If you’re a Ukrainian, the world looks rather strange these days. Just a few weeks ago, the United Kingdom voted to give up its membership in the European Union, a privilege that Ukrainians have fought and died to try to gain. That decision now raises for reform-minded Ukrainians the unhappy possibility that a weakened and divided EU will no longer be there to push democratic progress forward.

Ukraine is not alone. In the 25 years since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc, the European Union has been a mighty force driving political and economic reform in many of these newly independent countries.

The carrot of EU membership — as well as funding and expert assistance from EU countries — helped countries like Poland, Slovakia, and Estonia undertake badly needed economic and political reforms. Moreover, EU investment and economic redistribution has helped produce positive economic growth and prosperity in many of its poorer member states.

Now, however, the Brexit vote has raised the very real possibility that Europe will increasingly turn inward and, as it focuses on its own problems, lose interest in further expansion and assisting those countries that have come to rely on its help, influence, and example. This is decidedly bad news for the EU’s newer and still-developing members, as well as for those nations that aspire to EU membership.

The EU has been a major force for political reform

In order to join the European Union, or to be considered for membership, candidate nations must meet certain standards and benchmarks. According to the European Commission:

Countries wishing to join need to have:

stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;

a functioning market economy and the capacity to cope with competition and market forces in the EU;

the ability to take on and implement effectively the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.

While Americans may take for granted that they have “stable institutions” and “a functioning market economy,” creating such things from scratch is a complex and difficult job. That task is compounded when your country has been under the thumb of autocratic and corrupt dictators for generations and entrenched interests work actively against reforms.

It is in large part thanks to the demands of European Union membership that newer members like Bulgaria and Romania have been willing to take steps to root out the corruption that has long been endemic in their societies, reform their police and judicial systems, and open up their markets.

And the prospect of EU membership continues to drive politics in many countries that have not yet joined the bloc. For instance, right after the Brexit vote, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko wrote that “Europe’s real strength is its ability to inspire change in others” and described the EU as “the only path to a better future and the only remedy for the disease of egoism and division that has cost our Continent millions of lives.”

In the Balkans, where Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia are all at various stages of trying to accede to the European Union — and Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina are considered “potential candidates” — there is a lot of fear that Brexit will slow or stymie their chances to join. While current members of the EU have spoken about the need for the remaining 27 countries to unite, nations that sit outside the bloc worry that unity will mean a strict focus on internal matters.

The status of their young democracies is also a concern. Bosnian political analyst Adnan Huskić has raised concerns that in a situation where the United States in increasingly uninterested in the region and Europe has turned inward, “Russia, Turkey and other countries might step in, countries that do not contribute to the general security and the creation of environment that would support the development of democracy in [Bosnia and Herzegovina].”

Poland, which is often considered the poster child for the European Union’s success in encouraging political and economic reform, is understandably sad to see the United Kingdom leave. In many instances, Poland has acted as a kind of advocate for other Eastern European nations that have European aspirations, and Britain has backed them up.

Since the Polish government was exiled to London in 1939 as a result of the German/Soviet invasion, Poland and Britain have had a friendly relationship. And as the two largest EU member states that do not use the euro as currency, they have maintained that connection. It is no wonder, then, that the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party has called for “efforts aimed at making Britain return, including a second referendum.”

The EU has brought economic growth and prosperity to poorer countries

Eastern European countries are concerned about the negative effects that Brexit may have on their economies, too. The newer, poorer nations of Eastern Europe have benefited greatly from EU-sponsored infrastructure projects and redistribution of the funds that each EU nation contributes to the general pot each year.

As one of the richer nations in the EU, the United Kingdom’s contribution has been around 8 percent of the EU’s total revenue. That chunk of money will either have to be made up by other nations or disappear altogether, lessening EU investment in Eastern Europe.

Croatia, the newest EU member, has worried aloud that Brexit may stymie the EU’s expansion into the Balkans, a step it sees as key for building economic growth in the region.

While Croatia itself has very little trade with Britain and does not expect to be very much affected by Brexit or the fall the British pound has taken since the vote results were announced, many of its neighbors are not in such a secure position. The World Bank lists the UK as the second most common destination for Polish exports, or 6.4 percent of all Polish exports. The UK is the fourth most popular destination for goods exported from the Czech Republic.

