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The Europeanisation of candidate countries has emerged only recently as a separate research area. The
study of Europeanisation has long been confined to analyses of the member states of the European Union
(EU). However, what the literature usually considers as ‘Europeanisation’, is not confined to the
member states. While there is considerable debate about how to define ‘Europeanisation’ (see
e.g. Börzel 2005
; Börzel and Risse 2003, 2007; Cowles et al. 2001; Falkner 2003; Featherstone and
Radaelli 2003; Mair 2004; Radaelli 2003), the literature generally uses the term as shorthand for
‘influence of the EU’ or ‘domestic impact of the EU’. Of course, this conflation of ‘Europe’ with the EU is
problematic and the dominant focus of the literature on responses to top-down adjustment pressures
emanating from the EU limits the scope of analysis – and hence of this review – in a number of ways (which
I will discuss below). Yet these restrictions notwithstanding, the domestic impact of the EU is certainly not
confined to the EU’s members. The narrow focus of the Europeanisation literature on membership may
therefore appear surprising. Throughout the EU’s history, outsiders have undertaken various forms of
unilateral adjustment. Two principal reasons account for why such adjustments were not studied under the
umbrella of Europeanisation.
One reason is fairly straightforward: the research agenda on Europeanisation is relatively recent. Only by the end of the 1990s did the term Europeanisation come to denote a distinctive research area in EU studies. While adjustment of outsiders, candidates and new members thus certainly had been analysed before, the term Europeanisation was hardly used as a label to designate it as a common research area, or to provide a focal point for a coherent framework of analysis.
A more substantive reason is that while the adjustment of outsiders has been a longstanding phenomenon of European integration, these adjustments were generally a response to various negative externalities of European integration. Adjustments to the EU in non-member states were thus highly selective and did not result from deliberate attempts by the EU to create adjustment pressures. Analysts therefore did not consider such adjustments comparable to the EU’s impact on member states – and hence as cases of Europeanisation.
A qualitative change in the EU’s impact on outsiders occurred in the 1990s with regard to two groups of countries whose adjustment was much more comprehensive and much more directly influenced by the EU. First, the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement between the EU and most members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) created a regime in which the non-member states unilaterally adopted the EU’s rules and regulations – the acquis communautaire (except for agriculture). This adjustment allowed them to participate in the EU’s internal market and most of their governments regarded it as a first step on the way to full membership.
Second, the EU’s influence has been most comprehensive and explicit in the case of the post-communist Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) that declared their intention to join the EU after the regime changes of 1989. The EU’s adjustment requirements did not only include the implementation of the acquis communautaire, but also an explicit political and economic conditionality, which covered many rules for which EU institutions have no legal competences vis-à-vis full member states (such as democracy and minority rights). In particular, the study of the EU’s conditionality in the context of eastern enlargement has started to frame the analysis in terms of ‘Europeanisation’ of candidate countries. These studies thus started to broaden the focus of Europeanisation and to establish the Europeanisation of applicant states as a separate sub-field of this broader research agenda.
Thus, two key characteristics of these adjustments of non-members are comparable to the impact of the EU on member states, and hence suggest that it makes indeed sense to study the impact of the EU on candidate countries in terms of ‘Europeanisation’: the significant extent to which EU actors and institutions direct and enforce the adjustment process (even if instruments differ) and the comprehensive nature of adjustment to cover the entirety of the acquis. Yet at the same time, the Europeanisation of candidate countries has distinctive characteristics, which suggest that it can be seen as a particular sub-field of Europeanisation research. First, the status of candidates as non-members has implications on the instruments used by EU institutions to influence the adjustment process. EU institutions cannot rely on the treaty-based sanctions, but have to use softer instruments, including conditional incentives, normative pressure, and persuasion. At the same time, monitoring of compliance is much more intrusive and direct than in full member states. Second, as non-member states, the candidates had no voice in the making of the rules that they have to adopt and the power asymmetry vis-à-vis the incumbents has led to a top-down process of rule transfer, with no scope for ‘uploading’ their own preferences to the EU level.
Moreover, the distinctive characteristics of candidate Europeanisation were more prominent in the case of the eastern enlargement than in the 1995 enlargement. The adjustment pressures for candidates differed with regard to the EEA and the eastern enlargement process. In its final form, the EEA did not generate the possibilities for decision-shaping by the EFTA members and a more equal role in the enforcement and interpretation of the ECJ and EFTA surveillance authority as initially envisaged. Still, while many EFTA governments considered the EEA early on as a mere transitory regime on the way to full EU membership, the EFTA states also considered the adoption of the acquis in the EEA of intrinsic value to change national regulatory practices (Smith 1999). By contrast, the adaptational pressures for the CEECs were far higher: the legacy of post-communism created high adjustment costs; the main rationale for adopting the acquis was the benefits of full EU membership rather than the intrinsic benefits of EU models in the various policy areas. Moreover, only in the context of the CEECs did the EU spell out, and regularly monitor, an explicit pre-accession conditionality.
