The EU and Russia in Their 'Contested Neighbourhood'

Multiple External Influences, Policy Transfer and Domestic Change

Laure Delcour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367173692
• eBook ISBN: 9781317288817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The literature on the European Union influence's in its Eastern neighbourhood has tended to focus on EU-level policies and prioritize EU-related variables. This book seeks to overcome this EU-centric approach by connecting EU policy transfer to the domestic and regional environment in which it unfolds. It looks at the way in which the EU seeks to influence domestic change in the post-Soviet countries participating in the European Neighbourhood Policy/Eastern Partnership and domestic receptivity to EU policies and templates. It seeks to disentangle the various dynamics behind domestic change (or lack thereof) in Eastern Partnership countries, including EU policy mechanisms, domestic elites' preferences and strategies, regional interdependences and Russia's policies. Based upon extensive empirical investigation on EU policies in four countries; Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – and in two pivotal policy sectors - the book provides systematic and nuanced understanding of complex forces at work in the policy transfer process.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, European studies, democratization studies, and East European Politics and area studies, particularly post-Soviet/Eurasian studies.

1
Introduction

Multiple external influences, EU policy transfer and domestic change in the post-Soviet space

Can the EU be effective in promoting domestic change beyond its borders and if so, under what conditions?

These questions have gained salience since the Union has stepped up its role in the post-Soviet space. With the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) created in 2004, and even more so with the Eastern Partnership (EaP) launched in 2009, the EU offers unprecedented guidance for reform combined with monitoring and benchmarking. The EU seeks to support political and economic reforms by ‘facilitating approximation and convergence towards the European Union’ (Council of the European Union 2009) and diffusing its standards and rules to post-Soviet countries included in the ENP/EaP.¹ Both the ENP and the EaP are premised on the view that the adoption of EU norms and rules will ultimately bring stability and prosperity to the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood, as was the case in post-war Western Europe and in post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe.

However, domestically, EU-demanded reforms touch upon the heart of post-Soviet systems, in which rent-seeking elites are closely connected to business interests. These reforms also entail massive costs in view of post-Soviet countries’ lower level of socio-economic development and weak institutional capacities. Regionally, EU-driven change unfolds in a context characterised by Russia’s attempts to regain influence over the post-Soviet space, among others through regional integration with the launch of the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) in 2010 and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015. In Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, Russia’s actions have undermined ENP countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity (as most vividly illustrated in Ukraine) and thereby added to the daunting challenge of reforms.

The overarching aim of this book is to disentangle the various dynamics behind domestic change (or lack thereof) in Eastern Partnership countries. To that purpose, this research explores how domestic preferences, EU incentives and policy mechanisms, and Russia’s policies shape reforms in line with EU demands. The book traces the process of change (or lack thereof) in two sectors (reforms of the food safety system as part of deep trade integration and migration-related reforms as part of the visa liberalisation process) and develops a comparative analysis between four countries (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine). It looks at the domestic actors who are engaged in sectoral change and scrutinises their strategies and interactions. It examines the instruments used by the EU to diffuse its rules and policies to Eastern Partnership countries and the leverage employed by Russia to maintain its influence over these countries. Finally, it analyses the outcomes that the above factors and actors exert on domestic change in selected countries. In light of the deployment of two deep economic integration projects (the Deep and Comprehensive Free-Trade Areas [DCFTAs] and the ECU), it seeks in particular to explain the linkages (if any) between this macro-level framework of integration and domestic change at a sectoral level.

The book seeks to contribute to the literature on domestic change in response to EU policies in the post-Soviet space (called ‘Neighbourhood Europeanisation’ by Franke et al. 2010). In response to the gaps noted in this literature, it draws upon two other scholarly strands: policy transfer studies and the literature on post-Soviet transformations.

‘Neighbourhood Europeanisation’: analysing the neighbourhood through EU lenses

This section provides an overview of how the literature has addressed the issue of EU rule transfer beyond its borders and highlights the analytical and conceptual gaps that still need to be addressed.

Enlargement and neighbourhood policies: the limits of comparison

The initial literature on the ENP has overwhelmingly viewed the EU’s policies in its neighbourhood through the prism of the enlargement policy. This is because the neighbourhood policy’s discourse, principles and instruments were, to a great extent, inspired by the enlargement toolbox (Tulmets 2005; Kelley 2006), as claimed by EU institutions themselves (European Commission 2004: 6). Considerable scholarly attention has been directed to whether the enlargement toolbox can work under a policy lacking similar incentives (Lavenex 2004; Kelley 2006).

