Claire Gordon

Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction The Logic of Enlargement Conditionality and Europeanization Communist Legacies and Regionalization The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy Monitoring Conditionality and Compliance Transition, Enlargement and Regionalization: A Comparison of Hungary and Poland Elites and the Capacity for Europeanization Conclusion Bibliography Statistical Appendix

Saying `Maybe' to the `Return to Europe' Elites and the Political Space for Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe

A major challenge for EU enlargement is how to communicate the benefits of membership to electorates. Given the weak penetration of party systems in the Central and East European countries, subnational elites have an important role in shaping voter preferences. Attitudes among subnational elites to EU enlargement are examined in three leading candidate countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Hungary, Slovenia, and Estonia. The results are based on large-scale elite interviews conducted in 1999-2000 in key regional cities. The research demonstrates that subnational elites are disengaged not only structurally from the European integration project, since the negotiations involve the Commission and national governments, but also in their opinions. The subnational elites tend to view EU membership as a national issue and irrelevant for their level, and are poorly informed about EU activities that benefit them. The article suggests that this disengagement of subnational elites constitutes a space for the mobilization of Euroscepticism from below.

Enlargement and Regionalization: The Europeanization of Local and Regional Governance in CEE States

In building any home location is key. Geography is widely regarded as the single most important reason why the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe (CEECs) can realistically aspire to inclusion in a common European home that is democratic and prosperous (Przeworski, 1991: 190–1). This hypothesis may have sound structural foundations in that those transition states that are most proximate to the vibrant democratic market economies of central and western Europe are most likely to benefit from ‘spillover’ and contagion pressures for Europeanization. Moreover, some of the CEECs contiguous with the European Union (EU) share a pre-communist historical legacy of close relations with their EU neighbouring states dating from their interwar era of independent statehood. In the immediate period after the fall of commmunism there existed a widely held perception in many of the CEECs that post-communism equated with a ‘return to Europe’, and that swift European integration would follow. In the decade after the fall of communism, however, the concept of Europe-building has been stretched by the pull of two policy agendas: first, a process of ‘deep integration’ among a historical core-group of EU states driven by a distilled notion of European exceptionalism; and, second, a process of eastward enlargement of EU membership driven by the diluted notion of a ‘wider Europe’. Thus far, the inherent tension between these alternative grand projects has been analysed, on the whole, as a macro-level problem between supranational, transnational and national institutions and elites (Wallace, 1999: 1–13).1

The Stabilization and Association Process in the Western Balkans: An Effective Instrument of Post-conflict Management?

This article investigates the Stabilization and Association Process as an instrument of post-conflict management in the Western Balkans. It explores the appropriateness of the fit of the modified Central and Eastern European accession template with the added stabilization component to the post-conflict countries of the region. In addition, the article raises questions about the continued efficacy of the prolonged and faulty leveraging of conditionality as the EUs primary instrument for affecting transformative change in the Western Balkans. Finally, through the case study of minorities protection, the article suggests that insufficient attention has been paid to developing a comprehensive strategy for the stabilization of post-conflict societies and thus laying the foundations for stable consolidated statehood and a viable democratic peace throughout the region.

The Logic of Enlargement Conditionality and Europeanization

Despite the importance of conditionality during the current EU enlargement, there are few theoretical or empirical studies of the concept. The study of EU enlargement conditionality is characterized by a concentration on the analysis of its correlation with macro-level democratization and marketization, rather than empirically tracking clear causal relationships in policies and institution-building. Most studies tend to focus on two cumulative levels of conditionality. Firstly, they attach great salience to the broad ‘principled’ or normative conditionality established by the Copenhagen European Council in December 1993, the so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’, which was subsequently elaborated in the Accession Partnerships for individual candidate countries from 1997. Secondly, they emphasize the ‘technical’ preconditions for the CEECs to accelerate the adoption of and adaptation to the acquis in order to fulfil all the responsibilities of membership. The speedy adoption of the acquis was the benchmark for measuring CEEC progress on accession — a condition that only Austria, Finland and Sweden, all advanced industrial countries, had previously met prior to membership. There is a wide spectrum of opinions as to whether EU conditionality has had positive or negative effects on the CEECs.

