Abstract
The ‘eastern enlargement’ of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 marked the unification of Western and Eastern Europe, yet many scholars feared negative consequences of enlargement—both for the institutions of the EU, which were expected to encounter gridlock in a Union of 27, and possibly for the new members themselves as the end of ‘conditionality’ might lead to backsliding on political or economic reforms. Despite these concerns, a growing body of EU scholarship has begun to explore both questions, and the results give substantial grounds for optimism. EU institutions have proven remarkably adaptable in the face of enlargement, while the new member states show little or no signs of backsliding, remaining committed to democracy, the rule of law and free markets.
Keywords
The year 2009 represents a significant milestone in European politics, coming some 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which in turn marked the beginning of the end of a continent divided between Eastern and Western blocs. In addition, 2009 also marks the fifth anniversary of the EU's eastern enlargement, in which the Union took in 10 Eastern and Southern European Member States in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in January 2007. That enlargement marked the transformation of the EU from a Western European to a pan-European union, yet enlargement was undertaken with significant trepidation by EU officials and observers, who feared negative consequences of enlargement both for the institutions of the EU and possibly for the new members themselves. With respect to EU institutions, there was a general fear of indigestion in institutions originally built for six and now operating with 27 members of ever-increasing diversity. Would the EU be able to operate as efficiently as in the past, or would sheer numbers as well as the heterogeneity of its expanded membership condemn the Union to paralysis? With respect to the new members, the new democracies of Central and Eastern European countries had reformed their political and economic systems in the run-up to membership, in an effort to gain entry into the European club, and both scholars and practitioners agreed that ‘membership conditionality’ had been a strong incentive for those countries in undertaking reforms. Would the long-sought achievement of membership have a perverse effect on the new members, prompting a relaxation or backsliding of political and economic reforms once the leverage of membership conditionality no longer applied?
We lack historical perspective on these questions, particularly with respect to Bulgaria and Romania, where EU membership is barely 2 years old. Nevertheless, a growing body of EU scholarship has begun to answer both questions, and the results give substantial grounds for optimism. With respect to EU institutions, there had indeed been good reason to suspect that enlargement would adversely affect the workings of the executive Commission, the legislative Council of Ministers and European Parliament and the judicial Court of Justice, and hence reduce the Union's ability to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the treaty reforms undertaken at Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2001), as well as the would-be reforms in the defunct Constitutional Treaty and the pending Treaty of Lisbon, were aimed in large part at adapting EU institutions to the demands of an enlarged Union. Yet even in the absence of fundamental constitutional change, EU institutions, both individually and collectively, have proven remarkably adaptable in the face of enlargement. With respect to the new members, moreover, compliance with EU law remains imperfect, but the loss of membership conditionality has not resulted in widespread backsliding among Central and Eastern European countries, which by and large remain committed to democracy, the rule of law and free markets.
In this article, I offer a preliminary survey of the evidence collected by scholars, seeking to document and explain both the adaptability of EU institutions and the continuing commitment to reform of the new Member States. I begin in the next section by analysing the reasons why many scholars and practitioners had predicted a new era of ‘Eurosclerosis’ following eastern enlargement, and surveying the evidence of adaptability and efficiency in EU institutions post-enlargement. In the following section, I turn to the new members themselves, noting the substantial fear of backsliding after membership, as well as the growing evidence that such fears have proven largely unfounded.
EU institutions: indigestion?
The eastern enlargement of the EU, as noted above, was undertaken with considerable trepidation, not least for fear that the character and the working of EU institutions would be altered profoundly by the influx of Central and Eastern European countries that were smaller, less prosperous, and had a shorter history of democratic government and open markets than the existing members of the EU-15 had. Indeed, the frenetic period of treaty drafting and ratification from 1993 through 2009 was motivated in large part by a perceived need to gird the existing institutions to operate in an EU of 27 members or more.
The Treaty of Nice, which entered into force in 2003 and remained as the operative constitutional framework for the EU until late 2009, was linked to no grand projet for European integration but was almost exclusively an effort to prepare for enlargement. The Treaty provided, inter alia, for a streamlined Commission (one commissioner per Member State from 2004, to be followed by an even smaller Commission with a rotating membership once the Union reached 27 members); an enlarged European Parliament; greater qualified majority voting to avoid gridlock in the Council of Ministers; and a reweighting of votes in the Council to boost the influence of the most populous Member States (designed to counter the influx of mostly small new members with disproportionate voting weight under the old system). Nevertheless, the Nice Treaty failed to address some of the central concerns expressed in the run-up to enlargement, including a qualified majority voting threshold that actually increased after Nice (from 71.2% of all weighted votes to 73.9%), thereby reducing the likelihood of reaching agreement in an enlarged Council of Ministers [1,5,17]. The Constitutional Treaty and the Treaty of Lisbon, in turn, featured a number of institutional reforms, such as the creation of a new president of the European Council (to replace the chairmanship of the rotating presidency) and the modest further extension of QMV (qualified majority voting), that responded at least in part to the perceived challenges of enlargement, but these reforms remained in abeyance until late 2009, pending the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by all the Member States.
