EU Democracy Promotion in the European Neighborhood: Conditionality, Economic Development, and Linkage.

[From the introduction]. Enlargement is often called the most successful foreign policy of the European Union (EU). The attractiveness of EU membership and the strict conditionality attached to the accession process have vested the EU with considerable transformative power in the applicant countries (Grabbe 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). After the breakdown of Soviet communism and hegemony in Eastern Europe, enlargement has been credited with having contributed significantly to economic recovery, peace and stability as well as democratization in the transition countries of the region. With the accession of Bulgaria and Romania in January 2007, the Fifth Enlargement of the EU has been completed. Whereas the Western Balkans and Turkey continue to have a membership perspective, the EU has devised the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) for the remaining countries of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean as an alternative to accession. It remains to be seen, however, whether ENP will be able to produce similarly positive effects as enlargement. This policy question provides the practical interest we have in this paper....In this paper, we address these potential sources of bias and uncertainty. On the one hand, we systematically include in our analysis core variables of modernization theory as well as several proxies for diffuse international and transnational influences beyond the specific incentives of the EU. Second, we extend the study to 36 countries of the “European neighborhood” and thus to almost all post-communist and Mediterranean countries from the late 1980s to the beginning of the 21st century. Finally, in order to deal with this expanded data set, we move from comparative case studies to a panel regression analysis

Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism, Chapter 10

Europe has pioneered regional integration, and studies on European integration have dominated the study of regionalism. Curiously, as much as the study of regionalism has long been Europe-centered, the study of European regionalism and the theories of European integration have centered on the European Union (EU), its organizational growth and performance. This literature is vast and discussed in entire handbooks on the EU (e.g. Jones et al. 2012; Jørgensen et al. 2006). By contrast, this chapter deliberately takes a regional perspective. It starts with a discussion of how “Europe” has been constructed as a civilizational and institutional region and how it has developed from being the core region of the global system to the divided region of the Cold War era to the post-1990 unified region. Rather than looking at regionalism as a process of uniform deepening and widening of the EU, the chapter conceives of European integration as the establishment of a region-wide system of differentiated integration, which extends to virtually all policy areas and countries but integrates them at different levels of centralization. Understanding European integration as differentiated region-building requires a refocusing of both theories and impact assessments of European integration

Europeanization beyond Europe

Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence (Ftii) är ett parjämförelsetest som mäter spädbarns intresse för ett nytt visuellt stimuli när detta presenteras tillsammans med ett stimuli redan känt för spädbarnet, kallat nyhetspreferens. Även om Ftii har visat sig fungera väl vid bedömning av spädbarns kognitiva nivå kan testet förbättras på ett antal punkter. För att uppnå reliabla resultat har försökspersonerna ofta testats vid ett flertal tillfällen. För att undersöka möjligheterna att ytterligare validera erhållna resultat från Ftii har en version av Ftii skapats för att utföras med en ögonrörelsemätare. Denna version, kallad Ftii-Ö, har testats med hjälp av en spädbarnsgrupp och en vuxengrupp för att på så sätt utvärdera för och nackdelar med ett test utfört på ögonrörelsemätare. Resultaten från studien visar att  spädbarnsgruppen uppvisar nyhetspreferens i de båda testen, och att Ftii-Ö för spädbarnsgruppen ger liknande resultat som Ftii

Claims of a ‘new intergovernmentalism’ in European integration have been overstated

Several authors have argued that European integration is becoming characterised by a form of ‘new intergovernmentalism’, with increasing numbers of decisions made through intergovernmental forms of decision-making such as those in the European Council. Frank Schimmelfennig assesses how accurate this perspective is. He argues that intergovernmental policy coordination of the kind described by these authors is a far from novel phenomenon and originated in its present form during the 1970s. As such the ‘new intergovernmentalism’ appears to be more about a specific set of policies rather than European integration as a whole

The normative origins of democracy in the European Union: toward a transformationalist theory of democratization

Institutional democratization has made considerable progress in the history of the European Union (EU). Mainstream theories of democratization, however, fail to capture this process because they are wedded to the nation-state context. This paper therefore proposes a transformationalist theory of democratization beyond the state. EU democratization results from the conflict about the redistribution of political competences between institutional actors in a multilevel system, in which liberal democracy is the shared norm of legitimate authority. To the extent that institutional actors, who push for further integration in order to increase efficiency, undermine existing democratic institutions at the national level, their competitors can put into question the legitimacy of integration by invoking the shared liberal democratic community norms and shame them into making democratic concessions. The normative origins of democracy in the EU are illustrated in case studies on democratic membership conditionality, legislative rights of the European Parliament, and the institutionalization of human rights in the E

Good Governance and Differentiated Integration

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organizational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyzes organizational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in-between grades of membership. It describes how the EU’s system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of good governance. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries

Europeanization beyond Europe

This article reviews the literature on Europeanization beyond the group of EU member, “quasi-member” and applicant states. It uses the analysis of Europeanization in the applicant states for membership as a theoretical starting point to ask if, how and under which conditions we can expect domestic effects of European integration beyond Europe. Focusing on Europeanization effects in the areas of regionalism, democracy and human rights, the article collects findings on the strategies and instruments as well as the impact and effectiveness of the EU. The general conclusion to be drawn from the theoretical as well empirical literature is one of low consistency and impact

Graded membership in the European Union: good governance and differentiated integration

The study of European integration has traditionally focused on organizational growth: the deepening and widening of the European Union (EU). By contrast, this article analyzes organizational differentiation, a process in which states refuse, or are being refused, full integration but find value in establishing in-between grades of membership. It describes how the EU’s system of graded membership has developed, and it explains the positioning of states in this system. The core countries of the EU set a standard of good governance. The closer European countries are to this standard, the closer their membership grade is to the core. Some countries fall short of this standard and are refused further integration by the core: their membership grade increases with better governance. Other countries refuse further integration because they outperform the standards of the core countries: their membership grade decreases as governance improves. These conjectures are corroborated in a panel analysis of European countries