Volume 9 Number 4

Fall 2000

Feature: Enlargement as Seen from the East

Introduction
     Stephen Holmes

The European Union’s relentless but unenthusiastic headway toward absorbing onetime members of the vanished Soviet bloc illustrates the ambiguous triumph of liberalism over its principal twentieth-century rival. Faced with the practical task of transferring rights, markets, and the rule of law to the other Europe, the EU shed libertarian rhetoric about dismantling the state and devoted itself to bolstering the administrative capacity of applicant countries. Liberalization and state-building turn out to be two sides of the same coin, because only an honest and effective civil service (bureaucracy) can manage the accession process, including the onerous implementation of the highly complex acquis.

That enlargement is burdensome and often perplexing goes without saying. As Zsofia Szilagyi and the other contributors to this symposium suggest, the largest uncertainties arise from the thinness of public debate in both member and applicant countries. Neither the importance nor even the political and economic implications of expansion have been anywhere made clear. Brussels’s proneness to postpone benefits to, but not sacrifices by, East Europeans has raised eyebrows; yet public support in applicant countries for integration into the EU remains robust. This is probably because accession is still identified closely in the public mind with improved living standards and escape from Russia’s sphere of influence. Western European leaders and opinion makers, by contrast, arguably have dodged the responsibility for explaining to their domestic publics the EU’s real interest in widening, a process that will obviously leave the Union even less coherent than it is today.

The lack of appetite for enlargement inside the current EU should not be associated too closely with the famous "democratic deficit," however. For West European political elites are just as chilly about expansion as average citizens. At least, as Milada Anna Vachudova explains, leaders have made little serious effort to involve their citizens in the process, to explain why, for instance, current EU members should relinquish their own rural development funds to improve poor areas in the east. Because liberal elites have failed to make a positive case, as Arista M. Cirtautas adds, public discussion of enlargement inside the EU is sometimes dominated less by economic pros and cons, than by an emotional fear that Western national identities will be eroded by uncivilized immigration from the east. Undefended in a publicly convincing way, the accession process proceeds pretty much on autopilot. No surprise if the nontransparency of such a momentous process fuels the rise of antienlargement parties, of the Jörg Haider stamp.

Albena Azmanova agrees with most analysts that the East European public’s fear of change and, especially, obstructionism by vested interests would have stymied root-and-branch reform in some applicant countries (in her case, Bulgaria), had not pressure for restructuring, as a condition for entry, been applied by the EU. But Brussels’s paternalism has a downside, she interestingly continues, because it removes all incentive for the cobbling together of strong domestic political coalitions in favor of reform, able to explain liberalization publicly and to bring ordinary citizens along. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi argues along similar lines. In every applicant country, and not only in Romania, the governing party’s program is a carbon copy of the EU accession strategy delivered on a platter by Brussels. As a result, East European political parties, with an eye trained on accession, have abandoned any pretense of becoming bodies able to debate and formulate original policies in a domestic political setting.

How the long accession process will affect the quality of democracy in applicant countries is still uncertain. But it has certainly done little to improve the ability of governments to govern in active consultation with citizens. However inadvertently, its critics argue, the EU is pursuing economic reform in Eastern Europe by weakening democratic responsiveness and even encouraging civic passivity. From the "economic reform perspective," after all, elections are something of a nuisance. To make East European elites into dutiful functionaries of Brussels, the EU must inure local political leaders to the complaints of their domestic publics aching from reform. How can East European incumbents remain popular when executing commands from Brussels to transform a fiscal deficit into a social deficit (balancing the budget by cutting back health care and pensions) or to seal shut eastern borders (cutting off access to relatives and trading partners)?

Thinking of Romania, Mungiu-Pippidi argues that the EU’s refusal to adjust its immediate demands to an applicant country’s current resources and capacities dissolves democratic support for reforms and helps sweep antiliberal forces into power. If the pro-EU government of Emil Constantinescu (replaced by Ion Iliescu in November) was seriously undermined by the EU’s rigidity and impatience, the implications are indeed paradoxical. In its effort to prevent Eastern Europe from exporting disorder westward, the EU has managed to export disorder eastward. That this pattern has consequences beyond Romania, for more highly developed applicant states, is a strong implication of the following symposium.

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