This long delay, in turn, led to the widespread fear that the combination of the Nice rules and a substantially increased and more diverse membership would paralyse EU institutions. Five years after the 2004 enlargement, however, a growing body of evidence and scholarly studies have demonstrated that, contrary to expectations, EU institutions have experienced not indigestion or paralysis but ‘business as usual’, with both the individual institutions and the system at large adapting flexibly to the influx of new members, and with a pattern of ‘policy outputs’ broadly similar to the period before enlargement. There have, to be sure, been some changes and growing pains within the institutions, and the impact of new members has been felt more acutely in some issue areas than in others. Nevertheless, the overwhelming lesson of recent studies is clear: the various institutions of the EU, and the political system of the Union as a whole, show few if any signs of paralysis or breakdown. Instead, study after study, employing a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative measures, has depicted an EU that has adapted pragmatically and successfully to the larger numbers and greater diversity of an enlarged membership. Consider first the record of the overall legislative output of the EU system as a whole, followed by more specific evidence of performance in individual institutions such as the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the Commission and the Court of Justice.
With regard to the legislative output of the Union as a whole, the more dire pre-enlargement analyses envisioned an EU in which the larger numbers (27 Member States, representing an 80% increase over the EU-15) and the increased diversity of preferences (Western and Eastern European states from the Atlantic to the Russian border) would make legislative negotiations and agreement far more difficult, reducing the legislative output of the Union and hence its ability to respond to the demands of globalisation, foreign policy challenges and economic crises.
In fact, multiple studies have shown that the Union's legislative output has remained remarkably steady before and after enlargement. Care is in order when interpreting data on the EU's legislative output, since the May 2004 enlargement was not an isolated event but also coincided with the June 2004 election of a European Parliament with a new centre-right majority, as well as with the nomination of the centre-right Commission of José Manuel Barroso, who promised to reduce and simplify the quantity of EU regulations and their burden on industry. In this sense, not just enlargement but also broader political developments in the EU might lead us to expect a substantial reduction in the quantity of EU legislative output.
Studies of EU decision-making, however, have by and large not borne out these predictions. Instead, large-scale quantitative studies undertaken under the auspices of the Observatory of European Institutions at the Centre for European Studies of Sciences Po in Paris [8] and the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) in Maastricht [3,41] demonstrate remarkable continuity in the EU's legislative output before and after the 2004 enlargement. 1 The period immediately preceding and following enlargement in May 2004 did, at first glance, appear to support the hypothesis of decreased output, with a significant fall-off of legislative output in the second half of the year compared with the period from January through May. The year 2004, however, turned out to be idiosyncratic, with a major push by EU-15 Member States to adopt a large package of regulation before enlargement and before the June elections of the European Parliament, followed by a drop-off as the new Commission and EP took up their respective positions. Extending the analysis back before 2004 (typically to January 2003, when the Nice Treaty rules came into force) and forward into 2005, 2006 and beyond, however, reveals remarkable continuity in the EU's legislative output. According to Dehousse et al. [8], the EU's legislative output in 2006 and 2007 was similar to that in the period before enlargement, and the speed of decision-making, widely expected to decrease with greater numbers, actually increased in the years after the 2004 enlargement. Similarly, Settembri, comparing the legislative output of the EU in 2003 and later in 2005-2006, finds the annual legislative output of the EU largely unchanged (479 pieces of legislation per annum before enlargement, compared with 455 afterward), while the speed of decision-making again increased slightly ([41], 27-29).
See also the excellent review in Wallace [49], the essays in Best et al. [2], and the references on post-enlargement decision-making in the individual EU institutions cited below.
In terms of sheer quantity of legislative outputs, therefore, the enlarged EU does not seem to be suffering from gridlock. Nevertheless, as various scholars have pointed out, continuity in the quantity of legislation may be masking more subtle changes in the quality of legislation, and Settembri's analysis points to several areas in which the character of legislation appears to have shifted since the May 2004 enlargement. He finds, for example, that while the overall number of acts adopted has held roughly steady, the proportion of important or salient acts has decreased, suggesting that the EU may be producing more marginal legislation and less salient or innovative legislation in the EU of 25 or 27 members ([41], 27). Settembri's data also suggest that in their efforts to promote legislative efficiency in the enlarged EU, the various EU institutions have altered the decision-making process, rendering it less political (with fewer debates among national ministers and among EU commissioners) and less transparent (with a growing percentage of codecision negotiations taking place in closed-door meetings between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament) ([41], 29; [3], 190-193). 2 These subtle changes, in turn, suggest that we need to look below the level of the EU as a whole and examine the workings of individual EU institutions.
