The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe
304
The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521833592 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2004 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.14(d) |
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Cambridge University Press
0521833590 - The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO - Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe - by Wade Jacoby
Excerpt
Introduction
Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe
So when does an idea's time come? The answer lies in the match between idea and moment. An idea's time arrives not simply because the idea is compelling on its own terms, but because opportune political circumstances favor it.
(Lieberman 2002: 709)
In 1989-90, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell. In a few countries, social movements had challenged and eroded communism; in other places, the regimes seemed to collapse of their own weight. In either case, however, the notion of becoming a normal European state was an idea whose time had come. Almost all the new governments that emerged looked to distance themselves from many communist-era practices and institutions. Elites and citizens generally thought of these changes as part of a "return to Europe." Even those who argued that one could not "return" to a place (Europe) that one had never left still acknowledged the need for radical changes. Within a few years, elites and citizens also came to a broad consensus that their states should aspire to join the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and many subsequent institutional changes were pursued with these goals in mind.
This book analyzes Central and Eastern European (CEE) states' efforts to return to Europe by trying to become members of the EU and NATO. Unlike available accounts of the "dual enlargement," it pays particular attention to the proclivity of CEE elites to emulate existing institutions from Western Europe. As the subtitle puts it, these elites often "order from the menu" as opposed to creating their own new practices entirely from scratch. The menu is composed of institutions and practices used by the EU and NATO or by their member states. Emulation, defined more fully below, includes a variety of related processes that have in common the fact that elites in one country use formal institutions and practices from abroad to refashion their own rules or organizations.1 The elites in question are members of the CEE governments, along with top parliamentarians and civil servants, all of whom play key roles in such emulation as they draft the reform plans of the government and its individual ministries.
Emulation is a curious and understudied phenomenon: Why do the attractions of foreign designs sometimes outweigh the attractions of indigenous innovation? In the case at hand, how faithfully have CEE elites attempted to reproduce Western European designs in their own societies? How much have EU and NATO external pressures or incentives shaped their choices? Finally, to what extent have institutions and practices adopted from Western Europe promoted democratic or market-oriented practices in CEE? The answers to these questions have rich implications for scholars of globalization, regionalization, development, international organizations, and institutional change in a variety of policy areas.
The book also contributes to the debate about the extent to which outsiders can assist processes of reform occurring in other countries. This issue has a central place in several social science disciplines and is a regular topic of public discussion on reforming states in the wake of regime collapse or transition. A host of important studies look at the effect of foreign aid, trade, and foreign direct investment on both economic growth and, though to a lesser extent, on political reforms as well. On the more overtly political side, a large historical literature covers military occupations and a smaller one treats the use of institutional conditionality, mostly in Latin America and Africa. With some exceptions, this literature tends to emphasize the limits of external coercion in promoting reform.
Too often, however, we lack evidence on crucial questions. For example, proponents of the 2003 military invasion of Iraq downplayed or ignored the limits just noted - limits that soon seemed all too real. When are institutions "foreign" enough to promote real change and yet not so foreign as to be unacceptable? We have too few studies of a crucial dimension of external assistance: the use of foreign institutional models to change the legal architecture - constitutional and statuatory - of the reforming state. True, there are literatures on both diffusion and policy borrowing. But while the former pays little attention to the ways institutions change as they spread from one setting to another, the latter squashes a large number of contrasting motives and strategies into one overstuffed concept. So what happens when international actors promote particular institutional changes in the context of a massive shift in domestic structures? Or what happens when these reforming states are simply intrigued by an apparently better practice somewhere else? Both situations have been ubiquitous in CEE since 1990.
Policy makers should care about these issues. Regardless of whether they are internal reformers, external occupiers, or ostensibly neutral consultants, such reformers ask many of the same questions: Does what works in one place tell us anything about what might work in another? Are there lessons that one country's leaders can learn from another? If so, is it better to learn by taking explicit advice, or is it better to observe from a distance? Should lessons lead to rapid change, or is real learning best achieved gradually? If local conditions differ - and they always do - should we try to change the practices or change the local conditions? Running through all of these questions are the crucial issues of external imposition versus domestic choice and superficial and cosmetic changes versus real and enduring ones.
