Attila Ágh

Eastern enlargement and

the future of the EU27:

EU foreign policy

in a global world

Together for Europe
 Series

Kossuth Publishing Co.

The ‘Together for Europe’ Research Centre

wishes to express its gratitude

for the financial support of its

research programmes:

‘EU-CONSENT (Wider Europe, Deeper Integration – Constructing Europe)’ project sponsored by

the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme

(Contract No. 513416)

And

‘European governance and the Hungarian

accession’ project of the Hungarian National

Research Foundation

(OTKA T 046919)

Table of Contents

Preface: Widening and deepening after the Eastern enlargement

PART ONE

The Creative Crisis in the EU25

1 EU and US in the globalizing world: The Fourth Wave of Democratization

1.1 EU and US approaches to the Global World Order

1.2 Transformative linkage politics and global democratization

1.3. The traditional and new concepts of the “post-enlargement world”

2. The birth pangs of EU25 and its creative crisis: The future of the EU in four scenarios

2.1 The state of the art in the EU25

2.2. The EU25 fighting with common problems

A. The West side story: Missing reforms in the EU15

B.The East side story: Completing membership in the EU10

2.3. “Will Europe run the 21st century”?

PART TWO Completing membership in a post-Lisbon era

3. Sub-continental regionalization and the EU foreign policy: The reemergence of Central Europe in an enlarged Europe

3.1 Smaller states and the Nordic Model

3.2 Smaller-bigger states controversy and the EU25 in the making

3.3.“Schwerpunkt Central Europe”

4. External and internal Europeanization of the ECE political systems: The accession crisis in the new member states

4.1 The accession crisis as the “general crisis” of the ECE polities

4.2. Governments and parliaments facing Europeanization

4.3. Comparative democratizations and post-Lisbon democracy

5. Social construct of democracy and EU capacity-building in ECE: The “Productivist Challenge” and sustainable competitiveness

5.1 The Lisbon Strategy and the new member states

5.2. The state capacity and social capacity in ECE

5.3. Completing membership and the Social Challenge

6. Identity crisis in the enlarged EU: The “cultural politics” and “civic democracy” in ECE

6.1. European vocation of the EU and “cultural” systemic change in ECE

6.2. The “value wars” in ECE before the EU membership

6.3 The recent value war on EU between Euro-sceptics and Euro-supporters

PART THREE

The “borders” of the new Europe

7. The Balkan region in an enlarging Europe: The West Balkan states in the waiting room

7.1 The separation of the Balkans from the ENP

7.2 Balkan particularism and the divergence between the East and West Balkans

7.3 The Balkan saga or the long and painful road in the West Balkans

8. Reinventing the EU for the 21st century: Constitutionalizing Europe and the new perspectives

8.1 The EU crisis after the “annus horribilis” (2005)

8.2. Reorganizing the EU Space

8.3. Constitutionalizing Europe: the new perspectives

References

Preface: Widening and deepening after the Eastern enlargement

This book is about the “problematization” of widening and deepening in the EU25 that has been the main theoretical endeavour of the EU Consent FP6 network of excellence. Many authors warn that this is a false dichotomy, since widening and deepening basically strengthen each other, still their mutual relationships have to be analyzed in all respects. This analysis has been based on the large body of the mainstream EU Studies on the present EU situation, including the “crisis” literature but written from the point of view of the new member states to articulate their approaches. I try to argue in this book that in facing the challenges of the late 2000s in the enlarged EU, we live in an intellectually polluted world of controversial partial theories with slowly emerging and hardly contacting “islands of theory”. This “island of theory” in the new member states has been much lesser known in the EU than the bigger “islands” of the former member states. One has to take the opportunity given by this large framework of the EU Consent to present a theory from the side of the new member states as well in order to integrate not just the ECE countries into the EU but also the theoretical generalization of the ECE situation into the European Studies as a whole.

The emergence of the EU25 has been one of the main historical turning points in the EU history. The Eastern enlargement has largely been a success story but its completion still needs a big effort in both the old and new member states. The distinction between the old and new member states as “we” and “they” has to be overcome in the unified Europe. Therefore the book has a dual task: to overcome the divide between the old and the new member states on one side and to show up the specificity of the new member states in their catching up efforts or completing membership on the other. The new Europe of 25 or 27 member states has many regional specifities between North and South, or East and West. The special character of the new member states will slowly become only one of these dividing lines and not necessarily the deepest one. This dual task of dealing with the Unified Europe and focusing on the specificities of its sub-continental regions goes through this book with some Hungarian bias, since this is the country “I know best”.

