The European Union (EU) has made the promotion of democracy and good governance a pillar of its foreign policy. Admittance to the EU, as well as participating in various economic and political accords with numerous countries far beyond its borders, is conditioned on adherence to norms such as the protection of human rights and the rule of law. Whereas many heralded the EU’s interventions in the 1990s as a positive force for change, more recently there has been skepticism about both the EU’s commitment to, and ability to produce, change in targeted countries. This is particularly true with respect to issues of good governance and corruption, the primary topics of interest in Alina Mungiu-Pippidi’s far-reaching and impressive study. She concludes that the EU’s transformative power in these areas “has been proven largely a myth” (p. 217). Understanding why this is so—and what might be done to correct the EU’s course—is an important topic for both academics and policy makers and makes this work well worth reading.

Mungiu-Pippidi defines her subject as EU interventions to “engineer change from systemic corruption to public integrity” (p. 6). She draws on data from 2002 to 2014 from more than 120 countries that received EU aid, as well as the good governance record of EU countries themselves. The book is densely packed with statistical information, analytical narratives of selected cases, and the occasional enlightening anecdote, and it is relatively easy to follow. After a brief introduction that establishes Switzerland (?!) as a successful case of external intervention (by Napoleon), she defines her main concepts in Chapter 2, lays out various theories of change in Chapter 3, and describes general EU policies and practices in Chapter 4. The next three chapters assess what the EU has done (or not) to foster change, respectively, in “old” EU members (with particular focus on Italy and Greece), in new or aspiring members (with a focus on Romania, Turkey, Kosovo, and Bosnia), and in countries currently with no immediate membership prospects, including several in the post-Soviet space, the Middle East, and Africa. Chapter 8 concludes with a variety of reflections and policy recommendations.

The early chapters are useful in guiding the reader through a thicket of concepts and theories and establishing the bases and novelty of Mungiu-Pippidi’s core arguments. Her focus, she makes clear numerous times, is on “good governance,” a somewhat elusive concept that she defines as a situation “where the dominant rule of the game in government ethos and practice is ethical universalism” (p. 27). Put differently, it suggests that the state is autonomous from private interests and that state leaders serve the common good. She notes that this concept is different from corruption—which she considers an individual concept, not a macro one—and from democratization writ large, but it is intrinsically linked to the rule of law. Although good governance can emerge with institutional development (particularly well-functioning bureaucratic and legal systems), it does not, she reminds us, automatically arise in conjunction with democratization, economic development, or education. The core dilemma is that of state capture by powerful groups, and intervention to promote good governance needs to address this in a number of ways: through transparency, monitoring, administrative simplicity, judicial independence, free media, and a strong civil society as a check on state actors. Broadly speaking, the author frames the issue as one of limiting resources available to bad actors and developing constraints to modify their behavior. These aims are operationalized in various ways in the Index of Public Integrity (p. 47), which serves as one of the main data sources in the book. International actors, she suggests, might be able to bring about good governance through a variety of means, including encouraging more open competition, promoting free media, and adopting antibribery or anticorruption conventions. However, already by the end of Chapter 3, it is clear that Mungiu-Pippidi is skeptical whether much of this can actually work, suggesting that anticorruption efforts “might just be another therapeutic, feel-good industry, enjoying ‘doing something’ and insouciant about whether it is actually doing any good and whether or not corruption is thriving in tandem with it” (p. 64).

The subsequent chapters, which present her data, devastatingly bear out this criticism. In Chapter 4, which offers an overview of EU aid policy, we learn that dedicated EU aid for good governance and control of corruption has not yielded positive results, that little EU support goes to civil society, and that much of EU aid goes directly to governments without much effective monitoring or oversight. Chapter 5—which usefully shifts the focus to the EU’s practices among its member states—reveals numerous flaws in the EU’s strategy, starting with observations that the EU has poor instruments to restrain state behavior, insufficient political will, its own issues of corruption within EU institutions, and no Europeanized good governance standard in law or in practice (p. 115). In the cases of Italy and Greece, EU funding literally fed the problem of patronage politics.

Chapter 6 might be even more damning. Mungiu-Pippidi attacks widespread myopia in EU policies in the Central Europe and the Balkans, resulting in a lack of support for civil society; a misplaced focus on high-profile, politicized corruption trials; an emphasis on the formal adoption of rules as opposed to their implementation; lack of mechanisms to prevent backsliding; and, perhaps most significantly, a naiveté that leaders in would-be member states have the political will to tackle corruption (p. 185). She also, however, dryly notes that academic papers that might have offered “refined statistical treatment” to demonstrate EU success in promoting judicial independence and rule of law in new member states were “simply wrong” (p. 167). After these indictments, no reader is likely to be surprised by the discussion in Chapter 7, which finds EU good governance promotion wanting in countries such as Ukraine, Tunisia, and Uganda.

It is, of course, all too easy to criticize, particularly with the advantages of hindsight. To her credit, Mungiu- Pippidi closes the volume with a variety of policy recommendations (e.g., act knowingly, do not contribute resources to the problem, identify and promote local stakeholders) and outlines the possibilities and limitations of promoting good governance through market means, legal means, and a more comprehensive donor-induced program. One critique I would add is that the book might focus too much on the failures: Greece, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Ukraine. Fuller discussion of success stories—Mungiu-Pippidi frequently mentions Estonia and Georgia, but neither is subjected to sustained analysis nor does she credit the EU with their reform programs—might be useful to demonstrate how states successfully adopt good governance practices.

This is, without a doubt, an important work, one that puts to rest earlier, more optimistic treatments of the EU’s normative power or use of conditionality, and it sets an agenda for much future research. It will rightfully find a large academic audience—and it is certainly accessible to graduate students—but I hope it will find a wide readership in the policy community as well. True, EU officials may not relish reading this work, but the lessons it draws are too important for them to continue to ignore.