The intense and sustained use of emulation in CEE thus offers a unique research opportunity, with links to several broader problems. For example, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank often give leveraged policy advice to borrower nations, it is not clear how and when international organizations can best promote model institutional structures and formal rules. The reconstruction and occupation of postconflict states has also stimulated debates about the possibilities and limits of institutional change by design. The importance of sustained and systematic attention to institutional redesign under the influence of foreign models is nowhere more apparent than in the Europe of the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. Nowhere have the conditions been more propitious for emulation, as the East Europeans have had the idea, the opportunity, and the incentives to pursue this course for close to a decade.
The questions answered in this book also fill a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on CEE. A decade and a half after the collapse of communist regimes, the time is ripe for a reappraisal of the sources of institutional design in CEE and, in particular, of the role of outsiders. The early, almost exclusive focus on forces internal to the region has been augmented by a steadily growing interest in the external influences on, or even the external governance of, the various political and economic transformations of the region (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2004; Grabbe 2004; Lieven and Trenin 2003; Pravda and Zielonka 2001; Carothers 1999; Dawisha 1997; Grey 1997; Pridham et al. 1997). This writing on external influences describes a range of Western actions to promote change, though much of it still leaves us quite far from understanding how those Western policies are taken up by the weak states of CEE. It shows that external influence is a multistranded process and not a discrete variable. As a result, authors who begin by setting up external pressures or international imperatives as alternatives to domestic explanations of economic and political change in CEE usually abandon the claim that these are real alternatives (Crawford and Lijphart 1995: 194-6; Stark and Bruszt 1998: 5-8). A sustained focus on both domestic and external pressures will be needed to replace the mostly atheoretical concepts in the literature on external influences.2
CEE elites have used emulation very extensively. For example, in Hungary's June 1999 parliamentary session, of the 180 laws passed, 152 were not subject to any debate simply because they were part of the EU acquis communautaire, which is the set of treaties, rules, standards, principles, and policies that acceding countries are required to adopt (Kopstein and Reilly 2000: 27; Magyar Nemzet [Budapest], June 19, 1999). This observation, which could be replicated many times across the region, raises some real puzzles. Given the common expectation that states will jealously guard their sovereignty, why would states just freed from Soviet domination willingly subject themselves to invasive reform demands from Western Europe? Given the importance of control of the national legislative agenda, why would elected officials surrender agenda-setting power to the EU or NATO? The outcomes are as puzzling as the motives. If international organizations (IOs) - especially the EU - really wield significant power, why does the kind of emulation attempted and the outcomes that result vary so greatly? Finally, if CEE elites are simply pretending to reform, how do we explain the extraordinary changes that have occurred in some policy areas? To unravel most of these puzzles, we must first appreciate the great variation in the choices for and results of emulation.
EXPLAINING MODES AND OUTCOMES OF EMULATION
This book explains two patterns: the kinds of emulation CEE elites attempt and the outcomes of reform that follow from these efforts. Both patterns encompass significant variation, and the empirical chapters of the book discuss this variation in great detail. For now, it is sufficient to sketch only the main outlines of the causal relationships.
