The postcommunist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have generated a rich body of literature over the past 15 years. Most works on CEE transitions have drawn from the comparative politics literature and treated international factors, at best, as secondary. Yet with the recent eastern expansion of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the impact of international institutions on domestic changes in this region.
This volume focuses on the role played in CEE by the EU—arguably the most complex and influential international institution in the region. It offers an in-depth, coherent account of the process through which CEE countries have adopted EU rules, defined as the process of “Europeanization.” As eight CEE countries joined the EU in 2004 and two more will soon join, the book is a timely and welcome contribution to at least three important bodies of literature: on transitions, on the EU, and, more broadly, on the role of international institutions.
The 12 authors are known for their previous work on the transitions in CEE and on the role of European institutions. Yet the contributions to the book are composed expressly for this project. They all address the same principal question: How does the EU exercise its influence on accession countries? Moreover, they test the same hypotheses. This makes the chapters unusually well integrated and allows for a set of coherent conclusions.
In the introductory chapter, Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier offer three possible models for explaining Europeanization in CEE. The external incentives model deals with conditionality mechanisms involved in EU accession. The social-learning model emphasizes rule adoption through persuasion. The lesson-drawing model focuses on processes induced by CEE countries rather than the EU. Each of the three models generates multiple hypotheses. The following eight chapters proceed to test these hypotheses across different issue areas, countries, and moments in the accession process.
Some of the chapters compare the adoption of EU rules in a single issue area in all CEE candidate countries (such as the chapter on administrative reform by Antoaneta L. Dimitrova and the one discussing policies on the movement of persons by Heather Grabbe). Others compare developments across two or three countries. Schimmelfennig, Stefan Engert, and Heiko Knobel discuss the EU's role in promoting liberal democracy in Latvia, Slovakia, and Turkey. Guido Schwellnus focuses on the question of minority rights in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Liliana B. Andonova addresses the role of the EU in the adoption of environmental policy in the Czech Republic and Poland. Beate Sissenich discusses the changes in social policy in Hungary and Poland. Many of the contributions further divide what may initially appear as unitary issues into two or more “subissues” that are then compared (e.g., Schwellnus discusses the adoption of rules of nondiscrimination as well as those referring to minority rights; similarly, Grabbe compares the free movement of workers and the control of movement of persons across EU borders).
Two chapters offer especially interesting insights regarding the applicability of the hypotheses by each comparing dynamics in two very different realms. Wade Jacoby compares the adoption of regional policy and health policy in the Czech Republic and Hungary. He finds that while the former process was primarily driven by EU actions, the latter was induced more by CEE countries. By focusing on two different issues, Jacoby is able to refine his analysis by adding two more variables to the ones that are tested in the other chapters: the degree of availability of alternative models of organization and the structure of the interest representation.
Rachel Epstein compares the acceptance of EU rules on central banking independence and agricultural reform in Poland. She finds that due to the different role that social learning played in the two processes, central banking rules were accepted by Poland at multiple levels, while agricultural reform was accepted only at the elite level. Like other authors in the volume, Epstein finds that CEE countries accepted EU rules even when they were not perceived as legitimate. Yet she recognizes that the lack of legitimacy in the agricultural realm eventually reduced the EU's bargaining power in other issue areas.
The chapters are not only coherent in their research design but also surprisingly similar in terms of their conclusions. Virtually all authors find that the “external incentives” model can best explain EU rule adoption. In other words, the changes in policies in CEE were primarily EU driven and based on the logic of expected consequences (and far less on the logic of appropriateness). While this finding may seem, at first sight, predictable, what makes the results truly surprising is their lack of support for many of the initial hypotheses, especially those deriving from the two alternative models: social learning and lesson drawing.
The authors also find that, so far, the EU has been more successful in promoting the formal, legislative, and institutional adoption of its rules in CEE and far less in the actual implementation of the rules. This observation raises the question of the long-term impact of these changes. The question is especially significant considering that the EU has now lost much of its bargaining power with CEE governments, as most of these countries have become members.
In a laudable effort to frame the findings within the broader Europeanization literature, the volume includes a thought-provoking chapter, by Adrienne Héritier, comparing the process of Europeanization in CEE with the one in Western Europe. Not surprisingly, Héritier, as well as the editors in their concluding chapter, find that the two processes have been very different because Europeanization in CEE took place while the accession countries had weak negotiating positions and because requirements on CEE countries were broader and more “institutional” than in Western Europe. These observations suggest that the existing literature on “Europeanization West” would benefit from future comparisons with the EU's role in CEE after the postcommunist countries became members. In this context, the volume represents an important contribution toward the slow, yet inevitable, blurring of the long-standing divide between the academic fields of East and West European politics.