This increasing use of closed-door meetings, Settembri demonstrates, results from the increasing tendency of the Council and the EP to agree to legislative texts in the ‘first reading’ of the codecision procedure, in 65.2% of cases after enlargement compared with 29.6% before 2004. As Settembri concedes, however, this effect may be due less to enlargement than to the increased experience and improved working relationships between the Council and Parliament over time.
The Council of Ministers
The Council of Ministers, composed of national ministers from the EU's growing roster of Member States, has been the source of both the greatest worries about enlargement and the subject of the largest number of studies seeking to ascertain the shifting decision-making patterns, contestation and coalitions among member governments before and after the enlargement of May 2004. 3 Studies of the Council prior to enlargement established a baseline for comparison and generally depicted a body governed by a ‘culture of consensus’, in which decisions are most often taken by unanimous agreement even where formal rules allow voting by qualified majority. In the pre-enlargement EU, studies showed, most decisions were indeed taken by consensus. Furthermore, in many of the ‘contested’ votes, only a single Member State voted against the majority, with the ‘northern’ members (Germany, Sweden, the UK and others) voting most often against the majority. Moving from contestation to coalitions, pre-2004 studies drew upon a wide range of indicators (formal votes, informal networks and distributions of preferences as revealed by interviews), with most studies finding a tendency towards ‘north-south’ coalitions in which northern members were most likely to vote with other northerners, and southern (largely Mediterranean) states were more likely to vote together on contested decisions. This north–south pattern has been variously interpreted to represent either a cleavage between free-market and interventionist states, or alternatively between net contributors to and net beneficiaries from EU spending programmes (on the pre-enlargement Council, see for example [22,28,43]).
Post-enlargement studies of the Council are numerous and growing. See for example Best and Settembri [4]; Hagemann [19]; Hagemann and De Clerck-Sachsse [20]; Mattila [29]; Naurin and Lindahl [31]; and Thomson [42]. On the impact of enlargement on the European Council (heads of state and government), see Wessels [50].
After enlargement, the character of Council of Ministers meetings has visibly changed, with a large increase in the number of members, an even more dramatic increase (from 11 to 23) in the number of languages and decreased time for discussion. 4 Yet multiple studies show that the central indicators of Council functioning—number of decisions, speed of decision-making, degree of contestation and patterns of coalition building—remain largely unchanged since 2004. With regard to the number of decisions, for example, the record of the Council, like that of the EU as a whole, shows stability in the Council's output before and after enlargement, while the speed of decision-making has again increased ([4], 43-45).
Indeed, a number of reforms of Council bureaucracy and procedure were undertaken in advance of enlargement, including changes in decision-making rules, the translation system, staffing of the Council Secretariat and working methods in the Council and its working groups; see Best and Settembri ([4], 36-43).
A key indicator of potential indigestion in the Council would be a pattern of increased contestation, with the increasing diversity of Council members (rich and poor, east and west) manifesting itself in the form of a larger percentage of ‘no’ votes or abstentions from EU legislation. With a few exceptions, however, fears of increased contestation have been unfounded, with most studies finding that the average tendency of Member States to vote against a majority has held steady or declined since enlargement, while the percentage of legislation adopted by consensus continues to hover around 90%. 5 The size of ‘contesting coalitions’ has increased somewhat in line with the increase in the overall size of the Council, but the incidence of contestation itself has held steady ([29], 31). In terms of the specific states most likely to vote against the majority, previous studies had shown that on average larger Member States and northern members were more likely to vote no, and this pattern appears to hold after enlargement. In the years following the 2004 enlargement, Mattila finds, new Member States were slightly less likely to vote against a majority than existing members, although Poland and Lithuania have come up behind Sweden and Denmark as the states that most often vote no or abstain ([29], 27-30; [19], 52).
This finding holds across multiple datasets and measures; see for example ([4], 44); ([29], 27); and ([19], 53). Hagemann's study goes beyond recording incidents of ‘no’ votes and abstentions, also recording the number of times that individual states enter dissenting statements into the minutes of Council meetings without actually voting against the legislation in question. Indeed, she argues, the relatively low numbers of contested votes after enlargement ‘may be the result of an increased reliance on oppositions voiced through formal statements recorded in Council minutes’ ([19], 53).
