the paradoxes of enlargement
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the paradoxes of enlargement rachel a. epstein Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, 2201 S. Gaylord St., Denver, CO 80208, USA E-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210045
Books reviewed: Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage & Integration after Communism Milada Anna Vachudova (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), 341pp., ISBN: 0 1992 4118 X Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: The Myth of Conditionality James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 231pp., ISBN: 1 4039 3987 X Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives Judith G. Kelley (Princeton, N.J. and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004), 276pp., ISBN: 0 6911 1798 5 The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe Wade Jacoby (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 287pp., ISBN: 0 5218 3359 0 The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric Frank Schimmelfennig (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 323pp., ISBN: 0 5218 2806 6
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ore than fifteen years after the revolutions of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and central Asia began, at least three paradoxes have emerged as a consequence of the post-communist transition and the enlargement of a range of international institutions, including the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Orga-
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nization (NATO). First, despite the uniformity of state socialism implied by a common logic of economic and political organisation enforced by a single hegemon, those states that formerly comprised the Soviet Bloc now manifest more economic and political diversity than any other region in the world (Bunce, 2003: 169; Kitschelt, 2003:
european political science: 4 2005 (384 – 394) & 2005 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/05 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
49). Second, despite the unprecedented profile of a range of international institutions that had throughout the Cold War successfully re-channelled national power through multilateral organisations, compliance with these international institutions’ policy prescriptions has been notoriously uneven (Stone, 2002; Epstein, 2005a; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005). Heterogeneous responses to ostensibly uniform incentives have even marked those central and east European transitions where states arguably had the strongest motives to cast their lot in with the West in order to permanently extricate themselves from the East. Third and perhaps most disappointingly for people in the East, after years of reform undertaken in many cases to satisfy the West, at least two of the EU’s founding members have signalled, in their rejection of a European Constitution, that they are now far from certain about whether the entire project of enlargement is desirable at all. The books under consideration here grapple in one way or another with the following themes in transition and enlargement and by extension with the paradoxes
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