ABSTRACT
Defenders of the liberal international order (Ikenberry 2006; Ikenberry and Slaughter 2007) and those who seek to support the spread and consolidation of liberal democracy around the globe are today, as perhaps never before, confronted by fundamental questions regarding the nature, extent and limitations of external influence on domestic democratic development (Burnell 2005). In the first chapter we addressed those questions. For clarity’s sake let us recall them again. Do Western international actors, including the EU, play a significant role in encouraging processes of institutional, legal and normative change in transitional states? If so, when and how do external incentives, financial and technical aid, supported by conditionality, international democratic socialization, diplomacy or sheer democratic example, influence national decision-makers to pursue alignment with a given externally driven model of law, practices and beliefs? What combination of domestic structural factors and agency-driven considerations, on the one hand, and external influence mechanisms, on the other, are most likely to result in convergence with European rules and practices? Does EU influence, where it exists, generate genuine implementation and internalization of reforms (‘real change’), or does it only solicit shallow, formal compliance, i.e. rule adoption alone? Does EU influence, where it exists, follow the pathway of direct intergovernmental bargaining, or does it act indirectly, surreptitiously, through persuasion of epistemic communities and other non-state elites who then promote a pro-EU alignment policy internally?
