulation is poisoning EU competitiveness. In her September 2025 State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen challenged European lawmakers: "It is time for the member states to step up." Her October 12 letter to EU leaders laid out the structural mechanism for the proposed pact: No Complexity Creep: Rules agreed at the European level must not become more complex when transposed into national law. Justification of Additions: Governments signing the pact would be forced to explicitly declare and justify every national requirement added to EU directives. Single Market Review: A review-and-removal process within the European Semester framework would actively target domestic rules that obstruct the free flow of goods, services, and capital. While the European Council’s mid-October summit conclusions called on the Commission to bring forward new initiatives to tackle gold-plating, leaders stopped short of formally signing von der Leyen’s pact immediately. Gold-plating, officials note, is hardly a post-communist monopoly. When the Commission surveyed businesses across the EU, the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry submitted 20 distinct grievances regarding German gold-plating, ranging from corporate data-protection officer mandates to excessive packaging law declarations. To counter this from within, the Commission is attempting to streamline its own legislative output. It has proposed a dozen "omnibus" simplification packages and pledged to favor directly applicable regulations over directives wherever possible, reducing the physical space national bureaucrats have to tinker with European rules. Implications: The Future of Enlargement and Red Tape Tallinn and Warsaw inherited the exact same baseline EU rulebook when they joined the bloc in 2004. Yet today, they stand fifty places apart in global economic freedom rankings. This divergence proves that EU membership does not inevitably dictate a nation’s internal regulatory culture. National administrative habits matter more than Brussels directives. As Slovakia has demonstrated, positive procedural safeguards are possible: Slovak law requires any bill transposing an EU directive to include a comparative compliance table that explicitly identifies and justifies any domestic gold-plating. If other Central and Eastern European capitals adopted this transparency requirement, it could fundamentally alter how local politicians draft legislation. For aspiring EU members like Georgia and Armenia, full accession remains years away. When the time comes, Brussels will transmit the exact same mandatory directives to Tbilisi and Yerevan as it does to Berlin and Warsaw. Whether entrepreneurs in the Caucasus remain free of excessive bureaucracy or are buried under mountains of local paperwork will not be decided in Brussels. It will be decided at home—just as it was in Warsaw, and just as it was avoided in Tallinn. Post navigation Serbia’s Watershed Election: Student-Led Movement Upends Political Establishment, Inherits Stalled EU Bid and Fragile Economy
