EU Enlargement and Socialization

Turkey and Cyprus

Stefan Engert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138969063
• eBook ISBN: 9781135168087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The European Union's enlargement has been considered a success story – apart from Cyprus and Turkey. This book looks at the EU's expansion and examines its effectiveness in terms of international socialization and compliance, focussing specifically on the socialization of Turkey and Cyprus into the Western community. Although NATO-member Turkey submitted its membership application long before the end of the Cold War, the Kemalist state still struggles to become the first Muslim EU member state. Cyprus was allowed to join the organization in 2004, but the island remains a divided entity.

Providing a comprehensive theoretical perspective, the book is divided into three parts and investigates three questions:

• Why expand? From an EU / international organizations perspective.
• Why join? From an applicants' perspective.
• Why comply? Exploring why a state would choose to adapt to the EU's fundamental norms and rules from a candidates' perspective.

Contradicting the impression that the latest round of EU enlargement has been a model story of smooth and effective socialization from top to bottom, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of the EU, European politics, international relations and particularly those interested in Turkey and Cyprus.

Part I
Why expand?

Enlargement from the perspective of international organizations

This part explains why international organizations enlarge and admit new members. Chapter 1 starts with an overview of the literature and theories on institutional widening. It addresses the existing lacunae in the current state of research and contains the conceptualization of the dependent and independent variables. Drawing on rational and sociological institutionalism, I derive testable hypotheses about the process and outcome of enlargement. The following chapters, 2 and 3, test the theoretical expectations empirically in the cases of Turkey and Cyprus. I answer the first question (and puzzle) ‘Why expand?’ and explain both countries’ rise in institutional status. However, I come to a somewhat mixed conclusion: while the EU’s commitment to its constitutive norms and to keeping its earlier promises played a critical role in fostering both countries’ progress towards membership (in particular in Turkey’s case), material factors such as Greece’s bargaining power within the EU played an equally important role in explaining Cyprus’ institutional advancement.

1
Explaining institutional widening

Theories and hypotheses

The state of the literature and value added

Before the Cold War ended, the EU had only twelve members. It enlarged to fifteen in 1995, to twenty-five in 2004, and to twenty-seven in 2007. In spite of the political importance of the process, the scientific community has not yet offered a ‘grand theory’ to explain the large-scale process of institutional expansion – the OSCE, the CoE and NATO admitted new members, too – in Europe in the 1990s (cf. Croft et al. 1999).

The scientific debate on ‘European (regional) integration’ exclusively concentrated on the ‘deepening’ of the European community instead (cf. Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch 1996); Andrew Moravcsik’s ‘liberal intergovernmentalism’ battled with ‘neo-functionalist/supranationalist’ approaches to explain the implementation of the Single European Act (1985), the Maastricht (1992) and Amsterdam (1997) treaties.¹ The ‘rest’ of the European integration literature discussed the extent of European multi-level governance and the remedies for the EU’s democratic deficit (cf. Marks et al. 1996). It was not until the late 1990s when the first theory- guided analysis of the expansion of EU and NATO was introduced (Schimmelfennig 1998a, 1998b) and not until 2002 when the first analytical framework referring to organizational widening was published (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2002).

Nonetheless, some blind spots in explaining the EU’s biggest enlargement round ever remained.

First, the majority of the political analysts focused on the CEECs, while the Mediterranean dimension of ‘eastern enlargement’ received only little attention. Due to the collapse of communism and the end of bipolar East–West rivalry, the vast majority of literature understandably concentrated on the ‘tense’ transformation process of post-communist societies. As Turkey and Cyprus were already Western states and had not encountered a total change of their political, social and economical systems, the southern applicants received comparatively little attention.

Second, the regional concentration on Eastern Europe accounted for a distinct but hardly recognized selection bias towards successful ‘model stories’ of enlargement (first of all Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic), in which severe conflicts with European norms were the exception rather than the rule. In contrast, Turkey and Cyprus pose extraordinary and quite unique challenges to the EU. No other candidate state was in a similar way ‘protected’ as was Cyprus by its principal, Greece, threatening to veto enlargement if its agent was not to proceed simultaneously with the other candidates – regardless of the island’s division. Turkey would be the first ‘Muslim state’ to join the ‘Christian EU’ (cf. Müftüler-Baç 1998: 242). Thus, the country never appeared to be regarded as a ‘natural insider’, but rather as a typical (although important) ‘outsider’ to the community. The EU’s oldest associate (1964) and oldest applicant for accession (1987) received candidate status as late as twelve years after its bid for membership (1999). In 2004, the EU executed its sixth enlargement round and admitted ten new members. All of them applied a long time after Turkey, but all of them – even the economically underdeveloped Bulgaria and Romania – have meanwhile overtaken the country with regard to institutional advancement.