The first outcome to be explained is what I call the emulation "mode." How have CEE elites tried to emulate Western European institutions? I argue that what appears to be one messy complex of borrowing Western structures is better understood as four different, but related modes (see Table 1). The typology in Table 1 follows from two factors whose combination generates these different modes: the degree of pressure brought to bear externally and the degree of faithfulness in replication (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Kopstein and Reilly 1999: 20-1). In any given case, EU and NATO officials largely determine the first value (coded in simple binary fashion in Table 1 as "more voluntary or less voluntary"), and CEE national governments largely determine the second (coded as "faithful or approximate"). Crucially, modes of emulation are often the result of the constrained choices of CEE elites; elite preferences for faithful versus approximate emulation - or their refusal to emulate at all - underscore their room to fashion a response to these constraints.3 The combination of these two factors - what we might call pressure and precision - marks a pattern that is richer than the crude notions that CEE states either do exactly what the powerful IOs demand or that they merely pretend to do so as a way to gain membership. Depending upon the policy area being considered, CEE states often do some of each and, as the discussion below will indicate, several other things in addition.4
The four modes of emulation are as follows: The upper-left cell of Table 1 comes straight from a well-established literature. Scholars of
TABLE 1. Different Uses of Emulation in the Design of Postcommunist Institutions
| More Voluntary | Less Voluntary | |
| Faithful | Copies | Patches |
| Approximate | Templates | Thresholds |
"diffusion" and "policy borrowing" have long tried to understand the macrosociological and network factors that promote the voluntary and reasonably faithful spread of institutions from one place to another (for reviews, see Jacoby 2000: 4-12; De Jong, Lalenis, and Mamadouh 2003; Strang and Soule 1998). Such cases, labeled copies for shorthand, did exist in CEE, but this book argues that they were rather rare.5
Much more common were three other modes that occurred alongside simple copying. The first alternative mode I call templates. As communism collapsed, some CEE elites voluntarily looked to Western Europe for general templates in which they used the West European model more as a loose approximation than a detailed blueprint. In some cases, CEE states took their inspiration or sought advice directly from EU and NATO officials, but in many other cases they were able to use national templates from those organizations' member states. In some cases, CEE experts had fairly intimate familiarity with Western practices, either from careful study, extended exchange visits, or years in exile in the West. A large number of Western experts also visited the region, armed with advice that ran the spectrum from well-conceived to obviously ludicrous. In many cases, this form of emulation was blended in the same policy sector with institutional reforms that were entirely indigenous. As a result, a common pattern was that CEE elites often tried to make significant local adaptations of the foreign template.
The second alternative mode I call thresholds. In these cases, the EU and NATO set minimum standards for policy and institutional changes. But typically, these standards were rough and approximate - that is, "We can't tell nonmembers how to design their institutions..." - and also less voluntary - "...but if you eventually want to join, you'll need to make the following reforms...." Thus, pressure was high, but precision could be low. Both the EU and NATO long tried to minimize mandates of precise institutional outcomes. At times, this reluctance reflected a lack of internal consensus among members or deference to the sovereignty of CEE states. In part, however, IO officials also were wary of a checklist approach, because for several years, each IO had an internal consensus against a rapid enlargement. Some officials worried that if they gave precise targets to CEE reformers, they would come under more pressure to admit CEE states if those targets were met. In other cases, NATO and EU officials claimed to see value in letting CEE states discover appropriate structures without undue outside pressure. Yet as membership drew nearer, both organizations began to articulate certain minimal conditions. In many cases, we will see that these thresholds remained vague; as in Justice Potter Stewart's famous assessment of pornography, EU and NATO officials often claimed to know what was acceptable or unacceptable when they saw it. Once the IO in question articulated such thresholds, CEE elites could, by definition, no longer make use of the two voluntary modes (copies and templates), at least not in response to that particular threshold.
The third alternative mode to copying is located in the upper-right cell of Table 1. As CEE states' membership has drawn nearer, both organizations sometimes have required mandatory and faithful patches. This mode allowed CEE elites the least discretion of all, for these patches have been quite explicit, often involving specific legal texts to be incorporated en bloc into national law.6 While such patches have been more common in EU accession as a result of the detailed and demanding acquis communautaire, NATO accession has also generated CEE patches, especially in the last-minute defense legislation that attempted to meet specific NATO Target Force Goals (TFGs). In some cases, CEE elites inserted patches into policy domains where their existing structures were quite thin. In other cases, they used patches to fix what NATO and the EU had deemed to be holes in more developed legislative practices or administrative capacities. As we will see, policy areas that had once been marked by the industrious if voluntaristic use of templates came later to be the site of a mad rush to patch what was still deemed incompatible with prevailing IO practices. Indeed, one of the virtues of patches was the speed with which they could be implemented. Some policy areas subject to EU and NATO thresholds were patched when the threshold could clearly have been met by some form of indigenous reform that owed no debt to specific Western models. Yet since both the conceptual and political demands of developing indigenous reforms can be quite high, off-the-shelf patches were often the preferred response to pressure from the IO.
