"Europeanisation as a contest: The EU and sub-national governance in Bulgaria"

Nikolova, Pavlina. (2007) "Europeanisation as a contest: The EU and sub-national governance in Bulgaria". In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2007 (10th), May 17-19, 2007, pages 26, Montreal, Canada.

Abstract

[From the introduction] This article assesses the reforms in sub-national governance in Bulgaria in the years of postcommunist transition and pre-accession (1991-2005) in order to make conclusions about Europeanisation and domestic responses in candidate states. It draws on a number of Bulgarian policy documents and Commission reports and on forty semi-structured interviews with officials of the European Commission, Bulgarian national ministries and sub-national authorities in the period April-August 2004. The article proceeds by briefly outlining the theoretical framework. Europeanisation is a concept originally developed for member states and it is therefore necessary to take into account the specifics of the enlargement process at the theoretical level in order to be able to apply it to Bulgaria. In the second part of this article it is argued that the models provided by the EU in the area of sub-national governance are fuzzy, the Commission preferences were incoherent across DGs and over time, and the tools for exercising EU pressure (the mechanisms for Europeanisation) leaked out EU influence and allowed models and pressures from elsewhere to filter in. The third part of this paper examines the reforms in the administrative-territorial organisation of Bulgaria while the fourth section focuses on the creation and content of the national policy for addressing territorial disparities (regional policy). The concluding part reflects upon the utility of the concept of Europeanisation to explain processes of change beyond the EU territorial boundaries and about the challenges of future Europeanisation research on recent entrants as Bulgaria.