EU Conditionality and the Protection of Minorities in the Post-Communist Region

Th is article explores the complex and evolving interaction between minorities’ protection within the European Union (EU), the instrument of conditionality and the shifting constellation of domestic and regional interests in the post-Communist countries. Taken together these have diff erently shaped and constrained the implementation and practice of minority rights protection across the region. Th is multilevel dynamic is examined fi rstly in the context of the EU accession process in Central and Eastern Europe, secondly in the context of the EU’s Stabilisation and Association Process in the Western Balkans and thirdly in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy, with a particular focus on the countries in the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood. Despite the evident power asymmetry between the aspiring candidates and the EU, the interaction of EU policy on minorities, conditionality and Eastern European states has not been characterized by a straightforward one-way process of progressive improvements in minority rights provision and implementation with the EU facilitating advances in the “respect for and protection of minorities”. Rather it is suggested that notwithstanding the development of the international minority rights regime since the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the evolution of EU policy capacities and the moves to formalize and seek compliance with minority rights norms throughout the region, the realization and practice of such provision has been far more complex and variegated.1 Th is is in part due to the fact that the leverage of conditional-

Communist Legacies and Regionalization

Studies of transition generally focus more on the immediate events and processes and less on the historical background which shapes it. Nevertheless, historical legacies and the extent to which a transition state has a ‘usable past’ are generally recognized as having an important bearing on the transition outcome.1 The term ‘historical legacy’ and the issue of ‘usability’ are, however, not systematically researched in the study of transition. Paradoxically, the more routinely employed concepts of ‘path dependency’ and ‘initial starting conditions’ tend to focus on the predetermining effects of decisions taken at the outset of the transition process rather than exploring the influence of historically rooted factors which may be equally important.2 Moreover, it is also important to take into account not only whether a ‘usable past’ is present in a particular case but also whether the elites that drive the transition process are willing to draw on it. The decisional calculus of elites is of central importance in transition studies as successful reforms are viewed as being largely dependent on the attitudes and behaviour of elites and how differences between elite segments are negotiated in the ‘games’ of transition.3

Transition, Enlargement and Regionalization: a Comparison of Hungary and Poland

During the initial post-communist transition years in most CEECs the issue of local government reform was high on the political agenda as a central theme of democratic state-building. As discussed in Chapter 2 most countries introduced democratizing and decentralizing changes to the structure of local government (see Table 2.1). In formulating these reforms domestic policy-makers looked to their historical legacies of pre-communist experiences, to the transferability of systems of local government in Western Europe and beyond, as well as to the ‘model(s)’ promoted by the Commission and its actors. The framing of regional reform had normative and functional dimensions. As discussed in Chapter 2 some of the CEECs were formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and thus had experience of a system of self-government and autonomy dating from the mid-nineteenth century and enduring in some cases until the 1930s. The functional legacy of communist-era planning regions provided a geographic template for the NUTS regionalization. The policy issue of whether to opt for political or statistical regionalization was also subject to an important territorial and functional constraint in that the former was most obviously relevant to big countries rather than to smaller countries such as Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization

During the EU’s eastward enlargement the notion of ‘capacity’ has been of paramount importance for the Commission and the EU’s governing institutions more broadly. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the Commission employed the term as a generic label for the parts of the acquis that required new institutional structures, management and organizational arrangements and staffing levels, all of which were often seen as being deficient in the CEECs. ‘Capacity’ became a catchall phrase in the accession process, derived from a bureaucratic and technocratic understanding of the concept and, indeed was increasingly over time interpreted in managerialist terms by the Commission. This was, in fact, a narrow understanding of the shortcomings in the CEECs’ preparations for EU membership. Getting the appropriate administrative and organizational structures in place is an important but partial step towards the implementation of the acquis. The capacity to adopt or implement the acquis requires not simply transposition through a domestic legislative gallop, but also a cognitive adjustment by elites who must not only learn to ‘speak European’, but also become acculturated and assimilated into European norms and ‘ways of doing things’. things’.