EU Enlargement, Identity and the Analysis of European Foreign Policy: Identity Formation through Policy Practice

The eastern enlargement of the EU provides an excellent vantage point to examine the interplay of EU identity and European foreign policy. Yet most analysis of eastern enlargement either focus on enlargement as a case of EU foreign policy or on enlargement as the result of EU norms and identity. They therefore neglect that the EU's enlargement policy practice itself is a case of EU identity formation that has a causal impact on European foreign policy. This paper argues that the EU's eastern enlargement has contributed to the formation of an EU collective identity as a promoter and protector of human rights and democracy. This particular aspect of EU identity has been concretised and articulated in its policy practice towards the central European accession candidates. The thus formed identity affects European foreign policy by creating an argumentative logic that strengthens the advocates of particular foreign policy options and initiatives that can be legitimised with references to this particular identity. The broader implication of this argument for the analysis of European foreign policy is therefore that a focus on identity formation at the EU level and on the causal impact of identity provides important insights for the analysis of European foreign policy.Treaty on European Union; enlargement; identity

Compliance after conditionality: why are the European Union’s new member states so good?

The good compliance record of the European Union’s post-communist new member states presents a puzzle for dominant approaches in the literature. This paper identifies two possible explanations for how the process of pre-accession conditionality can foster compliance after accession is achieved. The first explanation is that the then candidate countries created specialized administrative capacities for the implementation of EU legislation in preparation for EU membership. These specific capacities might be able to compensate for the otherwise generally weak public administration in the new members. Second, the process of pre-accession conditionality socialized the candidate countries into perceiving a link between compliance with the EU’s rules and appropriate behavior of good community members. Positive government attitudes towards European integration may therefore lead to better compliance in these new member states, while in the old member states the perception of a link between compliance and good membership is much weaker. Since the logic of these arguments suggests a differential impact of similar factors in old and new member states, I conduct a two-step fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of compliance in both groups of member states. The results suggest that the two legacies of pre-accession conditionality continue to affect compliance in the new member states even after accession has been achieved

Protecting democracy inside the European Union? The party politics of sanctioning democratic backsliding

As the salience of ‘democratic backsliding’ in member states of the European Union (EU) increases, preferences inside EU institutions about whether to sanction governments that breach liberal democratic principles diverge. Anecdotal evidence suggests that party politics play a key role in determining attitudes towards sanctions: parties strategically protect target governments that belong to their European party family. This paper conducts a first systematic analysis of this claim. I examine a most-likely case for partisan politics – the position of political groups in the European Parliament. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Analysis of positions towards backsliding in Hungary (since 2010) and Romania (in 2012) finds that party politics do, indeed, matter, but that they cannot be reduced to ideological distance (in Left/Right terms). Preferences about sanctions are the result of conjectural causation, in which parties’ commitment to liberal democracy as well as their attitudes towards European integration also play a role. An implication of this finding is that while partisan politics can be an obstacle to the use of sanctions, specific partisan configurations are more conducive, e.g. if sanctions target governments of the Left

Is there an East-West Divide on Democracy in the European Union? Evidence from democratic backsliding and attitudes towards rule-of-law interventions

Perceptions of an East–West divide in the European Union (EU) with regard to democracy have led to re-evaluations of EU eastern enlargement as a policy failure and militate against further enlargement. This article examines the accuracy of narratives of an intra-EU East–West divide on democracy, in which the western member states outperform the eastern members, and in which the former support, and the latter oppose, rule of law (RoL) interventions by the EU in member states engaged in democratic backsliding. The article considers two aspects of a potential democracy divide: the quality of democracy and attitudes towards RoL interventions. It draws on several quantitative indicators for a more comprehensive assessment of intra-EU democracy divides and uses set-theory to identify different in- and out-groups that demarcate such intra-EU divides. Although different indicators and different conceptions of set-membership reveal to varying extents East–West patterns, none fit with a clear regional divide. It is more fruitful to conceive of these differences as a continuum, with (currently) a small group of (western)member states at one end and a small group of (eastern) members at the other, and most member states in distinctive sub-groups in-between

Anchoring democracy from above? The European Union and democratic backsliding in Hungary and Romania after accession

This article analyzes the European Union's reactions to breaches of liberal democratic practices in Hungary and Romania during 2012-13 in order to assess its capacity to lock in democracy in the Member States. The article finds that a combination of partisan politics and weak normative consensus thwarted the EU's ability to use the sanctioning mechanism of Article 7. The effectiveness of alternative instruments that EU institutions used - social pressure, infringement procedures and issue linkage - varied across issues and countries. In Hungary, changes to illiberal practices generally remained limited, but differences in the EU's material leverage explain cross-issue variation. The EU's relative success in Romania suggests that it is not necessarily powerless against democratic backsliding. It might require a demanding constellation of favourable conditions for both social and material pressure, but there are grounds for a more optimistic interpretation that material leverage might be unnecessary if the conditions for social pressure are favourable

Sanctioning democratic backsliding in the European Union: transnational salience, negative intergovernmental spillover, and policy change

In 2021, the European Union (EU) started to use material sanctions to punish democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. This policy change presents a puzzle for the existing literatures on international responses to backsliding. We theorise two distinctive processes that can account for why EU policy changed from inaction to enforcement. First, once the issue of backsliding in a member state has attained public salience across the other member states, their mainstream parties face domestic electoral incentives to support sanctions against illiberal governments abroad. Second, once backsliding governments also disrupt intergovernmental policy cooperation and threaten common policies at the EU level, even those actors who had been reluctant to defend EU values become more inclined to use sanctions. We demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation with evidence, first, of the increasing public and electoral salience of backsliding in other EU member states, and second, of the occurrence of a negative intergovernmental spillover through increasing attacks by backsliding member state governments against common policies

Kompetenzorientierte Aufgabenkultur am Beispiel der Besprechung einer Klassenarbeit im Geographieunterricht

Obwohl die Kriterien einer kompetenzorientierten Aufgabenkultur nun schon seit knapp zwei Jahrzehnten bekannt sind, scheint die Einschätzung, dass eine „Dis­krepanz zwischen theoretischer Grundlegung und schulpraktischer Wirklichkeit" (Hieber et al., 2011a S. 2) besteht, noch Gültigkeit zu besitzen. Vor diesem Hinter­grund widmet sich der Beitrag der Darstellung und Diskussion der Aufgaben einer schriftlichen Prüfung, die im ersten Teil der Unterrichtsstunde von der Lehrerein, Frau Kleih, besprochen wird .. Diese Sequenz eignet sich hierfür in besonderem Maße, da alle von Lenz (2015) angesprochenen Kriterien miteinbezogen werden können

Political safeguards against democratic backsliding in the EU: the limits of material sanctions and the scope of social pressure

When confronting democratic backsliding in its member states, the European Union (EU) cannot rely on material sanctions. There are formidable obstacles to using the one political safeguard that entails material sanctions, namely Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Moreover, the experience of the EU’s pre-accession conditionality suggests that even a credible threat of material sanctions is least effective the more severe the breaches of liberal democracy. However, EU interventions without material leverage are not necessarily doomed, as the case of Romania in 2012 shows. Under favourable conditions the EU can thus elicit governments to repeal illiberal practices by relying primarily on social pressure and persuasion. This contribution assesses to what extent novel instruments that EU institutions have developed to confront democratic backsliding meet the requirements for effective social influence. It argues that the Commission’s Rule of Law Framework has potential because it meets the criteria of formalization, publicity and impartiality. Yet, to increase the likelihood of influence, it needs to be applied more consistently and should be embedded in a process of regular monitoring through a democracy scoreboard covering all member states