The International Promotion of Political Norms in Eastern Europe: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 5 No. 28, August 2005

Schimmelfennig, Frank. (2005) The International Promotion of Political Norms in Eastern Europe: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 5 No. 28, August 2005. [Working Paper]

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Abstract

[From the introduction]. After the end of the Cold War, the main regional organizations of Europe – the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – proclaimed human rights, liberal democracy, and peaceful conflict management to be the normative foundations of the New Europe. (2) Moreover, they defined support for political change as a new core task for themselves. They provided expertise and training to the transformation countries, gave financial support to the emerging civil societies and parties, and mediated in cases of conflict. They monitored the establishment and functioning of democratic institutions and the rule of law; they made financial assistance and the integration of the transformation countries into the Western organizations dependent upon compliance with their political norms and, in a few instances, intervened militarily to stop civil war and massive human rights violations or (such as in Bosnia- Hercegovina, Kosovo, or Macedonia). About one and a half decades later, ten consolidated East European democracies are or are about to become EU and NATO members. By contrast, other countries of the region (most of them in the Balkans) have not yet achieved democratic stability. Others still, mainly successor states of the Soviet Union, are consolidating autocracies rather than democracies. These divergent developments raise the question under which conditions European organizations have had an effective impact on compliance with norms of human rights, liberal democracy, and peaceful conflict management in Eastern Europe. In answering this question, the article starts from two basic models of international rule promotion – external incentives and social learning – used in different strands of International Relations research. First, in the context of the rationalist-constructivist debate in International Relations, constructivist scholars have begun to develop theoretical accounts of “international socialization” that go beyond the material bargaining frameworks dominant in rationalist IR theory (for overviews, see Finnemore 1996; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Checkel 2004). These accounts are based on processes of social influence (Johnston 2001), argumentation (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999) or persuasion (Checkel 2001) and include deep effects of interest and identity change. Second, the literature on international conditionality, which focuses mostly on the lending conditionality of International Financial Institutions (IFIs), also contrasts bargaining and social learning models and arrives at a skeptical assessment of the effectiveness of bargaining conditionality (see e.g. Kahler 1992; cf. Checkel 2000). Similarly, the literature on “Europeanization”, the impact of the EU on member state institutions, political processes, and policies, distinguishes “domestic change as a process of redistribution of resources” from “domestic change as a process of socialization and learning” (Börzel and Risse 2003; cf. Héritier et al. 2001).

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