A final concern about decision-making in the enlarged Council has been the potential emergence of a new and divisive east–west cleavage among the Member States. Here again, however, studies show few if any signs of such a persistent, cross-issue division between new and old members. Neither, however, have the new Member States simply joined the EU's southern camp, as some had predicted. Instead, the aggregate picture of coalitions and cleavages in the Council appears to vary depending on the measures used. For example, Mattila, examining the patterns of coalitions in contested legislative votes, finds a continuing north–south cleavage pattern after enlargement, with the Baltic states in particular more likely than the poorer southern states to join the free-market northern coalition; Naurin and Lindahl, employing network analysis, find an emerging pattern of distinctive northern, southern and eastern clusters in which governments from each of the three regions are likely to consult more extensively with other governments from their own regions; and Hagemann, employing a wide-ranging dataset of legislative and non-legislative decisions, finds a less predictable and more fluid pattern of coalitions after enlargement (see [29], 33-34; [19], 54-55; [31], 74; respectively).
In fact, evidence from a forthcoming volume on EU policymaking suggests that coalitions in the Council are indeed fluid, varying significantly by issue area in the enlarged EU. Broadly stated, coalitions in the core areas of economic regulation in the internal market as well as trade policy remain broadly in line with those before 2004, with the new Member States tending to favour free-market policies over more interventionist regulations. In the areas of environmental and social regulations, by contrast, the new Member States appear reluctant to accept substantial new regulatory burdens on their economies, placing them closer to the southern members and potentially limiting the prospectus for ambitious regulation in these areas. Budgetary decisions appear to have been most divisive in the post-enlargement Council, with increasing divisions both between net contributors and net recipients of EU funds, as well as new divisions between new members and the traditional, mostly southern, recipients of EU structural funding. Finally, we can identify several core issues where geography has been a driving factor in EU policy debates, and where new Member States have pressed consistently for new priorities in areas such as energy security, relations with Russia, border-control issues and the free movement of labour (for an overview of these cases, see [34]).
The post-enlargement Council is a larger, less intimate and arguably a less deliberative body than its pre-2004 counterpart, and the addition of 10 Central and Eastern European countries has indeed led to new divisions and cleavages on specific issues. Once again, however, the overall picture is one of successful adaptation, and of a Council that has altered its formal and informal working methods to remain productive and efficient with 27 members.
The European Parliament
As with the Council, the European Parliament has been called upon to adapt to a two-fold change since 2004, in both the number of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and the diversity of MEPs coming from various political parties across 12 new Member States. By contrast with the Council, however, the growth in the number of MEPs (up 38% from 570 in 2003 to 785 in 2007, by comparison with the 80% growth in the membership of the Council) was more modest due to the small population sizes of most of the new members; while the admittedly diverse MEPs from the new members were generally channelled into long-standing transnational party groups such as the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the centre-left Party of European Socialists (PES), and smaller groups such as the Liberals, the Greens, and various left- and right-wing Eurosceptic parties ([9], 82).
In the most extensive study of legislative behaviour in the post-enlargement EU, Simon Hix and Abdel Noury have examined the voting patterns during the first half of the sixth directly elected European Parliament, from July 2004 through December 2006, to test whether the ‘size effect’ or the ‘composition effect’ of enlargement had undermined or otherwise influenced the remarkable pre-accession cohesion of the EP's transnational political groups or the dominant left–right dimension of contestation within the EP. With regard to the cohesion of the party groups, there had been some concern that the new members, coming from diverse political parties with no history of socialisation in EU institutions, might change the pattern of voting with their party groups, instead breaking party ranks and voting by nationality. In fact, Hix and Noury detect only a slightly greater tendency for voting on national lines among MEPs from the new Member States; the cohesion of the various party groups, by contrast, remains essentially unchanged, suggesting that the new members have been well integrated into these groups.
With regard to the dimensions of contestation, Hix and Noury find that party groups in the enlarged EP continue to form coalitions in predictable ways with parties closest to them on the left–right spectrum; the only major difference they find in coalition behaviour between the fifth and sixth Parliaments is the greater tendency of the centrist Liberal Party group to vote with the centre-right EPP, an effect that is likely the result of the EPP's improved electoral showing following the 2004 elections rather than of enlargement. In sum, Hix and Noury conclude, ‘despite the enlargement of the European Union with ten new member states in 2004, voting behavior in the European Parliament has changed very little’ [23]. This smooth integration of the new Member States was symbolised, following the 2009 election of the Seventh European Parliament, by the election of the Polish MEP Jerzy Buzek as the first Central or Eastern European president of the Parliament.