If workers in the UK begin to return home — either because they are forced to by new UK immigration laws or because conditions in the UK make it a less attractive place for immigrants to live and work, Eastern European countries could also see the high amount of remittances sent back to their countries drop sharply.

Those remittances — and the economic support they provide to their home nations — have been made possible by the EU’s rules on the free movement of people and labor, and has seen citizens of poorer countries like Poland move to much richer nations like the UK to find work. Poland alone has around 790,000 of its nationals living in the UK.

While the Economist Intelligence Unit does expect Brexit will mean “a drag on export growth in central Europe,” the effects are not expected to be felt immediately. The United Kingdom is expected to formally apply for its divorce from the European Union in the next few months, an action that will begin a two-year process of conscious uncoupling. The conversations and negotiations done during that period will help determine how the nations of Eastern Europe will emerge on the other side.

Hannah Thoburn is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute focusing on Eastern European politics. She tweets on the former Soviet space @HannahThoburn.

On May 3, Poland celebrated the 225th anniversary of its constitution, usually considered Europe’s first modern constitution. Created only two years after the US Constitution came into force, it too was heavily influenced by principles of the Enlightenment, and incorporated ideas like bicameral legislatures and the freedom to practice any religion that are normal features of today’s democracies.

This year, though, Poland’s Constitution Day celebrations were marred by a major constitutional crisis over recent legal reforms implemented by the ruling party. For the past several months, hundreds of thousands of Poles have sporadically taken to the streets to protest the changes, which they believe represent the unraveling of their constitutional order and the democratic regression of one of the post-Soviet space’s greatest success stories.

But Poland’s constitutional crisis has implications that go far beyond its own borders. It’s also a striking symbol of what seems to be a broader — and highly disturbing — trend of democratic backsliding across Europe.

Here, then, is a brief guide to what’s happening in Poland and why the outcome is so important to the future of democracy in Europe.

The crisis is over controversial changes the ruling party made to Poland’s Constitutional Court

The whole thing began in October 2015, when the populist Law and Justice Party (better known by its Polish acronym, PiS) gained a majority of the seats in Poland’s parliament — it had also recently won the presidency — and quickly began making a series of changes to many of the country’s democratic institutions, increasing its control over the state media, judicial system, and constitutional court.

While many of these changes were contentious, nothing gained more negative attention than PiS’s moves in the constitutional realm.

The party’s first order of business concerned five judges who had been appointed to the 15-member Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s highest court (roughly equivalent to the US Supreme Court), by the outgoing administration.

While still in charge of parliament — though aware that they were likely to lose the elections in a few weeks’ time — the soon-to-be-defeated Civic Platform party had elected five new judges to the Constitutional Tribunal.

Three of them were to fill seats that had already been vacated (judges on the tribunal serve a single nine-year term), while two others were elected to fill seats that would soon be open. This would have meant a tribunal with 14 of the 15 judges elected by Civic Platform–run parliaments.

This move understandably upset PiS, which was keen to fill those seats with its own appointees and shift the judicial balance in its favor. PiS appealed to the tribunal, now short several judges, in hopes that Civic Platform’s appointment of those five judges would be overturned.

In a December 3 ruling, the tribunal split the baby, essentially ruling that Civic Platform would keep three of the contested seats while PiS would be able to choose two.

For PiS, this was not good enough. PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński announced that “the current Constitutional Tribunal is a redoubt of everything that is wrong in Poland.”

President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, refused to swear in the three judges appointed by the previous parliament, and instead the PiS-controlled parliament elected five judges of its own. Duda swore in all five of those judges, but the Constitutional Tribunal has refused to accept them, as their very election violates the tribunal’s own December 3 ruling. Since then, many of Poland’s legal mechanisms have been in a state of paralysis.

The passage of a new law that changed the operating procedures of the Constitutional Tribunal further exacerbated the situation. The law mandated that going forward, any decision taken by the court must be made with a two-thirds majority, rather than just a simple majority as had previously been the case. It also sharply increased the number of judges that need to be present for rulings to be made.

In March, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that this new law was unconstitutional. But PiS hit back and refused to publish the ruling — a step required for it to be enacted. The party’s amusingly legalistic argument? That the tribunal had not operated according to the dictates of the new law that it then found unconstitutional; since it was not declared unconstitutional until that point, the tribunal should have operated under its rules.

