3.3 Policy Impact

While the area of (macro-)economic policy in the post-communist countries has received much attention, particularly in studies of post-communist transformation, there have been surprisingly few attempts to disentangle the distinctive impact of the EU from ‘globalisation’ and economic transformation more generally (but see Andronova Vincelette 2004;  Dyson 2006;  Epstein 2005a, 2006b;  Johnson 2006;  Lindstrom and Piroska 2004).

These studies largely find that the EU’s policy impact has been strong across policy areas and candidate countries – if these countries had a credible membership incentive. Before the EU spelled out its conditionality, the candidate countries adopted EU rules in some policy areas, but such adjustments were patchy and highly selective. However, once the EU explicitly stated its accession conditions and regularly monitored the alignment of candidate countries, adjustment increased considerably. The EU’s impact on the CEECs’ alignment with EU policies intensified especially once the EU opened accession negotiations with the country question, which served as the most important evidence that the EU’s membership incentive was credible.

The finding of a strong impact of the EU in the policy dimension does not mean that that domestic adjustment costs and veto players did not matter. Domestic politics did play an important role, in particular in shaping which rules were adopted in cases where concrete EU demands were more limited, such as in the area of regional policy, or when domestic actors used the EU’s conditionality instrumentally as a focal point for domestic changes to promote their own priorities. Differences in domestic factors thus account for a continued diversity of outcomes of alignment efforts and for variation in the speed of adjustment across policy areas and accession countries. However, domestic opposition to EU rules rarely effectively prevented the adoption of EU rules that were subject to credible conditionality.

Even the cases in which domestic rules appeared more important for particular policy outcomes than the preferences of EU actors, the limitations of the EU’s impact in these cases fits well with rationalist institutional explanations. For example, factors limiting the effectiveness of conditionality include inconsistent demands from the Commission – either because some parts of the Commission informally promoted a more maximalist agenda than is underpinned by the acquis (see e.g. Hughes et al. 2004b), or because some actors informally indicated leniency in specific areas (Sissenich 2005).

Furthermore, although rationalist institutionalism emerges as particularly well suited to explaining the general patterns of the EU’s policy impact, constructivism is relevant to explain specific cases. Such cases include the adoption of EU policies without, or prior to, EU adjustment pressures (Andonova 2005) or the internalisation of EU rules by actors in the candidate countries even if the policies were initially adopted instrumentally (Grabbe 2005). Moreover, in cases in which social learning provided the main mechanism of policy transfer, these policies were much less prone to domestic contestation (Epstein 2005a).

In sum, in view of the starting point of the post-communist countries, the EU did induce a certain extent of convergence; at least if compared to the older member states and especially in areas where EU rules do not leave much scope for discretion. However, convergence has been far from uniform, and diversity persists, as the EU’s impact is differential across policy areas and domestic contexts (see also Bruszt 2002;  Zielonka and Mair 2002).

"Europeanisation in new member and candidate states" Ulrich Sedelmeier http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2006-3

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