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When Europe hits … beyond its borders: Europeanization and the near abroad

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

With the borders of the European Union (EU) moved eastwards, students of Europeanization have been awarded yet another real-world experiment. This article explores to what extent existing Europeanization approaches travel beyond the EU's border to its South Eastern and Eastern neighbours, which are marked by ‘bad governance’ with regard to both the effectiveness and democratic legitimacy of their domestic institutions. The first part outlines key insights of the literature on ‘Europeanization West’ regarding the outcomes and the mechanism of the domestic impact of the EU. Then, I summarize the main findings of research on ‘Europeanization East’ focusing on factors that have limited or at least qualified the domestic impact of the EU in the 10 Central and Eastern European countries in comparison to the EU 15. This article discusses to what extent the concepts and causal mechanisms need even further qualification when applied to countries, such as the European Neighbourhood Countries, that are neither willing nor necessarily capable of adapting to Europe and that do not even have the incentive of EU membership to cope with the costs. I will argue that the EU is unlikely to deploy any transformative power in its neighbourhood as long as it does not adjust its ‘accession tool box’ to countries the EU does not want to take on as members. The article concludes with some considerations on the policy implications of the EU's approach of ‘move closer but don’t touch’, which has started to creep into its relations with the Western Balkans and Turkey.

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Notes

  1. Freedom House is a rather rough measure for the democratic quality of a regime. Polity IV provides a more differentiated methodology. Yet, Polity IV has more missing values for the Western Balkans in 1998. Data for 2009 is not yet available. For the purpose of this article, the FH Index should be sufficient. Scores range from 1.0 (free) to 7.0 (not free). Data were obtained from www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=439, accessed 25 October 2010.

  2. Measuring state capacity is rather difficult. This paper uses the Regulatory Quality Index of the World Bank, which appears to capture what comes closest to the capacity of states to adopt and adapt to EU requirements for introducing domestic reforms. Country scores are listed as percentile ranks of countries with a worse governance performance than the relative country. Data were obtained from http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/resources.htm, accessed 29 October 2010.

  3. Council Regulation (EC) No. 1638/2006 of 24 October 2006.

  4. Please note that I used World Bank data published in 2009, which are valid for the same year, whereas Freedom House data published in 2010 are only valid for the previous year.

  5. Kubosova, Lucia (2007-04-17). ‘Brussels declines to endorse 2013 date for Turkey's EU entry’. EUobserver, http://euobserver.com/9/23881, accessed 25 October 2010. Interview with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, on BBC Sunday AM, on 15 October 2006, http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2004-2009/president/pdf/interview_20061015_en.pdf, accessed 25 August 2010.

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  1. Berlin Center for European Studies, Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestr. 22, Berlin, 14195, Germany

    Tanja A Börzel

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Börzel, T. When Europe hits … beyond its borders: Europeanization and the near abroad. Comp Eur Polit 9, 394–413 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.8

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