Suchergebnisse

This article asks under which conditions the state-building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites 'from below.'. Adapted from the source document.

The European Union has developed a one-size-fits-all approach to promote good governance reforms in African countries, focusing on strengthening the effectiveness of state institutions while increasingly asking for reforms that also target their democratic quality. Assessing the EU's policies in Angola and Ethiopia reveals, however, that the implementation of this approach is more differential. While the EU has a hard time making the two governments address governance issues, it has been more successful in implementing its policy approach in Ethiopia than in Angola. These differences are largely explained by these countries' different degrees of interdependency with the EU rather than differences in stability and democracy. Unlike Angola, Ethiopia heavily relies on EU development aid, giving the EU greater leverage to push for governance reforms. While conditionality is more effective in making African governments address governance issues, it undermines the legitimacy of the EU's development cooperation, which emphasizes partnership and ownership. Adapted from the source document.

In order to stabilise the post-Soviet region, the European Union seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States. In light of high adaptation costs, the lack of a membership perspective, and low levels of democracy, the prospects of Europeanisation appear to be limited. The Southern Caucasus belongs to the most corrupt countries in the world. While being least likely cases, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have responded to the EU's demands for good governance introducing formal institutional changes. Moreover, despite their differences in statehood, democracy, and power (a)symmetries with the EU, domestic institutional changes look very similar. This double puzzle is explained by differential empowerment. Instead of liberal reform coalitions, which are largely absent in the Southern Caucasus, the incumbent regimes have instrumentalised the EU, selectively implementing anti-corruption policies to gain and consolidate political power. As a result, the EU stabilises rather than transforms its neighbourhood. Adapted from the source document.

The articles in this special issue find ample evidence for the EU's influence on domestic and regional institutions. Its impact is patchy, often shallow but certainly not spurious. This conclusion demonstrates that it is worthwhile to integrate the Europeanisation literature and its theoretical arguments into the larger literature on diffusion. But it also shows limits of the diffusion approaches in the social sciences which tend to privilege structure over agency and, as a result, tend to focus on institutional convergence and isomorphism rather than variation in institutional outcomes. Some general impact of the EU on domestic institutional change in its neighbourhood and beyond is found, as well as some diffusion of EU institutional models of regional integration worldwide. The approach is decidedly agency-centred in focusing on diffusion mechanism and on scope conditions. Adapted from the source document.

This special issue explores to what extent policies and institutions of the European Union spread across different contexts. Are the EU's attempts to transfer its policies and institutions to accession and neighbourhood countries sustainable and effective? To what degree do other regions of the world emulate the EU's institutional features; what are the mechanisms of, and scope conditions for, their diffusion? This introduction provides the conceptual framework of the special issue. First, it specifies EU-related institutional change as the "dependent variable". Second, it discusses how Europeanisation research and diffusion studies relate to each other and can be fruitfully combined to identify processes and mechanisms by which ideas and institutions of the EU spread. Third, we introduce scope conditions which are likely to affect domestic (or regional) change in response to the promotion or emulation of EU ideas and institutions. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis symposium critically engages with the volume Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (2010), edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. "Experimentalist Governance" (EG) opens up an original theoretical perspective on the emergent governance architecture of the EU and sheds new light on developments in key policy sectors. This symposium brings together a transatlantic group of distinguished political scientists and legal scholars to discuss the added value of EG as a concept for analysis, its theoretical underpinnings, empirical relevance, and normative implications, in terms of legitimacy. Contributors discuss EG from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, referring to a variety of empirical examples in the EU context and beyond. The symposium closes with a response from the authors to their critics. This collection of essays sheds new light on debates around the nature of the EU and democratic governance beyond the nation state.

How has Europeanisation of environmental policy, as represented by the adoption of European Union (EU) biodiversity policies, influenced the agendas and repertoires of action employed by environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) in Hungary, Poland and Romania? The EU's environmental acquis gave ENGOs new and often forceful tools to reach their aims by emphasising the importance of collaborative relations between state and non-state actors and by offering opportunities to civil society actors to circumvent their national governments in the policy process. Implementation of the EU's Natura 2000 network in Hungary, Poland and Romania further reinforced endogenously driven professionalisation and institutionalisation of civil society groups. While EU accession benefited from the expertise of professional ENGOs, the logic of the accession process together with the weakness of both state actors and civil society has not led to the development of sustainable cooperative state-society relations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Adapted from the source document.