The European Commission and the Court of Justice
The predicted negative impacts of enlargement focused primarily on the legislative branches of the EU, but concerns were also expressed about the ability of the Commission and the Court of Justice to absorb 12 new commissioners and judges, respectively, as well as about the recruitment and integration of new ‘Eurocratic’ staff at lower levels, the dramatic increase in official languages and the increased workload on both institutions associated with incorporating 12 new Member States into the EU. Here again, however, both institutions appear to have coped smoothly with the demands of enlargement.
With respect to the Commission, assessment of the impact of enlargement is particularly difficult, since the executive has undergone extensive changes over the past decade, including administrative reforms initiated after the 1999 resignation of the Santer Commission, as well as the strengthening of the Commission president vis-à-vis the College of Commissioners by the Nice Treaty and the appointment of a new centre-right Commission led by José Manuel Barroso, all roughly coterminous with the 2004 enlargement. Despite these difficulties, Peterson and Birdsall argue persuasively that ‘enlargement has not fundamentally altered the role of the Commission, at least thus far’. The increase in the number of commissioners, they argue, appears to have accelerated the ongoing ‘presidentialisation’ of the Commission, and the new Commission appears more ‘intergovernmental’, with the members of the Barroso Commission more likely to represent the views of their individual Member States ([7,26,33,49], 8-10). Other observers note that the period since enlargement has seen more Commission decisions taken with little or no debate in the College, suggesting that increased size may have reduced the opportunity for deliberation [41]. In general, however, Peterson and Birdsall suggest that the Commission has seized on the challenge of enlargement as an opportunity for ‘reinvention’ after the difficult years of the 1990s, and in that context it is striking that the post-enlargement Barroso Commission remains only slightly less productive as a legislative actor than the pre-enlargement Prodi Commission. In sum, the European Commission is, as it has been for at least a decade, an organisation in flux, but the primary causes of the Commission's changing internal structure and external role are attributable to factors other than the recent enlargements.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ), finally, has undergone substantial changes both to its constitutive Statute and to its informal working procedures, designed in part to deal with the ever-growing volume of litigation and in part to prepare for the arrival of 12 new judges and hundreds of staff—and, eventually, litigation—from the new Member States. Both before and after enlargement, the Court has moved increasingly to sitting in chambers of three or five judges, with a plenary of 13 judges hearing the most significant cases; enlargement has accelerated this practice, leading in 2004 to the creation of an additional fourth chamber of five judges. In addition, the Court has adopted a number of other procedures to expedite handling of cases, including the now commonplace practice of omitting the preliminary opinion of the Advocate-General in cases that raise no new points of law, and the creation of an ‘urgent preliminary ruling procedure’ for pressing cases emerging from national courts. The result of these changes, as Naômé [30] demonstrates in a fine study of the post-enlargement Court, was an immediate increase in the number of cases completed and a decrease in the length of the proceedings. This trend has continued in recent years, with the Court continuing to decide historically large numbers of cases while reducing the length of proceedings of preliminary rulings to a record low of 16.8 months in 2008 ([14], 10). Nevertheless, the ECJ and the other European courts face the continuing challenge of an ever-rising volume of litigation, which reached a record-high number of 1,332 cases in 2008, including 592 cases for the ECJ alone. 6
As a result of this growing tide of litigation, the Court's backlog of cases, which had decreased slightly in the years immediately following enlargement, grew slightly in 2008 ([14], 5, 10).
In sum, EU institutions have, both individually and collectively, defied expectations about the impact of enlargement. As Helen Wallace concludes, ‘the “business as usual” picture is more convincing than the “gridlock” picture as regards practice in and output from the EU institutions since May 2004’ ([49], 4-5).
The new members: backsliding?
The two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall have been periods of far-reaching economic and political reform in Central and Eastern Europe, as those countries sought to distance themselves from their Communist past and adopt new institutions and new policies reflecting an embrace of democratic politics, free markets and the rule of law. Understanding these reforms—their timing, their substance and the motivations behind them—has been the subject of a substantial literature in recent years, which has sought to understand the role played by the EU in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the mechanisms whereby the EU has exerted its influence.
Prior to the 2004 enlargement, theories of the EU's influence on candidate countries fell into two broad camps. The first camp, writing in a ‘social constructivist’ vein, emphasised what they called the ‘constitutive’ power of EU and international norms for the elites of the newly democratising countries of Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that international social learning and the diffusion of legitimate norms would play a central role in the transition from Communist to ‘European’ politics and policies in each of these countries [6,10,18]. By contrast, the second camp, drawing from rational choice institutionalist scholarship, articulated a distinctively rationalist set of causal mechanisms, whereby explicit EU ‘membership conditionality’—the ‘conferral of rewards in exchange for compliance’ [11]—provides rational incentives for domestic actors to undertake reforms in anticipation of the credible promise of EU membership [25,39,44].
