3.1 Impact on the polity

Through the EU’s political conditionality, the EU’s impact on fundamental principles of liberal democracy in the candidate countries has been much stronger than on the incumbents. At the same time, the EU’s influence has been strongly constrained by domestic factors. The accession process had a strong impact on the organisation of core executives, but without resulting in convergent structures across the candidates. Another similarity to member state Europeanisation is that overall, the EU’s impact on polities has been on the whole more limited than its policy impact. At the same time, there has been more attention, particularly in legal studies, to the adaptation of the CEECs’ constitutions and legal order in view of accession (see Albi 2005 ; Poplawska 2004 ; Sadurski 2004 , 2006

; Sajo 2004 ).

3.1.1 Liberal democratic principles

The EU’s impact on democracy and political rights in East Central Europe has become a well-established subfield of research. Many of the contributions come not only from the EU studies community, but also from the broader disciplines of International Relations and Comparative Politics. They include the literature on the first phases of democratisation, in which the theme of the ‘return to Europe’ played a prominent role. Such studies are more generally interested in the international dimension or domestic conditions of democratisation; they often do not only focus on the EU and are less likely to use the terminology of ‘Europeanisation’ (see e.g. Cooley 2003 ; Knack 2004 ; Levitsky and Way 2006 ; Pevehouse 2002 , 2005 ; Pridham and Ágh 2001 ; Pridham et al. 1994 ; Schimmelfennig et al. 2006

; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005a

; Whitehead 2001 ; Zielonka and Pravda 2001 ).

Analyses of the EU’s ability to promote democracy, human rights and minority rights in candidate countries find that the EU’s influence has crucially depended on the regime type and party political constellations in the candidates (Schimmelfennig 2005 ; Schimmelfennig et al. 2003 ; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005a ; Vachudová 2005 ). In states with liberal democratic governments (such as the democratic frontrunners, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic), the EU did not need to use democratic conditionality heavily. In such countries, the EU was also generally successful when it used conditionality to promote particular norms, such as minority rights, even against initial domestic opposition, for example in Romania or the Baltics states (for a more critical view, see Hughes and Sasse 2003 ; Kelley 2004 ; Sasse 2005 ; Schwellnus 2005 ; Vermeersch 2003 ). By contrast, the EU’s impact on states dominated by a nationalist and/or authoritarian leadership (e.g. Slovakia under Meciar, Croatia under Tudjman, or Serbia under Milosevic) was negligible (see also Kubicek 2003a ). For such governments, the domestic political power costs of meeting the EU’s demands were prohibitive.

The EU’s impact on democratic consolidation was most pronounced in those states in which nationalist or authoritarian forces lost power to liberal forces, such as in Slovakia, Croatia, or Romania. Once more liberal opposition parties assumed power, the EU’s conditionality – if combined with a credible accession perspective – had a lock-in effect that endured subsequent changes in government (Schimmelfennig 2005 ; Vachudová 2005 ).

Debate persists on whether the EU was able to influence the electoral defeat of nationalist/authoritarian governments. (Schimmelfennig 2005 ; Schimmelfennig et al. 2005 , 2006 ) argues that the EU’s influence is limited to the intergovernmental channel (once favourable governments are in power). By contrast, Vachudová (2005 ) suggests that the EU influenced domestic politics indirectly and helped create a more competitive political systems in ‘illiberal’ states that pushed them to a liberal political trajectory. The EU empowered liberal reformers by informing electorates about the implication of their choices for the country’s accession prospects and facilitating cooperation and moderation of opposition forces. Vachudová thus suggests that even if the EU did not directly influence voters’ choices, it had a tremendous influence on the nature of the elites that won power in ‘watershed elections’ that marked the departure from illiberal systems.

The importance of domestic costs as the main constraining factor underscores the explanatory power of rationalist institutionalism for the general patterns of the EU’s impact in the polity dimension. At the same time, Schwellnus (2005 ) argues that the inclusion of factors emphasised in constructivist approaches – domestic resonance – can provide complementary, but more convincing, explanations of the domestic processes leading to the adoption of EU rules, and the particular choices of rules within the scope of the EU’s conditionality.

3.1.2 Executives and administrative structures

The EU’s impact on political-administrative structures has been pronounced for those institutional arrangements that link national executives and the EU. This impact is largely the result of the functional pressures arising from the need to organise relations with the EU, formulate negotiating positions, and to implement EU policies, rather than any deliberate attempt by the EU to change executive structures. And just as in Western Europe, there is considerable variation in the extent to which intra-governmental coordination is fragmented or centralised (Fink-Hafner 2005 ; Goetz 2001 ; Goetz 2005

: 271-272; Lippert et al. 2001 ). At the same time, especially in the later stages of the accession process, a tendency towards more centralised and hierarchical coordination could be observed, for example in Poland (Zubek 2001 , 2005 ). Evidence from earlier enlargements, such as in the case of Spain, suggests that a centralisation of intra-governmental coordination in order to respond to the high coordination requirements of accession negotiations may prove sticky even after accession (Jones 2000 ).

A novelty in the context of eastern enlargement is that the EU has undertaken considerable efforts to influence administrative practices in candidates, including civil service reforms, or anti-corruption. It may well be that the EU ‘certainly hastened such reform and gave it a visibility it would not otherwise have achieved as well as providing some legitimation for such change’ (Pridham 2005 ) and there is evidence of considerable changes in formal rules induced by conditionality (Dimitrova 2005 ). At the same time, the impact was varied and often restricted by post-communist legacies, domestic opposition, the lack of a single EU model of administration, and inconsistent application of conditionality (Ágh 2003 ; Bossaert and Demmke 2003 ; Dimitrova 2002 , 2005 ; Hintea et al. 2004 ; Meyer-Sahling 2004 ; Pridham 2005 : 122-127; Reinholde 2004 ).

Finally, while a number of studies have analysed the impact of the EU on regionalisation, evidence of the EU’s impact is limited (Ágh 2004 ; Brusis 2002 , 2005 ; Fowler 2001 ; Glenn 2004 ; Hughes et al. 2004a ,b ; Jacoby 2004 ; Kettunen and Kungla 2005 ; Marek and Baun 2002 ; O’Dwyer 2006 ; Sturm and Dieringer 2005 ). The lack of impact of the EU fits well with the expectations of rationalist institutionalism. The acquis does not prescribe decentralisation and the devolution of powers to the regional level, but merely the establishment of statistical units for the purpose of administrating the allocation of structural funds. Although parts of the Commission initially tried to promote a much more far-reaching interpretation of these conditions, inconsistencies in the Commission’s message make the finding that domestic politics was the main determinant of regional policy fully compatible with a rationalist institutionalist perspective.