Accession appears to be both a blessing and a curse to transition countries. On the one hand, EU membership supports their transformation from authoritarian regimes with centralized planning economies into liberal democracies with market economies. On the other hand, the accession countries face great difficulties in restructuring their economic and political institutions in order to meet the conditions for EU membership. The systematic involvement of non-state actors in the adoption of and adaptation to EU requirements was thought to be a remedy for the problems of European Enlargement towards 'weak' transition countries. Companies and civil society organizations could provide the governments of the accession countries with important resources (money, information, expertise and support) that are necessary to make EU policies work. The article explores the role of non-state actors in governing the double challenge of transition and accession. Focusing on the field of environmental policy, we seek to find out to what extent accession has empowered non-state actors by giving them a voice in the adoption of and adaptation to the EU's green acquis. Our study on the implementation of EU environmental policies in Poland, Hungary and Romania shows that accession left little room for the involvement of non-state actors into the policy process. The article argues that both state and non-state actors in transition countries were often too weak to make cooperation work during the accession period. The double weakness of transition countries and a political culture hostile to public involvement seriously constrained the empowering of non-state actors by 'Europeanization through accession'. Adapted from the source document.

In her book 'Democracy in Europe'. Vivien Schmidt argues that the core of the EU's democratic deficit resides in the national politics of the member states, and is more disruptive for simple as opposed to compound politics as a result of institutional fit with the EU polity. This article argues, however, that the level of diffusion of power in a state is not necessarily a good indicator for the loss of democratic quality induced by the EU. Focussing on the disempowerment of national parliaments as the core democratic institutions, we find that Europeanization has caused much more variance within the group of simple and compound politics than between them. The EU-induced loss of legislative power vis-a-vis the executive can be better explained by the nature of the relationship between executive and legislature, which cuts across the distinction between compound vs simple politics. By requiring a close cooperation between the two branches of government, the parliamentary attempt to redress the balance of power by invoking new scrutiny rights vis-a-vis the executive might also result in a new caveat for national democracy: the fusion rather than the separation of powers. Adapted from the source document.

The failure of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in bringing about democratic change in the European Union (EU)'s neighbourhood starts with the EU's limited effectiveness in shaping outcomes of international negotiations according to the ambitious objectives it pursues. This paper argues that this is not primarily a problem of a lack of actorness, however. The EU does have one message and speaks with a single voice but pursues conflicting goals. Rather than the lack of internal cohesiveness, it is the ENP's substantive inconsistency in seeking to promote effective and democratic governance that undermines the EU's external effectiveness. While the ENP conceives of the two objectives as complementary, the democratization of (semi-)authoritarian countries entails the risk of their destabilization at least in the short run. As a result, promoting effective and democratic governance become conflicting objectives. The lower the level of political liberalization and the higher the instability of a country, the more ineffective the EU is in asserting a democratic reform agenda in the ENP Action Plans, clearly favouring stability over change. Adapted from the source document.

While there is broad scholarly agreement that policy-making in the European Union (EU) involves a multitude of public and private actors at different levels of government, there is less agreement whether the EU should be conceptualized as a form of governance by networks or governance in networks. This article first examines different concepts of networks. It then sets out multiple functions of networks within the EU policy process. Particular attention is paid to the extent to which networks may provide added value to European integration and improve the quality of governance by effectively solving common problems and helping to address the democratic deficit or whether, by acting as mechanisms of exclusion rather than inclusion, they actually contribute to the EU's legitimacy deficit. Since networks can enhance governance quality as well as undermine its democratic credentials, a balance sheet shows both positive and negative consequences. Adapted from the source document.

In the current debate on the future European order, the European Union (EU) is often described as an "emerging federation." This article claims that federalism is not exclusively useful in deliberating about the future of the EU. Non-statecentric conceptions of federalism provide a better understanding of the current structure & functioning of the European system of multilevel governance than most theories of European integration & international relations do. We combine political & economic perspectives of federalism to analyze the "balancing act" between effective political representation & efficient policy making in the EU. Drawing on the examples of Germany & Switzerland in particular, we argue that the increasing delegation of powers to the central EU level needs to be paralleled by strengthened patterns of fiscal federalism & an empowered representation of functional interests at the European level. Without such "rebalancing," the current legitimacy problems of the EU are likely to intensify. 93 References. Adapted from the source document.