Third, in the scientific literature, both countries were often treated as single cases rather than within a common framework of research.² However, the accession process of both countries is intertwined and by no means independent of each other: Turkey’s occupation of the Cypriot North is an obstacle to Turkey’s accession while the division has also been mentioned as a possible obstacle to the accession of the RoC. Moreover, the bulk of scientific articles analysing the EU’s relationship with Turkey or Cyprus are either descriptive or policy-oriented to a large extent. Although rationalist and constructivist research has been successfully tested in the cases of eastern enlargement (cf. Schimmelfennig 1998a, 2000), there is hardly any analysis that deals with Turkey and/or Cyprus within the context of EU enlargement in a systematically comparative (cross-sectional/longitudinal) or theoretically informed way.³ This chapter aims at addressing this gap in order to provide a better conceptualized understanding of the institutional effects inside the organization and in relation to the external countries that want to join. Fourth, the political-scientific debate of the Cyprus problem as well as Turkey’s place in and belonging to ‘Europe’ is sometimes handicapped by national affinity. In contrast, this study tries to provide a fair discussion of the EU’s potential reasons to enlarge and tries to performs a competitive theory test in order to analytically explain the organization’s motivation to do so.

The dependent variable: institutional status

Why and under what conditions do non-members seek membership or lower stages of horizontal integration? And why and under what conditions do international organizations expand or modify their institutional relationship with third states (cf. Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2002: 504, 506)?

Within this analysis ‘enlargement’ of international organizations is defined as a ‘process of gradual and formal horizontal institutionalization of organizational rules and norms’ (Schimmelfennig et al. 2003: 496). Horizontal enlargement or widening of integration differs from vertical institutionalization. While ‘deepening’ is understood as the spread of more institutions among existing members, ‘widening’ is the spread of existing institutions among more members, that is to say that the group of organizational actors becomes larger. Moreover, the process of inclusion is gradual, i.e. it entails various steps of ‘coming closer’ towards membership (the final stage of integration) and it is formally defined, i.e. each step of accession depends on fulfilling the next set of conditions. However, one should not assume that international organizations are per se interested in gathering additional members as more members could also increase the ideological heterogeneity within the organization or reduce the overall benefit from sharing a club-good. It is therefore necessary to analyse what factors, i.e. interest/efficiency or norms/identity, determine inclusion and exclusion to an organization. Moreover, enlargement only takes place if both sides, the international organization and its member states (the supply side), as well as the third state (the demand side) are interested in doing so. In order to avoid an incomplete account of enlargement, it is necessary to investigate and to explain also the applicants’ motivation and desire to join (see Chapters 4 to 6).

The dependent variable in this chapter therefore is institutional status, which I shall define as the specific degree of horizontal integration between a third state and the organization. Although ‘accession’ is the central institutional status in this study, the dependent variable ‘membership’ would have been a too narrow measurement as it neglects the institutional effects, which take place before membership and is representative solely of the final stage of the integration process. ‘Institutional status’ permits a better fine-tuning of the dependent variable. It is a dynamic measurement that is compatible with relative performances, i.e the observation of individual steps of institutional rise (or fall). The selection will enable me to to explain the process of enlargement and to measure the applicants’ individual grade of institutionalization with the community in order to determine whether a country’s status corresponds with each theory’s individual assumptions about the conditions of institutional advancement. With regard to EU enlargement, I shall distinguish between six values (integration levels) of the dependent variable: no relations, trade and cooperation agreement (level 1), association agreement (level 2), candidacy (level 3), accession negotiations (level 4) and membership (level 5).

As the selected countries have already reached the second level of institutional status (association) at the beginning of the period of investigation (from 1987/1990)

Table 1.1 Enlargement: levels of institutional status

Figure 1.1 Decision scheme: enlargement

– Turkey’s association agreement dates back to 1964, Cyprus’ to 1972 – the first two levels of integration are of no empirical concern.