The first part of the book describes the present, “creative” crisis in the EU25 in general terms, in two introductory chapters. Problematization and/or theoretization of deepening and widening have two main – external and internal - dimensions that have been analyzed in these chapters. The chapters 1 and 2 give the theoretical foundation and dimensions in their mutual relationships have been further developed and investigated in detail in the second part of the book. This part deals first with the ECE region’s common features, then elaborates them in three dimensions (institutions, policy performance and cultural patterns) of completing membership in chapters 3,4,5 and 6. These chapters are about the new member states in a post-Lisbon era but taking always the EU25 as a newly emerging system into account. The concluding part of the book in chapters 7 and 8 discovers the future perspectives of the EU25 as the external and internal “borders” of the EU.

The second, largest part has been based on concept of the EU foreign policy discussed in the chapter 1 and on the structure that has been advanced in great outlines in the chapter 2. Namely, after discussing the situation in the EU25 it proceeds to the transnational level of “regions” as EU15 and EU10 in its breakdown by pointing out the common features and national specificities in both cases. After these general outlines, the chapter 3 turns to the detailed analysis of the Central European region. The following chapters deal with the institutional development and its deficit, with the policy approach and performance deficit and finally with the socio-cultural complex of cultural and socialization patterns in the chapters 4, 5 and 6. The missing social consolidation as the hard core of the ECE deficiencies runs through these three chapters and gets a summary in the closing “cultural” chapter. The third part of the book is looking ahead to the future of the EU25(27) and the European Neighbourhood Policy. It tries to see the “borders” of the new EU in both geographical meaning as further enlargements in the chapter 7. Finally, it analyzes the internal borders as restructuration of the European Common Space in the early 21st century in the chapter 8. All the chapters have a special focus as problematization of a particular question in the widening-deepening relationships. In order to present a clear structure to the book the short summaries of these problematizations have beenput at the start of each chapter.

This book is a long theoretical endeavour to “learn Europe” from a Central European position. In the early nineties I established the Hungarian Centre for Democracy Studies (HCDS) for coordinating democratization research in Hungary and in East Central Europe. This effort has been continued in the new form of the Together for Europe Research Centre (TERC) in the 2000s just for the same purpose: to emphasize that we are “together” in the EU but the newcomers have a special task though completing their membership already within the EU in order to reach the full or effective membership. The HCDS produced a series of books and papers, editing first the Budapest Papers on Europeanization (30 issues so far). Later in TERC we have published so far four books in English in the Together for Europe series and two other English language books in other series, working as usual with cosponsoring institutions. All the six books, however, have done the same job of outlining the accessions and post-accession periods in East Central Europe.

This study has been written in the framework of the team5 (“Transition and Europeanization in the Old and New Member States”) of the EU Consent FP6 Network of Excellence (“A reinvented Union: towards a deeper and wider EU”) in its Work Package “Theories”. The research has also been supported by the Hungarian National Research Foundation in the project of „European governance and the Hungarian accession” (OTKA T/F 046919) and by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in the Together for Europe Research Centre through the research programme “The reform of the Hungarian institutional system in the process of the EU accession”. Finally, I would like to thank for the cooperation of my closest colleagues, Péter Bánlaki, Alexandra Ferencz, Judit Kis-Varga, Krisztián Kádár, Tamás Kaiser, József Mocsári, Veronika Szemere and József Szuper.

PART ONE

The Creative Crisis in the EU25

1 EU and US in the globalizing world: The Fourth Wave of Democratization

“European Ostpolitik clearly ranks among the first priorities of the Union. (…) The Eastern enlargement can be regarded as a huge foreign policy initiative significantly increasing the scope of innumerable European regimes.”