While informed by similarities between the two policies, the enlargement prism has limited heuristic value. It overlooks the differences between the enlargement and neighbourhood policies: the latter was designed as a ‘full-fledged external policy’ (Beichelt 2007: 21), integrating different instruments and modes of action via ‘soft frameworks’ (Hillion & Cremona 2006: 2). Importantly, the enlargement prism leads to two major analytical flaws in analysing the EU’s influence in the neighbourhood.

First, the ENP is an important shift in EU/post-Soviet relations, yet it is not by any means a tabula rasa. While inspired by the enlargement policy, the neighbourhood policy did not start from scratch in the post-Soviet space (Delcour 2007). It built upon a decade-long record of relations that developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, with a few exceptions (see e.g. Wolczuk 2009; Langbein 2014), the pre-ENP history of EU/post-Soviet relations has been overlooked by scholars studying EU policy transfer under the ENP. This is despite the fact that, like many EU policies, the ENP has not developed by substitution but rather by aggregation. At least initially, it has not replaced the existing policy framework and instruments, but rather proceeded by pursuing this framework and adding yet another layer of tools.

Second, and most importantly, the enlargement prism is analytically misleading insofar as, by focusing on differences in the incentives offered by the EU, it implicitly assumes a similarity between the reception contexts, i.e. between Central European countries and post-Soviet countries. However, in terms of socio-economic development, political regimes, governance and statehood, these deeply differ from other countries applying EU acquis to a similar extent, i.e. EU member states, members of the European Economic Area and candidate countries. In contrast to Central European countries that acceded to the EU in 2004–07, South Caucasus countries, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and, beyond them, Russia and Central Asian republics, were not sovereign countries prior to the 1990s. All of them have a common Soviet past. While these countries cannot be defined solely by their former Soviet identity, they share legacies that still crucially affect their political, economic and institutional system, public policies and diplomacy. This also entails that these countries have to some extent shared similar challenges in their economic and political transformations, despite their (increasingly) divergent reform trajectories. Another core difference with Central European countries is, thus, the nature and scope of transformations undertaken in the 1990s. Yet the political, economic and societal specificities of post-Soviet countries have hardly been explored in the initial research conducted on the ENP.²

‘EU external governance’: the EU at the core of the analysis

The external governance approach that has developed as one of the major analytical perspectives on the ENP has exacerbated the focus on the EU side of the policy. This approach seeks to grasp the way in which the EU expands its rules abroad. In this perspective, the neighbourhood policy is primarily viewed as the ‘external projection of internal solutions’ (Lavenex 2004). Theories of external governance further assume that the degree of legalisation of EU internal rules and the scope of institutionalisation in trans-governmental co-operation determine the effectiveness of EU governance abroad. They posit that the adoption of EU templates is more likely in those policy areas where EU internal rules are strongly codified and legalised and where sector-specific policy co-operation is highly institutionalised (Freyburg et al. 2011). Yet, while pointing to the possible limits of the EU’s external governance in the neighbourhood, this approach suggests that these limitations derive primarily from the EU itself (codification) or from relations with the EU (institutionalisation). In sum, the external governance literature concentrates on the ‘push’ factor and glosses over the ‘pull’ variables, especially domestic factors that may lead ENP countries to adopt (or not) EU-demanded reforms.

This focus is entwined with a second flaw, i.e. the strict disconnection between EU, domestic and regional processes. Lavenex and Schimmelfennig (2009) contrast the institutionalist explanation (which they find the most germane to explain the effectiveness of EU governance in the neighbourhood) with two other sets of accounts. The first of these explanations, the domestic structure explanation, refers to the compatibility of EU rules with domestic institutions and practices. Following this account, ‘the effectiveness of external governance increases (a) with the resonance of EU rules; (b) with the EU compatibility of domestic institutions; (c) as the number of adversely affected veto players decreases’ (Lavenex & Schimmelfennig 2009: 805). This is nonetheless open to criticism both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, this account refers to EU rules and institutions as the key benchmark against which domestic structures are analysed. Therefore, partner countries are conceived merely in light of EU demands as rule-takers or possibly rule-objectors. Yet ENP countries do contribute to shaping the neighbourhood policy’s outcomes. Reception is not to be under-stood as a passive absorption process but as an interactive and iterative process that involves both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, as ENP countries’ responses are shaped by the interaction between EU stimuli and domestic preferences. Empirically, this account seems to exclude the possibility of EU-driven policy transfer in post-Soviet countries, given the weak resonance of EU rules in some Eastern Partnership countries (Delcour 2013), the initial deep incompatibility with EU institutions (Börzel 2010) and the existence of a number of veto players (Langbein & Wolczuk 2012). However, evidence suggests that transformations have actually taken place, even if selectively (Ademmer & Börzel 2013; Buzogány 2013; Langbein 2013; Langbein & Börzel 2013; Delcour & Wolczuk 2015a).

