The Politics of EU Accession

Lucie Tunkrova, Pavel Šaradín, Lucie Tunkrova, Pavel Šaradín

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136979262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The question of Turkish membership in the European Union is highly controversial and subject to many misperceptions and misunderstandings on both sides.

This book examines the politics of EU accession which have evolved during the expansion of the EU, from more procedural conditions to provisions of substantive democracy. With a particular focus on the challenges Turkey faces to join the EU, the authors examine the experiences of the newly-democratised and acceded Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia to provide insight and to identify the best possible solutions.

Combining the Turkish and Central European perspectives in one volume, and using a social constructivist approach, the authors address issues including Euroscepticism, EU absorption capacity, women's rights, democratisation, Turkish Kamalism, the desecuritisation of Turkish politics and the problem of Northern Cyprus. This volume establishes the challenges the EU, its member states and the candidate countries need to face and successfully address in order to contribute to both their democratization and the European integration process.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, Turkish politics and international politics.

1
Introduction

Lucie Tunkrová

In May 2004, ten new Member States (MS) entered the European Union (EU), eight of them former communist countries. Three years later, two more post-communist countries, Bulgaria and Romania, joined the bloc. On 3 October 2005, the EU launched accession negotiations with Turkey, which initiated the final stage of Turkey’s journey towards EU membership. This moment in EU-Turkey relations was seen by many as a truly historical event but it also highlighted the many issues that will have to be tackled on the way. The most salient ones directly related to Turkey include political and economic reforms, relations with Turkey’s neighbors, and the question of the relationship between Turkish and European identity including the connection between the Christian and Muslim traditions. It will be a difficult and long process, where these and many more pressing problems related to both Turkey and the EU will have to be addressed. Concurrently, the EU is learning to “live” with the 12 new MS, while they are struggling to adapt to the new conditions of membership, facing the problems of persistent division between “old” and “new” Europe, between “us” and “them.”

Europeanization can in its widest definition relate to the formation of Europe as a cultural entity, and European integration can be viewed as an alternative way of achieving shared European identity, which in modern vocabulary means “adaptation to (West) European norms and practices,” often promoted by “domestic elites with internationally oriented identities and interests” (Featherstone and Kazamias 2001:4). It simply represents one the many influences the European nation states are exposed to. It also refers to the process of “becoming European,” which pertains especially to countries, whose “Europeaness” can be or is on some grounds questioned.¹

A narrower definition of Europeanization is related only to processes associated with European integration in the framework of the EU. In this respect, we could also distinguish between Europeanization and EU-ization (Wallace, in Haughton 2007).² The actors “redefine their interests and behavior to meet the imperatives, norms and logic of EU membership” (Featherstone and Kazamias 2001:13). Put very bluntly, Europeanization is a process in which countries adopt the broad scope of both formal and informal EU rules (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). It, thus, investigates how the norms are diffused in the domestic environment.

The issue at stake is how we specify norms and values, or more precisely European norms and values. We can generally define values as the “conception of the desirable” (Kluckhohn, in Gerhards 2007:6), as justified preferences, relatively stable over time and abstract (Gerhards 2007), while norms refer to particular standards. There is no explicit definition of European norms, so we define them as the rules, principles, and decisions specified in the acquis communitaire, that is, the EU primary and secondary law as stated in the EU treaties, directives, regulations, and case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). They also involve certain unwritten and common practices that we find in, for instance, decision-making procedures. Hence, European norms and values refer to a very complex body of formal and informal rules, which play a normative role and serve as a guideline to the MS and the candidate countries (CCs). Through these rules and norms, the EU increasingly limits the abilities of the national governments to act (Ladrech 2002). The pressure for Europeanization tends to be higher in countries, whose norms and values display higher levels of incompatibility with the European norms and values.

The impact of European integration on domestic political systems, known as top-down Europeanization, examines how the EU affects its MS. The EU’s impact varies because the countries have their own issues, agendas, and interests and understand or wish to understand the rules and norms differently. How the national level influences the European one is investigated within the bottom-up Europeanization approach, which focuses on the formation of transnational structures and how national processes and structures affect that process providing new opportunities but also posing challenges to various domestic actors. The top-down and bottom-up directions of Europeanization cannot be easily separated for as European integration affects the member state, so does the member state affect the EU.

We can also understand this relationship in a different context where the topdown influence of the EU might empower certain domestic actors, who then attempt at influencing the state’s policies from the bottom-up (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). As the representatives of the groups have frequent contacts with the EU, they start to become more Europeanized, developing a stronger European identity. The national and European levels meet and through mutual dialogue transform the identities and perceptions even though this process tends to be more asymmetrical and the national and sub-national level are transformed more than the European one. In the specific cases of democratizing countries, the EU and its conditionality create an opportunity structure that the domestic actors can use to pressure the political actors towards reforms. Still, Green Cowles and Risse (2001) show that change is likely to occur if the pressures from the EU coincide with the interests of particular domestic groups. Otherwise, change is dubious.