(Knud Erik Joergensen, 2004: 10-11)

Problematization No. 1: This chapter asks how the EU looks like from outside or how its external dimension has developed as its foreign policy and global role (“civilian superpower”). This dimension has been called “external” policy indeed, indicating that it is broader than the usual “foreign” policy, since beyond the classical-traditional defence and security oriented foreign policy it embraces also the fields of external trade, and the enlargement as well as neighbourhood policies. The chapter tries to prove that promotion of democracy has been basically different in the EU and the US. Actually, the Eastern enlargement as a result of the EU’s promotion of democracy has been an unprecedented success in the world history.

Introduction: EU foreign policy as “transformative linkage politics”

In the early 21st century there have been basic changes in global politics generated by the global democratizations that has demonstrated at the same time the diverging EU and US foreign policies. In the 21st century the EU has appeared as a global actor with its particular profile of a civilian superpower and acted through transformative linkage politics. It means that the EU advocates not only the fusion of international relations and domestic policy as linkage politics but gives a special transformation profile to it in the form of binding conditionalities for both sides. Transformative linkage politics or - with the usual term - the enlargement policy of the EU has been one of the most influential policies that has shaped the global world and it has been the major stake and bone of contention in the global rivalry between the EU and US.

The most recent result of this new policy instrument is the Eastern enlargement. EU elaborated for the Eastern enlargement “a unique model of democracy promotion through integration (…) with a particular combination of hard conditionality and soft measures” (Dimitrova and Pridham, 2004: 91). The Eastern enlargement has made the EU to a real global player. It has been a great success, which can revitalize the EU that has been suffering from a transitory identity crisis. After the Eastern enlargement the EU25 has organized a special zone as the partnership ring of Eastern and Southern neighbours, so in the next decades the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) will be one of the main directions in the European Foreign Policy (EFP). It has caused, again, some problems by testing the EU absorption capacity but the ENP has accelerated the dynamism of the EU’s doctrine on the effective multilateralism.

1.1 EU and US approaches to the Global World Order

(1.)Linkage politics as the new trend.

Fusion of international relations and domestic policy. The new general trend in the international relations theory has focused upon the interdependencies between domestic and international developments. This new trend has shifted the centre of gravity nowadays more and more towards the global “linkage politics” as James Rosenau termed this synthesis of international and domestic politics. Linkage politics, as it is well known, means that the traditional separation of foreign policy and domestic policy has lost its meaning (“Domestic and foreign policies are intertwined in ways that they have not previously been.” - Sjursen and Smith, 2004: 128). They have interpenetrated each other and, in addition, there have been many “hybrid” actors on the world scene. At abstract theoretical level it is a game that many players can play simultaneously, at least according to the Robert Putnam’s concept of a two-level or “nested” game, in which actors on the international level are to a great extent constrained by domestic politics, and vice versa. At a much more concrete level, however, many policy instruments have been used in global politics to promote democracy and market economy and this new relationship between “donor” and “recipient” countries or regions has changed the function and content of foreign policy.{1}

As a common wisdom, there has been “turbulence” in world politics because of the parallel processes of fragmentation and integration (“fragmegration”). James Rosenau has tried to capture the new situation with the term of “postinternational politics” that has opened a new period after the Westphalian state system (Rosenau, 1990: 6,10). Thus, it is commonsensical that after the Westphalian world the classical terms of external and internal sovereignty are no longer valid. Accordingly, the November 1990 Paris CSCE Treaty - by merging the “foreign” and “domestic” politics for Europe - has formulated the rules of behaviour for the states concerned and has also outlined the main norms of states’ responsibility towards its citizens. The general background of these transformations that unleashed global democratizations was the collapse of the bipolar world. Nowadays the new foreign policy has a “promotion of democracy” dimension, i.e. the foreign policy actions of the developed democratic countries focus on the democratization of the rest of the world therefore, I use the term of transformative linkage politics for the description of the proactive global dimension of democratizations.{2}

