From Nation-States to Member States: Accession Negotiations as an Instrument of Europeanization
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From Nation-States to Member States: Accession Negotiations as an Instrument of Europeanization John K. Glenn Council for European Studies, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, Mailcode 3310, New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
This paper analyzes recent accession negotiations to evaluate pressures for ‘Europeanization’ upon countries seeking to join the European Union (EU). Despite the European Commission’s policy of evaluating applications for membership on a country-by-country basis, the paper finds that accession negotiations followed an unexpectedly uniform process, whereby a similar sequence of policy areas were opened for evaluation and closed across diverse countries that had, in some cases, initiated their applications at different times. Using data from the EU’s regular reports on progress towards accession, the paper compares and analyzes patterns of negotiations with the European Commission, contrasting the sequence of openings and closings of chapters of the acquis communautaire, the duration of negotiations for each chapter, and patterns of transition periods. Second, the paper finds that applicant countries have made substantial and similar adaptations of policies and institutions to comply with the EU’s requirement that they adopt the acquis. The paper compares adaptations for the chapter on regional policy to highlight an arena in which the demands for institutional and policy adaptation are high and conditionality is especially powerful due to prospective EU funds associated with this chapter. The paper raises questions about whether changes in new member states can be considered to be deep or long-lasting and considers the future prospects for Europeanization. Comparative European Politics (2004) 2, 3–28. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110023 Keywords: enlargement; European Union; Eastern Europe; regional policy
Introduction On December 14, 2002 the European Union (EU) announced that it would expand its membership from 15 to 25 countries, welcoming eight East European countries previously under the sphere of Soviet influence, as well as Cyprus and Malta.1 The current enlargement will re-draw the political boundaries on the European continent, alter decision-making procedures within the EU, and expand the common market to new economies, many of which have only recently made the transformation from central planning. Despite its enormous relevance, the scholarly literature on enlargement has tended to emphasize the unprecedented challenges posed by the current round of negotiations and focused on policy-specific aspects of accession.2 As a result,
John K. Glenn Accession Negotiations
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enlargement has been seen largely of interest to specialists of Eastern Europe, and the potential insights from past enlargements and for current member states have been obscured. This paper reviews the literature on the ‘Europeanization’ of current member states to argue that new member states also face pressures to adopt EU policies and institutions during accession negotiations characterized by con
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