CCs engage in the accession process, which involves the adoption of a “set of rules, norms, institutional structure, ideas and meanings, interests and identities” (Lendvai 2004:320). Once it starts, domestic and European issues become more intertwined due to the continuing impact of Europeanization. The steps towards Europeanization can be initiated either at the domestic or at the European level. Action can also be taken at both levels simultaneously that reinforces the whole process of rule adoption (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). On the domestic level then, “Europeanization is both a cause and an effect of action… The mode of reaction of the different states highlight not only the importance they attach to Europe, but also their understanding of what ‘Europe’ is” (Featherstone and Kazamias 2001:2). European questions slowly become domestic political issues. The discussion becomes more salient as the negotiations touch on the more sensitive issues of integration and it culminates in the ratification process.

With the deepening of European integration, the CCs are exposed to much higher pressure of Europeanization than in earlier times. Simultaneously, the CCs are exposed to many external and internal forces—globalization, international organizations, change in public perceptions and expectations, in social norms, values, beliefs. The perceptions on how to define citizenship, how to conduct foreign policy and neighborhood policy, how to define rights of minorities, how to understand gender equality, develop and change. It is hard to define what role the EU played in this process as we cannot isolate its influence from that of the other actors. Societies develop and change over time, it is a constant process affected by both internal and external factors.

The effect of Europeanization on the CCs is always asymmetrical (Pridham 2006; 2007; Featherstone and Kazamias 2001, Hughes, Sasse and Gordon 2004) —the CCs need to adopt EU rules and regulations to satisfy the requirements for candidacy, for opening negotiations, and, finally, for membership, while they have virtually no power over the content of these rules and regulations, that is, the topdown force is much stronger than bottom-up, mainly because the CCs do not have any say in the EU decision-making process and are only beginning to participate in the various EU structures. The EU’s power over the CCs is higher than over its MS because the former face the threat of being denied membership whereas the possible sanctions for the latter are relatively mild. The European Commission’s regular reports on the CC’s progress evaluate their advancement towards membership in purely EU terms. In the case of Eastern enlargement, their specific situation of extensive reform project gave the EU “a unique position to impose [on the CCs] its system of governance” (Diez 2000:6) both formally and informally. Lane (2007) argues that the EU had a lot of influence on the political and economic development of the East Central European Countries (ECECs), partially as a result of conditionality and the connection of the membership prospects with domestic politics.

In addition, the negotiations are intergovernmental in nature and as such convenience the national governments and bureaucracies over the parliaments, interest groups, and other political actors. They also lead to the fragmentation of domestic society (Featherstone and Kazamias 2001) since accession negotiations’ outcomes create both “winners” and “losers.” This does not need to be translated into economic terms only but should be understood as (dis)empowerment of particular sections of the society, which can be “felt in social, cultural, economic and political terms as change and continuity are juxtaposed as domestic fault lines across the domestic system” (Featherstone and Kazamias 2001:13). The empowered groups will use the EU requirements to reinforce their position in the domestic system and will try to use them to limit the power of the veto players defined as those who oppose or try to block change in the status quo and have the institutional power and will to do so. The more the pro-reform actors and the more vocal they become, the higher the chance of the requirement not only being met but also implemented for it has been internalized by at least some of the social actors. The EU does not “create” these domestic actors but can help empower them.

The various theoretical approaches to Europeanization include rational choice institutionalism and sociological institutionalism (social constructivism). Rational choice institutionalism applies a minimalist view of the role of institutions with states acting as rational actors with fixed sets of preferences, who try to maximize their self-interest, while the institutions lay down the rules of the relations (rules of the game). As regards Europeanization, it maintains that state compliance is achieved by providing positive and negative incentives, the so-called “logic of consequences.” In the accession process, rational choice institutionalism highlights the importance of the stick and carrot approach, where the EU membership is the carrot and the denial thereof, the ultimate stick. It also works with the notion of external incentives, where the outcome of the negotiations depends on the relative power of the actors defined in terms of information available to them and the ratio between the benefit coming from the agreement and the possible alternatives. It also works with the concept of adoption cost, that is, the country will have a better compliance record if the adoption costs are low and vice versa. If the government faces zero adoption costs, it is assumed that conditionality is not necessary. However, the costs are not stable and might change with, for example, a change in government.