The second explanation outlined by Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, the power-based account, focuses on the existence of other players in the region (e.g. other international organisations, Russia and the United States) and their interdepen-dences with ENP countries. An effective transfer of EU norms implies that EU rule-takers are more strongly dependent on the EU than on any other player (Lavenex & Schimmelfennig 2009: 803). Russia, for instance, seems to strongly constrain the adoption of EU rules and standards in Ukraine in those policy areas where interdependence is high (Dimitrova & Dragneva 2009). However, scholars have also found that Russia does not necessarily hamper the adoption of EU rules. In conjunction with partner countries’ interests, they sometimes act as facilitators in this process (Langbein 2013). Furthermore, scholars have recently challenged the explanatory weight of interdependence analysed in isolation. After studying energy in Armenia and Georgia, Ademmer demonstrates that EU policies at times still travel to Russia-dependent countries (Ademmer 2015). Recent research also confirms that Armenia (Russia’s strategic ally in the Caucasus) has extensively reformed in line with EU standards between 2010 and 2013 (Delcour & Wolczuk 2015a). Thus, partner countries cannot be considered a mere scene of interaction between external players. They play an active role either in assessing their level of interdependence with external actors or in accommodating and incorporating their norms and policy regimes. External influences are therefore mediated by internal interests, norms and practices, as well as political structures that play a crucial role in the compliance process. This further entails that domestic and regional processes cannot be neatly contrasted with EU variables. Rather, EU norms and standards (as well as Russia’s policies) are expected to be filtered through domestic preferences.

Bringing the domestic actors back in: recent research on ‘Neighbourhood Europeanisation’

In recent years, the literature has tried to overcome problems of ‘top-down’ approaches ‘that tend to over-emphasise the role of the EU and legal compliance for (institutional) change’ (Börzel & Risse 2012a: 5). Börzel and Risse’s research design is better suited to the analysis of domestic structures, as they select domestic change as the dependent variable of the research instead of focusing on the effectiveness of EU policies. This enables them to look at the diffusion of EU policy templates from the output side, i.e. as a set of public policies implemented by partner countries. They are then able to move away from EU policies by identifying the conditions under which the adoption of EU policies leads to domestic change (thus implying that the adoption of EU policies, in specific contexts, may not yield any change). Recent literature, then, has exposed the baffling discrepancies in EU-demanded domestic change across countries and sectors and identified a plethora of factors that shape the adoption of EU-demanded reforms.

These publications confirm the role of EU-level factors that had been identified in the literature on enlargement policy, i.e. the size and credibility of rewards offered by the EU, policy conditionality and capacity-building measures through assistance projects. However, they connect these variables to the domestic context of implementation and thus broaden existing analytical perspectives by bringing into focus domestic preferences and constraints on reform. These have been identified as primary conditions for the effectiveness of EU policy transfer in the last waves of publications on the ENP. For instance, scholars have found that EU policy conditionality facilitates compliance, yet it only does so if and when the domestic agenda and EU demands fit (Ademmer & Börzel 2013). Likewise, when governments are receptive to the EU’s offer, EU assistance has an enabling impact by building capacities and expertise and increasing exposure to, and understanding of, EU templates (Delcour & Wolczuk 2015a). However, empirically most publications stick to the initial ENP period (i.e. 2004–09) and do not cover the policy mechanisms developed by the EU under the Eastern Partnership. Admittedly, since 2009 the EU has significantly strengthened the size of rewards as well as the use of sector-specific conditionality and capacity-building measures. This may bring important nuances to some scholarly findings. For instance, the lack of any reward tied to compliance under the ENP has been identified as a disincentive for domestic actors to adopt EU food safety templates (Langbein 2013). Yet, in contrast to the vague incentives offered as part of the neighbourhood policy, with the DCFTAs the EU now offers a clear and tangible incentive in the form of market access. In a similar vein, scholars who studied EU assistance prior to the Eastern Partnership have found no evidence of a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and boxes
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: multiple external influences, EU policy transfer and domestic change in the post-Soviet space
• 2 Research framework
• 3 EU policies in the post-Soviet space: EU rules at the core of an open-ended integration process
• 4 Russia’s (counter-)actions in the post-Soviet space: power without influence?
• 5 Between Brussels and Moscow: the manifold domestic responses to the EU’s offer
• 6 The EU’s policy transfer to the post-Soviet space in a context of rival trade integration frameworks: the case of food safety
• 7 The EU’s policy transfer to the post-Soviet space in a context of multiple influences: the case of migration
• 8 Conclusions: beyond the frontstage: reassessing the impact of external influences on domestic change in the post-Soviet space
• Index