Supporters of the tribunal’s decision then went commando, self-publishing the ruling on Facebook and literally projecting sections of the ruling onto the edifice of the Office of the Prime Minister.

Yes, seriously.

But the crisis is really about perceived threats to democracy and rule of law in Poland

Various civic organizations, most notably the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD), have sprung up to protest what they see as PiS’s breach of democratic rules and norms. Protests in cities across Poland against the constitutional gridlock and other related issues have become commonplace.

PiS claims these reforms are important and necessary to move the country forward. During PiS’s last stint in office (2005 to 2007), the tribunal blocked several key PiS initiatives. Now PiS sees the tribunal as a potential barrier to the implementation of its political agenda. PiS members have called the Tribunal “a crew of cronies defending the status quo” that will only try to stop the government from undertaking the changes for which the Polish people voted.

Further, they note that Poland’s current constitution was passed in 1997, under the presidency of Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who holds leftist political leanings and was aligned with the communists during the Soviet period. PiS claims that the constitution still maintains many vestiges of the old communist era and that it needs to be replaced entirely. Indeed, in a recent interview, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński did not eliminate the possibility of doing away with the Tribunal entirely.

Many in PiS also feel that the international attention being paid to Poland’s internal legal issues is unfair and has been drummed up by the sore losers of Civic Platform. In response to pressure from the European Union, PiS has been resolute to continue its path, saying that it is accountable only to the Polish voters, not European bureaucrats.

For their part, critics like KOD and Civic Platform worry that PiS is out to neuter the tribunal completely and clear the way for the party to push through any laws that it likes. They believe the PiS leadership sees the tribunal not as an institution responsible for upholding the rule of law, as it is supposed to be, but rather as an organ that should smooth the way for the elected government to do as it pleases.

Many are concerned that PiS is systematically undermining the country’s system of checks and balances, and that PiS is set on following the path of “illiberal democracy” that Viktor Orbán beat in Hungary.

Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has come under fire for using its constitutional majority to push through legislation and constitutional changes that solidified that party’s control over the country. That Kaczynski has publicly hoped for a “Budapest in Warsaw” and praised Orbán’s leadership does not help matters.

But while its liberal-minded opponents protest, PiS continues to press forward with its agenda. Poland’s opposition seems to be only that — an opponent of PiS. They lack a positive agenda.

Amid all of this, PiS remains quite popular with its electorate, and has fallen only 5 percent in the polls. So for now, this conflict seems to be at an impasse. Protests continue while Civic Platform and PiS continue to squabble.

This is just the latest example of what many see as a growing trend of democratic backsliding across Europe

Europe today faces a number of serious challenges — from the refugee crisis to a still-stagnant economy to the potential breakup of the EU — and there’s increasing concern about whether its democratic institutions will endure.

Populist movements on both the right and left are rising to address the issues – particularly the continued influx of refugees, increased worries about terrorism and Islam, and concerns about the loss of sovereignty and national identity to the European Union — that ruling political elites seem either unwilling or unable to solve.

But in doing so, they often appeal to the lesser parts of human nature, turning to racial or cultural dog whistles or resurrecting the kind of nationalism that has long been condemned in Europe.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s populist, Euroskeptic party continues to gain in popularity, while in Slovakia a neo-Nazi party recently won 8 percent of the popular vote and has entered the parliament. Germany has seen the creation of the far-right Alternative for Germany, which is creating an alliance with the decidedly undemocratic youth wing of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.

On the German left, Die Linke has seen growing success, largely thanks to its anti-migrant stance, a position that mirrors Alternative for Germany. In Austria, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party, who has said his choice to carry a firearm on his person is a “natural consequence” of immigration, came within 31,000 votes of being elected to the presidency.

It’s likely that this illiberal trend in European politics will only continue to grow. Similar, and increasingly popular, parties now exist in Sweden, Greece, and Denmark, among others. That PiS, a comparatively mainstream populist party, is attempting to mold Poland’s democratic institutions to fit its vision is not an encouraging sign. If successful, as was Hungary before it, it will lay the groundwork for parties with even more radical policies to do the same.

Hannah Thoburn is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute focusing on Eastern European politics. She tweets on the former Soviet space at @HannahThoburn.