While respecting the strengths of rationalism, that is, the ability to conduct detailed research on the individual phenomena of European integration, we believe that it basically excludes important aspects closely related to the issue of enlargement, notably the questions of “identity, community and collective identity” (Christiansen et al. 1999:533). While rationalism works with the idea that the actors can evaluate the real costs and benefits, that is, they follow the “logic of consequences,” social constructivism states that actors behave in a certain way because that is how things are done in their view, that is, follow the “logic of appropriateness,” choosing from the range of available choices the most legitimate or “appropriate” one.

Thus, while accession is governed by rational actors, the outcome is also influenced by other factors such as socialization and adoption of certain norms and rules. The EU will not be able to impose its regimes on the CCs despite its power and the asymmetry in their relations (Diez 2000) if the CCs are not willing to accept it. Therefore, the CCs will follow the stick and carrot approach of the EU but only under certain conditions and only up till a certain point. It also leads to the idea that if EU enlargement is to be successful, more attention needs to be paid to the norm adoption so that we avoid the so-called Potemkin harmonization. The extent to which the CC listens to the EU depends not only the former’s material interests but also on the extent to which it identifies with the latter (Diez 2000).

Social constructivism assumes that values, norms, and rules provide an important part of explaining political processes and events because they affect identities, behavior, and interests. Constructivists define norms as “shared, collective understandings that make behavioural claims on actors” (Checkel 1999:551). Actors try to discover the existing rules and follow them, through the “logic of appropriateness” and “rule-governed action.” Sjursen (2006:9) argues that the “logic of appropriateness” results either from habit or particular identity or from “rational assessment of morally valid arguments.” For the purposes of our work, we are not as much concerned with how European norms are created as how they interact within the accession process, how they affect the CCs, and how they become internalized and diffused.

CCs adopt EU norms because they believe in their legitimacy and because they identify with the EU. Unlike rational institutionalism, which argues that norms will be adopted as a result of offered incentives (or fear of punishment), social constructivism holds that they will be adopted because domestic actors see the EU norms as legitimate and suitable solutions for existing domestic issues (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). Social constructivists argue that the willingness to accept external norms increases if it concerns an area where such rules were absent or delegitimized, that is, there will be minimum opposition, or where the CC believes that the EU rules match with its image of “good policy” (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005).³

They are also interested in discourse analysis. Diez (1999:602, 610) argues that “speech acts have important social and political consequences” and notes that the future of European integration does not depend only on the national interests of the MS but also on the “translatability of the discourses on European governance that the relevant political actors are embedded in.” Thus, language represents an essential device for social constructivists because it “shapes our social and political realities” (Tunkrová 2008). How we name things becomes important for our understanding and communication. Social constructivists accentuate the power of negotiation, persuasion, and contestation in the EU negotiations. The regular reports on the progress of the CCs prepared by the Commission use language not only to evaluate the country in question but also to inspire further changes and reforms using “constructive criticism” to pressure the governments for more reforms but not to demotivate them. Just like in the actual negotiations, not only “what” is said but also “how” it is said is crucial. However, this is often measured not in absolute but relative terms, compared either to the previous year or over a longer period of time and it also differs from country to country (Hughes, Sasse and Gordon 2004).

What needs to be highlighted here, though, is that constructivists do not argue that discourses “cause” but that they “enable” and that they are not rigid (Diez 1999: 611). Applied to EU practice, “directives and communications from and to the European institutions speak a specific and unique language which is normally only understood by a limited circle of insiders” (Christiansen et.al. 1999:541). Hughes et al. (2004:141) argue that the CCs’ elites need to learn to “‘speak European’ but also become acculturated and assimilated into European norms and ‘ways of doing things.’” Verney (2006:40) utilizes the example of Greece in demonstrating the importance of talking about enlargement for influencing its outcome, when the original rather strong opposition to Greece belonging to Europe⁴ changed into a “moral mission” to democratize the country through EC membership. She further believes that at this point promotion of democracy became “a major new legitimating strategy for the European Community” (Verney 2006:40) and that already the second enlargement—what she calls the “Greek precedent” (Verney 2006:41) —showed that the European Economic Community (EEC) did not perceive itself as a problem-solving entity but rather a “value-based community founded on a conception of a common European identity and the rights-based post-national union” (Verney 2006:39). Ever since 1981, democracy promotion became an important argument in all subsequent enlargements, with the exception of the 1995 European Free Trade Association (EFTA) enlargement.

What language the EU and the MS choose and how the CCs understand the message involves the process of social learning. The language of individuals and the various groups together with the different approaches to constructing the environment result in different set of languages being used, a “discursive web surrounding each articulation” (Diez 1999:603). Our understanding of the meaning is subjective and exposed to the understandings of the other actors in the process defined by our and their contexts. The attitudes about cause and effec...