In the most extensive effort to test these competing theories, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier led a team of researchers who sought explicitly to test alternative rationalist and constructivist hypotheses about the effect of EU membership on the new Member States in Central and Eastern Europe [39]. Drawing on previous rationalist and constructivist work, they derived three distinct models of the mechanisms driving the Europeanisation of the candidate and new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The first, an ‘external incentives’ model, focused on the strong bargaining power of the EU over its applicant states and in particular on EU membership conditionality, namely the EU's insistence that candidate countries accept both political and economic conditions as a non-negotiable prerequisite to membership. Against this rationalist model, the authors put up two competing constructivist or sociological institutionalist accounts—a ‘social learning’ model predicated on a ‘logic of appropriateness’ and focusing on the socialisation of state and civil society actors in the target countries, and a ‘lesson-drawing’ model in which dissatisfied governments in Central and Eastern Europe actively seek out and import EU practices, with the EU itself playing an essentially passive role.
Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier's findings, based on a series of case studies cutting across multiple countries and multiple issue areas, provide striking support for the external incentives model. While various studies in the larger project found some instances of socialisation and/or lesson-drawing in the absence of conditionality, the authors conclude that, on balance, ‘the external incentives provided by the EU can largely account for the impact of the EU on candidate countries’. Observed variations in rule adoption, moreover, are explained in large part by the independent variables hypothesised in the external incentives model, including most notably a credible membership perspective and clear political conditionality, as well as tolerable domestic costs of compliance ([39], 210-211). Other studies of the enlargement process have employed varying theoretical frameworks and focused on different policy areas, but here too the general finding is that explicit and credible membership conditionality is the most important source of EU leverage and policy change in the new and candidate countries, with socialisation, persuasion and lesson-drawing having a much weaker and more variable impact (see for example [24,25,37,44,51]).
From a policy perspective, the findings of these studies were both encouraging and alarming. On the one hand, they suggested that insofar as the EU was prepared to make a credible promise of membership to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it could exert remarkable leverage over those countries, nudging them in the direction of democracy and free markets. On the other hand, however, these findings raised the disturbing prospect that once the candidate countries had achieved their goal of EU membership, the Union would lose much of its leverage over those countries, which might be expected to relapse, failing to comply with either the EU's economic rules or its political ideals of democracy and the rule of law. As Rachel Epstein and Ulrich Sedelmeier argue in the most extensive study of the question:
From the perspective of … an incentive-based ‘conditionality hypothesis’ … the EU's 2004 and 2007 enlargements might present a turning point for the influence of international institutions in postcommunist Europe. For if the incentive-based explanation were correct in predicting the circumstances under which non-member states comply with the demands of international institutions, we would expect their influence on postcommunist domestic politics to deteriorate after the 2004/07 enlargements. After enlargement, the main conditions that incentive-based explanations regard as critical for the EU's influence through conditionality—a credible membership incentive and non-prohibitive domestic adjustment costs—are no longer as favorable in postcommunist Europe. ([11], 796) 7
See also the excellent discussion in Levitz and Pop-Eleches [27].
Reflecting these concerns, the European Commission designed a series of post-enlargement incentives for Bulgaria and Romania, making access to EU funding conditional on further progress in judicial and anticorruption reform. This Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification has since been invoked by the Commission and has led to a reduction in EU funding for Bulgaria, reflecting that country's disappointing progress in its judicial reform and anticorruption efforts (see for example European Commission [47]). In addition, Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union allows the EU to suspend the voting rights of any Member State that poses ‘a clear risk of a serious breach’ of the basic principles of ‘liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law’. Short of such an extreme case, however, the EU lacks the strong material incentives over the new Member States that it enjoyed vis-à-vis those same countries as candidates waiting at the gates.
Once again, as with the question of enlargement's impact on EU institutions, scholars have raced to study the post-enlargement behaviour of the new members, looking for evidence of possible backsliding. And once again, the findings of these studies are surprisingly encouraging, demonstrating the resilience of both economic and political reforms in the new Member States of post-Communist Europe.
Compliance with the EU's economic rules, the so-called acquis communautaire, remains legally mandatory for EU Member States and candidate countries alike, with the Commission and the European Court of Justice serving to enforce EU law against Member State infringements. Nevertheless, despite these sanctions, a long line of earlier studies have demonstrated that compliance with EU law was highly uneven among the EU-15, with countries like Italy and Greece often cited for failing either to transpose EU rules into national law or to implement these laws ‘on the ground’. In the case of the new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe, the adjustment costs of complying with a body of EU economic and social regulations designed primarily for Western European countries could be considerable, creating the temptation to cheat once the overarching goal of membership had been achieved. Furthermore, the weakness of the administrative capacity of the new Member States, as well as civil society groups that have played a key role in EU law enforcement among the EU-15, further undermined the prospects for vigorous enforcement of EU law in the new members ([40], 809-810).
