When is EU conditionality effective? The terms of Poland's accession.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the reasons behind the mixed effectiveness of the EU pre-accession conditionality applied to the Central Eastern European candidates for membership. The process of enlargement to the East, concluded in 2004 with the accession of ten new countries, involved an unprecedented scope of EU conditionality applied to the prospective members. However, as the findings of this research demonstrate, the results of the grand European project of policy transfer to its new members have been mixed. Using a one-country cross-policy framework, I try to answer some open questions arising from the empirical analysis that the literature on conditionality has not thus far answered. The study draws on Putnam's two-level game model (Putnam 1988), analyzing international negotiations in their dual, domestic and international context. In theoretical terms, the interest of the research is in the entanglement between domestic and international policy processes. The key claim is that external pressures must be matched with the specific domestic context since none of these variables alone can explain the dynamics of adaptation. The effectiveness of EU conditionality is contingent on the type of acquis communautaire and the presence or absence of opposition to the reforms. The project aims to identify which properties of this framework or their combinations facilitate adaptation and which, to the contrary, impede prompt adjustments. The findings from the case studies challenge the conventional static approach to conditionality and demonstrate how instrumentalization of the international (EU) level of the bargain at the national level may lead to endogenous changes of the latter, namely mobilization of the social interests. This effect could explain why conditionality has not been as effective as the asymmetric bargaining power and the material advantages of compliance would lead one to expect