Similarly to the recent nature of the focus on candidate country Europeanisation, the Europeanisation of new members as a distinctive sub-field of Europeanisation studies is very new (see also Pridham 2006: 3-4). What makes the Europeanisation of new members more similar to candidates, rather than longer-standing members, is that the adjustment pressures of membership are different for states that did not participate in the making of the rules. Yet prior to the 1995 enlargement – as the first post-internal market enlargement – the adjustment pressures on new members had been much more limited. Thus, while some research on the impact of membership on newcomers started to emerge in the context of the EFTA enlargement (see e.g. Falkner 2000, 2001), studies of the experience of new members are still rare. However, the Europeanisation of new members is likely to become a major research area in the aftermath of the 2004 eastern enlargement. The distinctiveness of candidate country Europeanisation in the context of these countries suggests that the post-accession period will be a key test for the effectiveness of the mechanisms used by the EU to ‘Europeanise’ these countries prior to accession. This review therefore concentrates primarily on the insights from studies of candidate country Europeanisation, and in particular on the context of eastern enlargement, in which this research area has emerged (while the emerging literature on new members will be a point for later extensions in future Living Review updates).
Table 1 summarises the results of a keyword search of the Social Science Citation Index. It confirms the Europeanisation of applicant states and new members as a still comparatively small, but fast-growing research area, particularly since 2003. It also reflects the predominance of studies of applicants in the eastern enlargement round.
In recent years, the Europeanisation of candidate countries has become a more sophisticated research area, as studies moved increasingly beyond largely descriptive analyses and towards comparisons across countries and issue areas. Studies that set their analysis explicitly into a theoretical framework have only started to emerge over the last couple of years. In particular some recent, theoretically informed, book-length studies of the EU’s influence on the East Central European candidate countries have made a considerable contribution to the development of a common research agenda and have established the Europeanisation of candidate states as a distinctive research area. These studies share considerable common ground, both with regard to their analytical frameworks and empirical findings. Their framework of analysis, which is situated within insitutionalist debates in International Relations and Comparative Politics, is strongly compatible with those used to studying Europeanisation in member states. They also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the empirical findings with regard to candidate Europeanisation appear much more clear-cut in identifying a dominant mechanism of the EU’s domestic impact. Rationalist institutionalism, with its emphasis on credible external incentives underpinning EU conditionality, and on the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears to be well-suited to explaining variation in the broad patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. The next stage of this research agenda concerns the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage. Especially for the sustainability of compliance in the post-accession phase, factors emphasised by constructivist institutionalism might prove particularly salient.
This review provides an overview of the key research questions and dependent variables of (primarily, theoretically-informed) studies of candidate country Europeanisation, their conceptual frameworks, empirical foci, and main findings. It concludes with identifying emerging gaps and new directions in this research area. The empirical focus of the review is restricted in two significant ways.
The first restriction stems from following the general focus of the Europeanisation literature on domestic responses to top-down adjustment pressures emanating from the EU. On the one hand, this excludes influences from other European or transatlantic international organisations, such as the Council of Europe or NATO, although some studies consider the interplay between the EU and such organisations. On the other hand, this focus somewhat neglects the more voluntary adjustments to the EU and instances in which the EU provided ideational inspiration for domestic change. This restriction might have some conceptual implications, since precisely those instances of ‘Europeanisation’ are more likely to result from mechanisms emphasised by constructivist institutionalism. However, some studies explicitly consider voluntary emulation and lesson-drawing as alternative explanations.
The second restriction is the focus on eastern enlargement and the CEECs, which was chosen because
the theoretically informed literature on candidate Europeanisation developed in this context. These
countries are also particularly instructive cases for Europeanisation effects, in view of the often very
substantial political and economic adjustment costs resulting from the systemic transformation to
democracy and market economies. However, there are also studies of the other two countries involved in the
EU’s 2004 enlargement – Malta and Cyprus – that directly engage the Europeanisation literature (see
e.g. Cini 2000; Featherstone 2001; Mitchell 2002; Tocci and Kovziridze 2004). Moreover, especially
with regard to the EU’s impact on democratisation, a lively debate over the Europeanisation of Turkey is
emerging (see e.g. Diez et al. 2005; Heper 2005; Kubicek 2005; Muftuler Bac 2005; Tocci 2005);
while some studies cover Turkey in comparative studies of the CEECs (see e.g. Engert 2004;
Kubicek 2003b; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006).
While noting these restrictions, I would like to emphasise that the broader conceptual points derived from the Europeanisation of the CEEC candidates highlighted in this review should also apply to other international organisations, candidate countries and issue areas. Since the primary focus in this review is on theoretical frameworks that relate to the more general analysis of the domestic impact of international institutions, the factors emphasised should be more broadly applicable beyond the case of eastern enlargement – while taking due account of the fact that the setting of these factors, and accordingly the impact of the EU (or other actors), might vary in these different contexts.
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