Despite these concerns, Sedelmeier argues in a recent study that the EU does not suffer from an ‘eastern problem’ of noncompliance with EU law [40]. Drawing from official EU statistics of transposition (translating the requirements of EU Directives into national law) and infringements (noncompliance cases brought by the Commission against the various Member States), Sedelmeier claims that the ‘EU-8’ Member States (the post-Communist countries that joined in 2004) exhibit a compliance record that is, on average, better than those of the EU-15. With respect to transposition, Commission data show that on average, new post-Communist members outperform old members in transposing EU directives, and the trend has been towards greater rather than less compliance over time since enlargement. Similarly, Sedelmeier shows that the Commission on average initiates fewer infringement proceedings against the new Member States than against the original EU-15, and that new members are much more expeditious in coming into compliance with Commission demands than are the old Member States, which are substantially more likely to find themselves brought before the ECJ for continued noncompliance. Indeed, with the exception of Poland, the EU-8 Member States are among the best performers in the enlarged EU. Here again, moreover, the trend is positive, with the data showing improved rather than deteriorating performance over time. Sedelmeier concedes the potential weaknesses of the official Commission data, which capture only part of the full story of Member State compliance with EU law, but argues nonetheless that the available data confound analysts' expectations of a fall-off in performance among the new members after enlargement. ‘Compliance after conditionality,’ he concludes, ‘appears surprisingly durable’ ([40], 822).
A second major study of compliance takes a very different methodological approach, but comes to broadly similar conclusions about the post-enlargement behaviour of the new Member States. In a landmark 2005 volume, Falkner, Treib and their colleagues undertook an extensive study of compliance with EU social policy rules among the EU-15 Member States [16]. Suspicious of the questionable reliability of EU infringements data used in much of the literature [21], Falkner and her colleagues instead undertook detailed ‘on-the-ground’ research on compliance with and implementation of EU law, distinguishing the legislative transposition stage from the equally important but more difficult to measure application-and-enforcement stage. Combining qualitative and quantitative research designs, the authors relied on expert surveys to assess the level and the determinants of compliance with six landmark social policy directives in each of the then 15 Member States. Their findings were surprising, rejecting many of the variables that had been hypothesised to determine state compliance. In place of a variable-driven approach, the authors identified three ‘worlds of compliance’:
a ‘world of law compliance’, in which a ‘compliance culture’ leads to both prompt and accurate transposition and effective application of EU law (Denmark, Finland and Sweden);
a ‘world of domestic politics’, in which political battles determine the fate of directives at the transposition stage, while application and enforcement is generally reliable once transposition has been achieved (Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK); and
a ‘world of transposition neglect’, in which both transposition and application are neglected by governments with a weak ‘compliance culture’ (France, Greece, Luxembourg and Portugal).
These findings in turn raised the question whether the new Member States that joined in 2004 and 2007 might differ systematically from the existing Member States in their transposition, application and enforcement of EU law. Building on their earlier work, Falkner and Treib [15] analysed the early record of implementation of three EU social policy directives in four new Member States (Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic). Their aim was twofold: to determine whether the new members constitute a fourth, new ‘world of compliance’ or fit within their existing tripartite classification scheme; and to determine whether, having been forced to accept strict conditionality in the pre-accession stage, the new members would engage in a ‘world of revenge’, deliberately reducing their efforts once the hurdle of admission had been passed.
The authors' rich and careful empirical analysis, although based on a relatively small number of cases, reveals a remarkable similarity across the four new members: at the transposition stage, they find, domestic politics clearly matters in determining the timeliness and content of national implementing legislation, yet the new Member States' performance in transposition generally compares favourably with the EU-15. In this sense, Falkner and Treib's findings echo Sedelmeier's. At the application and enforcement stages, however, the authors find a ‘world of dead letters’, in which both EU and national law is poorly enforced and applied, owing to a series of factors including a lack of individual litigation, lack of support from civil society actors and from weak equal-opportunity bodies, and administrative and judicial shortcomings. This ‘world of dead letters’ constitutes a distinctive pattern of either compliance or noncompliance, the authors argue, yet it does not represent a ‘world of revenge’, since the observed weaknesses in application and enforcement appear to affect domestic and EU law in equal measure. Furthermore, the authors point out, this ‘world’ is not limited to the new members but also applies to two of the existing Member States, Italy and Ireland.