In short, not all emulation is the same. We should be skeptical of accounts that characterize emulation as homogenous, usually by noting the futility of isolated acts of "mindless imitation" or "mimicry."7 Different modes of emulation are the result of different mixes of IO constraints and CEE elite choices, and this section provides a terminology adequate to the complexity of the issues. We should also be skeptical of accounts that do not explicitly recognize the dynamism of modes of emulation. Over the course of the 1990s, the CEE states went through several ups and downs on the road to membership in the EU and NATO. The shifting domestic political moods interacted with the shifting policies of the IOs themselves. Table 1, therefore, distinguishes between degrees of voluntarism on the part of the CEE elites.8 The basic pattern is that early in the 1990s, CEE reforms were very lightly constrained, if at all, by the IOs. As first NATO and then the EU announced forthcoming enlargements and began to inventory CEE practices, the degree of voluntarism fell off markedly. The NATO case then suggests that after membership is achieved, the scope for voluntaristic reforms rises once again.
But modes of emulation are only half of the story. Just as there is a range of variation in ways to emulate existing Western practices, so too is there a range of outcomes that result. In some cases, we will see emulation feeding into a robust "politics as usual," while in other cases emulation will create policy areas almost de novo. As in Table 1, a necessary initial step is to provide labels for these outcomes, the pattern of which the empirical chapters then explain. I use four such labels, which I shall define below: struggle, scaffolding, homesteading, and learning. Two of these labels - struggle and learning - reflect fairly common and well-studied kinds of outcomes. The two others - scaffolding and homesteading - are less familiar, though hopefully still intuitive once explained. All four, however, are meant as short descriptions of the range of the kinds of politics that result when elites try to or are obliged to emulate policies and institutions that exist elsewhere. A key aim of the book is to describe and explain this full range of variation.
As in the case of Table 1, I use two broad factors to map this variation as it has existed across a range of policy areas in postcommunist CEE. Again, I highlight one factor at the international level and one factor at the domestic level. At the international level, we need to know about the nature of the demands emanating from the IO. Are they many and detailed? Few and vague? I capture this dimension by use of the concept of "rule density," by which I mean the extent of IO demands.9 This book looks at five policy areas, the selection of which is discussed below. In three of them - agriculture, regional policy, and civilian control of the military - the IO rules were dense. In two others, health care and consumer protection, they clearly were not.
The other dimension is the density of policy sector actors present at communism's collapse. The intuition is that emulation proceeds differently where state and social actors are well developed than in policy sectors that are new.10 Of the five policy areas, there are three where actors were dense and two where they were thin. In health care, agricultural policy, and civilian control of the military, reform proponents faced powerful actors from the start of the postcommunist era. In each case, some of the actors were nonstate interest groups, while others were part of the state apparatus itself, often ministries or factions within ministries. These actors have contested the adoption of some Western models and significantly reshaped others.
TABLE 2. Outcomes of Efforts at Emulation Through Copies, Templates, Thresholds, and Patches
| Low Density of Actors | High Density of Actors | |
| Low Density of Rules | Homesteading (consumer | Continuous Learning |
| protection) | (health care) | |
| High Density of Rules | Scaffolding (regional | Open Struggle |
| policy) | (agriculture, civilian | |
| control of the military) | ||
Table 2 sketches the range of variation. The right column of the table shows the dominant pattern when actors were well established. In those cases where the IO placed heavy demands on these powerful actors (i.e., rule density was high), emulation led to high-profile "struggles." In the agriculture case, emulation was a precondition for Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) support, and the struggles revolved around the extent of financial support that would flow to farmers after the emulated structures and policies were in place. In the military case, meeting certain thresholds of civilian control was a precondition for membership, yet this provoked fights between civilians and certain factions of their militaries. By contrast, when those demands were light, well-established actors could use emulation to engage in relatively unpressured "learning." This is the outcome in health care in both countries studied, as both the Ministries of Health and the major interest groups paid close attention to specific health care models from Western Europe and even the United States.
Regional economic development and consumer protection are two areas in which CEE interests were much less organized in 1989-90 and thus constituted far less of a brake on reform initiatives. These cases are on the left side of Table 2. In regional policy, a dense set of EU rules (though not so dense as in agriculture) provide a "scaffolding" around which previously latent or unorganized interests have congealed. In consumer protection, where the density of EU rules is quite modest, the rules have been sufficient only to encourage new groups to "homestead" this policy domain and have generated only a few isolated pioneers to push forward this new policy area.
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