Globalization and regionalization. Globalization has provoked increasing localization, producing some layers of territorial organizations as dense institutionalization, including continental level regionalization that has initiated a new approach of “comparative regional integration”. As a result the new world order has emerged with “unprecedented unity and unprecedented fragmentation” (Bache and Flinders, 2004: 1). This multi-level regionalization has changed the structure of political organizations at all its levels from government to governance. Thus, in the nineties the idea of “New Regionalism” was formulated closely interwoven with that of “governance without government” in the international system (Laursen, 2003, 20, 290). In this global world of multi-level governance the “continental regions” compete with each other in all fields, not just in economic, but also in foreign, environmental and social policies. The EU itself has also emerged as a “continentalregional” answer to this challenge. The EU principles of its global competition with the United States have been formulated in the Lisbon Strategy, while the US has tried to improve its competitiveness by establishing NAFTA as its continental region. Global challenge with its localization-regionalization effect has also appeared at lower levels, between and/or among countries and within them. Namely, as the EU has embraced more and more members, some other, “lower” level regionalization processes have also taken place at the level of “sub-continental” regionalization such as the marked emergence of Nordic region, parallel with marked contours for the other “sub-continental” regions as well. At the same time, within the EU member states multi-level democracy has created a new kind of polity with the relative autonomy of sub-national regional units and some analysts make the bold claim that “the ‘Europe of the Regions’ is no longer a catchword, but an important reality” (Magone, 2003: 1). For sure, the pan-European organizations of these sub-national units across the borders have embraced the EU as a whole horizontally, which has been a real “political revolution” as José Magone claims.{3}

Diverging concepts of conditionality. This contrast between the US and EU foreign policy can be grasped in the above mentioned term of conditionality. This term was introduced by the international financial institutions (IFIs) like the WB and IMF to determine the conditions for development assistance. Conditionality is inherent in any idea of aid but from the fifties on a whole system has been built up for its systematic regulation. This term still has the negative imprint on by IFIs, since they have often imposed unilateral and not tailor-made demands on the developing countries. “The nature of a specific application of conditionality concept – Angelov notes (2005: 138) – depends on a few different factors: the degree of power asymmetry in the relations between a ‘donor’ and ‘demander’”. From the sixties on, however, the term of conditionality has received an extended political and socio-economic meaning of transferring the rule of law, human rights, electoral democracy, and basic market economy. Philippe Schmitter defines conditionality as “the use of fulfilment of stipulated political obligations as a prerequisite for obtaining economic aid, debt relief, most favoured nation status, access to subsidised credit, or membership in coveted regional or global organization” (quoted from Angelov, 2005: 137). This definition is correct but – originating from 2001 – it is outdated, since from the nineties on conditionality has become the most important policy instrument for the promotion of democracy. It has also been varied between its negative and positive kinds of instruments, since the negative conditionality has meant punishment or denial of assistance, whereas the positive conditionality meant a large variety of incentives. This distinction is very important because the US foreign policy has always been mostly based on the negative conditionalities. It has never been too gracious in delivering economic assistance, unlike the EU, which has offered much more socio-economic assistance and elaborated complex sets of conditionality for promoting democracy. The NATO enlargement and the EU enlargement show also this contrast manifestly. The US managed NATO enlargement has presupposed only a basic democratization and it resulted in a loose security community, while the EU enlargement has brought a large complex set of strict conditionalities and resulted in a membership of a well organized economic and political community (see about the twin enlargement, Schimmelfennig, 2003).

{1} This introductory chapter will be continued in chapter 7, and combined with the internal problems in the concluding chapter 8. This chapter tries to give a complete picture of “EU from outside”. In this book I will use the following abbreviations: ECE for East Central Europe, CE for Central Europe, EE for Eastern Europe, SE for Southern Europe and Med for the Mediterranean region (Euromed and the Barcelona process). I quote shorter newspaper publications only in the footnotes and I enlist in the References only the books and journal papers.

{2} Transformative linkage politics as the main foreign policy instrument has been deeply intertwined with the domestic or internal democratization in the EU. This unity of internal democratization and external promotion of democracy goes through this study, not just as “national” or EU level democracy but also as “sub-national” (Loughlin, 2004) or multi-level (Bache and Flinders, 2004) democracy, or as new borders for a changing Europe (Anderson et al, 2003). Bache and Flinders in fact quote Andrew Gamble with the terms of unity and fragmentation, or with the James Rosenau’s term of “fragmegration”.

{3} Robert Keohane’s presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 2000 was entitled “Governance in a Partially Globalized World”. Finn Laursen notes also that governance in the nineties was increasingly used in the EU studies and the emphasis was usually put on networks (2003: 290).