Monitoring the monitors: EU enlargement conditionality and minority protection in the CEECs

In: Journal on ethnopolitics and minority issues in Europe, Band 4, Heft 1: EU enlargement and minority rights, S. 1-37

Abstract

The issue of minority protection is an extreme case for analyzing the problem of linkage between European Union (EU) membership conditionality and compliance by candidate countries. While EU law is virtually non-existent, EU practice is divergent, and international standards are ambiguous, the issue has been given high rhetorical prominence by the EU during enlargement. The analysis in this article follows a process tracking approach to study the relationship of EU conditionality to changes in minority rights protection in the Central and Eastern European candidate countries (CEECs). The authors examine how the EU's monitoring process has operated, what its benchmarks have been, how the EU process has interacted with those of other international organizations, such as the Council of Europe and OSCE, and evaluate what its impact has been on the candidate countries. In conclusion, the authors find that EU conditionality is not closely temporally correlated with the emergence of new strategies and laws on minority protection in the CEECs. Instead, the EU's main instrument for accession and convergence, the Regular Reports, have been characterized by ad hocism, inconsistency, and a stress on formal measures rather than substantive evaluation of implementation. (ECMI)