Moving from economic to political reforms, the potential for backsliding becomes even greater, since the EU's ‘Copenhagen criteria’ for membership imposed political conditions—including for issues such as minority rights—to which full members would no longer be subject. Here again, however, students of the region are in broad agreement that the new Member States have generally not fallen into recidivism after enlargement. In the most extensive such study, Paul Levitz and Grigore Pop-Eleches collected multiple indicators of political reform—including civil and political rights, electoral contestation, administrative capacity, governmental effectiveness, political stability, judicial independence and the rule of law—for 28 post-Communist countries, including EU members and non-members alike. Looking at trends over time across all these measures, the authors conclude that ‘there is no systematic evidence of post-accession backsliding among the new CEE Member States, except for somewhat greater political instability’, although they do concede that there has been a slowdown in several areas, a pattern they refer to as ‘coasting along’ [27]. Other scholars, focusing in detail on specific aspects of post-Communist political reform, tell a similar story of broad continuity before and after enlargement, with the new Member States demonstrating continued performance in areas such as minority protection [35,36], judicial reform [35] and the moderation of political-party platforms after the 2004 enlargement [46].
The apparent durability of economic and political reforms in the new Member States poses a puzzle to social scientists, who have posited a variety of explanations for the apparent lack of backsliding in most areas and in most Central and Eastern European countries. Some of these studies suggest that the EU retains considerable post-enlargement sources of leverage vis-à-vis the new members, particularly when it comes to the continued importance of EU funding and the ability of the European Commission and Court of
Justice to enforce the economic rules of the acquis communautaire, as well as the special case of the Mechanism for Cooperation and Verification vis-à-vis Bulgaria and Romania ([11], 801-802; [40], 820). These instruments do not, however, explain the new members' continued compliance with political conditions, where the EU's leverage did largely vanish following accession. Other scholars, therefore, suggest that the post-enlargement influence in the EU has entered a new, ‘post-conditionality’ phase, in which governments in Central and Eastern Europe comply out of a sense of appropriate ‘European’ behaviour, or because these countries and their citizens are now intricately linked into transnational networks that extend from Central and Eastern and into Western Europe (see for example [40], 822; [13,27]). Understanding the mechanisms whereby the EU continues to exert an influence on the new members ‘after conditionality’ remains one of the most promising areas of EU studies today.
Moving from scholarship to policy, the generally positive findings of these studies do not constitute an excuse for complacency vis-à-vis either new or candidate members. The disappointing record of anticorruption and judicial reform efforts in Bulgaria, Romania and other new Member States suggests that costly reforms in those countries cannot be taken for granted, and that weaknesses in administrative and judicial capacity and civil society activity remain substantial challenges for the new Member States [47]. Furthermore, as Schimmelfennig has persuasively demonstrated, EU conditionality has thus far been less effective vis-à-vis the remaining candidate countries of Turkey and the Western Balkans, where compliance with EU norms poses high adjustment costs and where the promise of future membership may be too murky to motivate economic and political reforms (Schimmelfennig [38,45]).
Conclusions
Imagine a scholar of Soviet or European politics being asked in 1984 whether the Soviet Union was likely to collapse, and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to escape the Soviet bloc and join the European Union in the coming years. Based on past experience and on existing theories of comparative and international politics, such a scholar would have considered changes of this nature highly unlikely and taken a pessimistic and ‘realistic’ view of the future. In much the same way, students of the EU, on the eve of enlargement, drew on past experience and on existing theories and hypothesised that enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 Member States was likely to hamper or even paralyse EU institutions and lead to backsliding among the new members. In both instances, events have proven the most pessimistic views to be wrong: EU institutions have generally responded pragmatically and smoothly to the challenges of enlargement, and the new Member States of Central and Eastern Europe have generally stayed the course of political and economic reform after achieving their goal of membership.
Nevertheless, challenges and questions remain, both for scholars and for EU policy-makers. With respect to EU institutions, we now know with some confidence that enlargement to 25 and then 27 members has not led to paralysis of any of the major institutions. Nevertheless, the precise mechanisms, both formal and informal, whereby the various institutions have adapted to membership remain under-studied, and it may be that some of those mechanisms have involved a trade-off between efficiency and other normatively desirable characteristics of EU governance such as careful deliberation or democratic input into the decision-making process. Furthermore, existing studies have all examined the before-and-after operation of EU institutions as governed by the Nice Treaty. It remains to be seen whether and how the institutional reforms of the Lisbon Treaty will impact the operation of EU institutions, once the Treaty comes into force. Finally, granted that the experience of enlargement has been generally positive for the new Member States both before and after accession, it remains to be seen whether the same positive experience will be repeated if and when the EU expands to take in Turkey and the countries of the Western Balkans, and possibly beyond. Indeed, in order to design enlargement and post-enlargement strategies for this next wave of candidate states, we need to understand how conditionality as well as other, more social mechanisms of EU influence have maintained the path of reform in the new Member States after enlargement.