The independent variables: power, welfare and norms

The following section provides the theoretical background of the analysis by combining the basic assumptions of rationalist and social-constructivist meta-theories with theories of institutions (Risse and Wiener 1999: 776–8). For this purpose, I introduce ontologically different ideal type actor models. Of course, I do not claim that, in reality, the EU does exclusively follow either the one logic or the other. But even if one assumes the EU to hold a multifaceted identity, one has to assess which part of its identity dominates its enlargement policies and under what conditions.

I start with introducing rationalist variables; the neo-realist ‘power’ approach and the neoliberalist ‘welfare’ variant, before moving to the social-constructivist variable ‘legitimacy’.

Rationalist institutionalism: enlargement – a matter of efficiency

Rationalist explanations of enlargement are based on an individualist ontology: the wholes are reducible to the interacting parts. Agencies (individual actors), not social structures, are central for action. Rationalism a priori presumes that all agents are self-interested and goal-oriented actors; i.e. the so-called homo oeconomicus or ‘calculating machine’, who is driven by instrumental rationality, pursues the maximization of it own material interest and follows a calculus logic of action, i.e. the logic of consequences (cf. Hopf 1998: 173): Each actor

Table 1.2 Enlargement: independent variables

egoistically calculates the costs and benefits of the available courses of action in advance. Within a means-end type of rationality, the courses are ranked in a fixed order of preferences. The option that maximizes the benefits and minimizes the costs is the one ranking highest; i.e. the optimal course to attain the fixed goal. The actors’ preferences, interests and identity are not assumed to change as long as the material conditions of the surrounding environment remain stable. As rationalist explanations are also based on a materialist ontology, the international system is considered a mere technical environment. Each actor’s individual preference can be exogenously determined by analysing the material structures, i.e. the share of the distribution of power and wealth given in his environment. Of all actors, rationalist theories regard the corporate unitary state as the key unit of analysis.

Moreover, rationalists are ‘thin’ institutionalists: the role of international institutions – be it norms or organizations – is believed to be limited, i.e. mere epiphenomena of the underlying material power structures. Thus, it is the given (material) interests that determine the preferences and behaviour of the agents and create institutions to attain their preferences more easily. International organizations are not assumed to take independent roles but function as the willing instruments of their member states. They are not considered to constitute the actors’ identity; any decision about membership or institutional status therefore depends solely on the egotistical (material) preferences of the organization’s member states rather than on the organization’s ‘management desk’.

Rationalism treats international organizations as ‘clubs’. The central rationalist approach to the issues of conditions of membership, optimal organizational size, and calculating the cost and benefits of enlargement, is ‘club theory’ (Bernauer 1995: 81, cf. Schimmelfennig 2003: 21). International organizations are instrumental associations designed to help states to pursue their interests more efficiently. They maximize their members’ utilities (power or welfare) by reducing the transaction costs of cooperation. If international organizations do not provide a benefit or net gain, i.e. extend governance and control to third states (power) or contribute to the state’s international profit-making (welfare), they are neither joined nor created in the first place. A club is a voluntary group of states sharing the costs of consuming a common good (Bernauer 1995: 91). If the good provided is a pure public good, which means that it is indivisible, non-excludable and non-rival, expanding membership is not costly and therefore unproblematic (Schimmelfennig 2003: 21). However, in most cases, international organizations provide impure goods, that is to say that any new member is an additional rival consumer, which reduces the present members’ benefit of sharing the good (Bernauer 1995: 89). As long as the costs of using the good less often are not fully matched by the new member’s contribution to the club (the membership fee), enlargement is unlikely because an expansion would render individual consumption more expensive for the current members (crowding effect). As every new member ‘disturbs’ the established and rather complex cost–benefit equilibrium, new members will only be admitted if their accession is of benefit. The institutional status hence depends on the extent to which a third state is beneficial to the organization and to each member state.

As all actors are considered strategic and self-interested utility maximizers, they aim at maximizing their benefits and minimizing their costs. The intra-organizational decision-making process will turn out as a two-level bargaining process (Putnam 1988). On the external side, the bargaining process between the organization (EU) and the third state is asymmetrical due to the fact that the third state faces the accumulated bargaining power of the organization’s member states. Another bargaining process will, however, occur internally, i.e. among the organization’s member states. Here, the more powerful member states will threaten the less powerful actors with their preferences (enlargement/ non-enlargement) or – in the event of equal voting rights – a group of member states will try to form a majority coalition to achieve their preferences. In the event of unanimous decision making – as is the case in the EU – enlargement cannot take place without each member st...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Why expand?
• Part II Why join?
• Part III Why comply?
• Notes
• References
• Index