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European Union Accession Dynamics and Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Future Perspectives1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Geoffrey Pridham
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Abstract

EU influence in encouraging and promoting democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe has been extensive, though in a wide rather than deep sense. But, as shown by the enlargement process up to 2004, accession dynamics are the crucial force driving governments in the region to meet the EU's political conditionality. Despite the latter's deficiencies, it has by and large contributed towards democratic consolidation in the new member states notwithstanding some negative aspects of accession. The clear lesson for further enlargement in post-Communist Europe is that EU pressure and promise over integration will be decisive in new candidate states, even though their capacity to achieve the political conditions is more problematic. It follows too that any lessening of EU commitment is likely to undermine democratization efforts there.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , 2006 , pp. 373 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2006

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Footnotes

1

This article draws on work for a Fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Europeanising Democratisation?: EU Accession and Post-Communist Politics in Slovakia, Latvia and Romania’; and previous work for a Leverhulme Fellowship which covered these same countries but also the Czech Republic.

References

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5 Cf. the comment of David Ringrose, Director General of Enlargement, European Commission, that the end point of democratic consolidation is EU accession and that the commission would not like a (conceptual) debate about the end of consolidation as this would provoke differences among the member states. Once candidate countries received the invitation to join, thereafter ‘the political criteria are no longer an issue’ (interview in Brussels, December 2002).Google Scholar

6 One EU ambassador in a new member state from post-Communist Europe, who had seen through the last vital years of the accession process, when asked for his definition of ‘democratic consolidation’ (at the end of the interview in spring 2005) replied that he could not ‘tell what is consolidation’, that there was no working definition and that the 1993 conditions ‘look evidently like the key variables’.Google Scholar

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34 E.g. in Romania, this attitude has been quite pronounced because of the problems of state capacity there and the connection made between EU accession and reform of the state. According to the director of the Institute of Marketing and Polls (IMAS), ‘the public believe these international organizations [like the EU, the IMF and the World Bank] know better than Romanian politicians’; and this meant these organizations ‘had public opinion behind them’ (author interview with Alin Teodorescu, in Bucharest, October 2003).Google Scholar

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36 Cf. reports in 2003 on deficiencies in the observation of human rights in Latvia in Latvian News Agency (LETA), report, 9 February 2005, and in EU Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights, Report on the Situation of Fundamental Rights in Latvia in 2003, Brussels, European Commission, 2004.Google Scholar

37 Interview with Alena Panikova, executive director, Open Society Foundation, in Bratislava, May 2005.Google Scholar

38 Cf. the comment of the Central Europe correspondent of European Voice that ‘enlargement is coming to be seen not as a way of exporting stability but of importing instability (European Voice, 4–11 May 2005).Google Scholar

39 International Commission on the Balkans, The Balkans in Europe's Future, Sofia, Centre for Liberal Strategies, 2005, p. 12.Google Scholar