ABSTRACT
Accession Europeanization in CEE: mechanisms of domestic change Approaches to accession Europeanization have identified several factors upon which the EU’s domestic impact hinges. The two most prominent are the misfit between EU requirements and domestic conditions, on the one hand, and the EU push, mostly based on the consistent application of membership conditionality, on the other. To start with, the misfit between European and domestic policies, institutions and political processes is a necessary condition for domestic change. Should the misfit be combined with EU conditionality, it exerts pressure for adaptation on a target country. Yet to what extent such misfit translates into change depends on domestic institutions which mediate or filter the domestic impact of Europe (Börzel and Risse 2003, pp. 57-80). Rational choice institutionalism argues that the EU facilitates domestic change by changing opportunity structures for domestic actors. Domestic change is facilitated if EU incentives discourage domestic actors from vetoing adaptation to EU requirements (veto players) or if, on the contrary, they empower domestic reform coalitions by providing them with additional resources to exploit the opportunities offered by Europeanization (formal supporting institutions). Sociological institutionalism conceives of Europeanization as the emergence of new rules, norms, practices and structures of meaning to which member states are exposed and which they have to incorporate into their domestic rule structures. Norm entrepreneurs, such as epistemic communities or advocacy networks, socialize domestic actors into new norms and rules of appropriateness through persuasion and learning, a process through which they redefine their interests and identities accordingly. The more active norm entrepreneurs and EU allies are, and the more they succeed in making EU policies resonate with domestic norms and beliefs, the more successful they will be in bringing about domestic change. Moreover, a consensus-oriented or cooperative decision-making culture helps to overcome multiple veto points by rendering their use for actors inappropriate. Considering domestic change in CEE, “reinforcement by reward” (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005, p. 11) was strong enough to overcome the resistance of veto players against the substantial costs entailed in compliance with the Copenhagen criteria and the adoption of the acquis communautaire (Andonova 2003; Vachudova 2005). Europeanization has empowered the reformists and moderates over nationalist forces to push through domestic reforms in CEE. If domestic veto players have mattered, they have delayed rather than forestalled compliance with EU requirements (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2006, pp. 88-101). At the same time, formal veto players helped to lock in institutional changes induced by the EU in cases where these changes no longer fit government preferences (Sedelmeier 2012, pp. 20-35). Hence the mediating effect of both informal institutions and veto players is more ambivalent since they may facilitate as well as impair Europeanization. While the rationalist mechanisms of “differential empowerment through conditionality” have dominated accession Europeanization in CEE, socialization and
social learning have also played a role (Kelley 2004; Kubicek 2005; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005). Next to financial and technical assistance and the substantial reward of membership, the EU provides elites in accession countries with the necessary legitimacy to enact domestic change. The strong domestic consensus in favor of EU membership in their “return to Europe” allowed CEE decision-makers to silence domestic veto players inside and outside government, despite the considerable costs incurred by EU policies. Moreover, the Copenhagen criteria strongly resonated with ongoing reform agendas; large parts of the societies in the CEECs supported the political and economic transition that started with the “velvet revolution” of 1989. The legitimacy of the EU generated diffuse support through the identification with Europe that often trumped cost-benefit calculations in the adoption of and adaptation to the package of enlargement conditionality. It also facilitated access to and influence of (trans-) national norm entrepreneurs, who had little difficulty in invoking the resonance of EU requirements with domestic norms and values so as to increase their acceptance and promote their internalization. While it did not forge completely new identities and beliefs, EU accession reinforced the identification with Europe (Risse 2010). Yet socialization takes time. In this regard, the dominance of the “external incentive model” and “differential empowerment through conditionality” has given rise to “shallow Europeanization” (Goetz 2005, p. 262) or “Potemkin harmonization” (Jacoby 1999, pp. 62-7) in CEECs. The CEECs formally adopted a massive amount of EU legislation, which, however, is still often not properly applied and enforced and thus has not changed actors’ behavior (Börzel 2009; Falkner et al. 2008) or fostered internalization and long-term consistent practices. Empirical evidence suggests that history, to a great extent, repeats itself in Turkey. Despite empirical support for the theoretical expectation that domestic change was unlikely to occur if CEECs faced high misfit, substantial costs and few incentives, we do find evidence for the EU’s influence on both institutional and policy change in the case of Turkey (Nas and Özer 2012; Yılmaz and Soyaltın 2014). The domestic impact of the EU on Turkey may be patchy and often shallow, but it is certainly not spurious. While the EU is usually not the only game in town and Turkey is not merely downloading EU policies and institutions, the EU has influenced domestic change even where its shadow of conditionality is weak or nonexistent. At the same time, there is significant variation. To what extent can existing approaches of Europeanization and domestic change account for the differential impact of the EU on Turkey? The next section explores this question.
