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Europeanization and
Regionalization in the EU’s
Enlargement to Central
and Eastern Europe
The Myth of Conditionality
James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse
and Claire Gordon

One Europe or Several?
Series Editor: Helen Wallace
The One Europe or Several? series examines contemporary processes of political,
security, economic, social and cultural change across the European continent, aswell as issues of convergence/divergence and prospects for integration and frag-mentation. Many of the books in the series are cross-country comparisons;others evaluate the European institutions, in particular the European Union andNATO, in the context of eastern enlargement.
Titles include:
Sarah Birch
ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE
Sarah Birch, Frances Millard, Marina Popescu and Kieran Williams
EMBODYING DEMOCRACYElectoral System Design in Post-Communist Europe
Andrew Cottey, Timothy Edmunds and Anthony Forster ( editors)
DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF THE MILITARY IN POSTCOMMUNIST EUROPE
Guarding the Guards
Anthony Forster, Timothy Edmunds and Andrew Cottey ( editors)
THE CHALLENGE OF MILITARY REFORM IN POSTCOMMUNIST EUROPE
Building Professional Armed Forces
Anthony Forster, Timothy Edmunds and Andrew Cottey ( editors)
SOLDIERS AND SOCIETIES IN POSTCOMMUNIST EUROPE
Legitimacy and Change
James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon
EUROPEANIZATION AND REGIONALIZATION IN THE EU’S ENLARGEMENTTO CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEThe Myth of Conditionality
Andrew Jordan
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF BRITISH ENVIRONMENTAL POLICYA Departmental Perspective
Christopher Lord
A DEMOCRACTIC AUDIT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
Valsamis Mitsilegas, Jorg Monar and Wyn Rees
THE EUROPEAN UNION AND INTERNAL SECURITYGuardian of the People?
Helen Wallace (editor)
INTERLOCKING DIMENSIONS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

One Europe or Several?
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Europeanization and
Regionalization in the EU’sEnlargement to Centraland Eastern Europe
The Myth of Conditionality
James Hughes
Reader in Comparative Politics
London School of Economics and Political Science
Gwendolyn Sasse
Lecturer in Comparative East European PoliticsLondon School of Economics and Political Science
and
Claire Gordon
Visiting LecturerLondon School of Economics and Political Science

© James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon 2005
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
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may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2005 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 1–4039–3987–XThis book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHughes, James, 1959-
Europeanization and regionalization in the EU’s enlargement to Central andEastern Europe: the myth of conditionality / James Hughes, GwendolynSasse, and Claire Gordon.
p. cm. – (One Europe or several?)
Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1-4039-3987-X (cloth: alk. paper)
1. European Union–Europe, Eastern. 2. European Union–Europe, Central.
3. Regional planning–Europe, Eastern. 4. Regional planning–Europe, Central.I. Sasse, Gwendolyn, 1972–II. Gordon, Claire E., 1963–III. Title. IV. Series.
HC240.25.E852H84 2004
341.242’2’0943–dc22
2004051673
1 098765432114 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents
List of Tables vi
List of Figures vii
List of Boxes viii
List of Maps ix
Preface x
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Logic of Enlargement Conditionality and 10
Europeanization
2. Communist Legacies and Regionalization 30
3. The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 61
4. Monitoring Conditionality and Compliance 85
5. Transition, Enlargement and Regionalization: 118
a Comparison of Hungary and Poland
6. Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 141
Conclusion 164
Notes 175
Bibliography 202
Statistical Appendix 218
Index 228
v

List of Tables
I.1 EC aid to the ten accession countries, 2004–06 6
1.1 Total PHARE commitments, contracts and payments 23
by country and sector, 1990–98
2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs 42
vi

List of Figures
I.1 Conventional model of conditionality 3
I.2 Process-based model of conditionality 4
5.1 Openness to EU inﬂuence on sub-national reforms 127
(Pécs 1999)
5.2 Perceptions of the impact of the EU on sub-national 136
reforms (Katowice 2000)
6.1 Elite opinions of the EU 149
6.2 Elite knowledge of EU-funded activities in the locale 150
6.3 Elite perceptions of what the EU ‘stands for’ 153
6.4 Elite opinions of the beneﬁt of EU enlargement to 155
the city
6.5 Elite opinions of the beneﬁt of EU enlargement to 156
the country
6.6 Elite opinions of who beneﬁts most from EU 156
enlargement
6.7 Elite opinions on the redrawing of administrative 157
boundaries
6.8 Katowice elites’ opinions on EU inﬂuence on Polish 159
regional reform
6.9 Sub-national elite identity 161
vii

List of Boxes
1.1 Three stages in the normative development of EC/EU 20
conditionality
6.1 Mechanisms of Europeanization 143
viii

List of Maps
1. EU-25 2004 xiv
2. Regions with GDP/head less than 75% of the EU 66
average (1997–98–99)
3. Regionalization in Hungary (NUTS II regions) 125
4. Regionalization in Poland (NUTS II regions) 134
ix

Preface
This book is based on research conducted within the framework of the
Economic and Social Research Council project ‘Elites and Institutionsin Regional and Local Governance in Central and Eastern Europe’
(Award no. L213252030) which formed part of the ESRC Programme
‘One Europe or Several?’ (OEOS). In over four years of research, includ-
ing large-scale ﬁeldwork in several EU accession countries, we have
beneﬁted from the support, encouragement and criticism of many col-
leagues and friends. The initial research project was devised by James
Hughes in 1998. Peter John (Birkbeck College) and Gwendolyn Sassemade valuable input into the initial research design, and helped to
reﬁne the methodology and interview schedules. The project was trans-
formed after some months of initial research into one that focusedmore speciﬁcally on the impact of EU enlargement. Gwendolyn Sassejoined as a main researcher and Claire Gordon was appointed as
Research Ofﬁcer. Our project has, thus, been a real team effort from the
outset and, thankfully, has remained so through to its end.
The original aim of the project was to explore economic and political
transition through a comparative study of the role of elites in the insti-tutional design and practice of governance at the sub-national levelacross six Eastern European post-communist states. The research
focused on ‘second’ cities. After a preliminary analysis the research
team recognized that one of the most critical dimensions of regional
policy and sub-national institution-building in the CEECs was the rela-
tionship between the European Union, enlargement conditionality,
central governments and local and regional elites, and consequently
we shifted our research efforts increasingly to exploring this nexus. The
project involved an extensive programme of interviews in ﬁve CEEC
candidate countries (Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia),
and in two ‘outsiders’ (Ukraine and Russia). Only the 287 interviews
completed in those four CEEC states that were among the group that
joined the EU on 1 May 2004 have been used in this book.
The ﬁeldwork was critically dependent on the assistance of several
academics and researchers from the candidate countries who assistedus with the interviews between 1999–2002: Dr Jüri Ruus of the
University of Tartu in Tartu (Estonia), Katalin Sule of the TransdnubianResearch Centre, Centre for Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of
x

Sciences in Pécs (Hungary), Dr Tanja Majcherkiewicz of the London
School of Economics in Katowice (Poland), Professor Igor Luks ˇicˇ of the
University of Ljubljana in Maribor (Slovenia). We express our profound
thanks to these colleagues and to all of the interviewees who gave theirtime freely and generously to assist us with the research. As we agreed
with the interviewees, we have preserved their anonymity. Similarly,
we would like to thank the ofﬁcials from the European Commission, inparticular from DG Enlargement and DG Regio, and the various
Country Delegations in Brussels who met with us to discuss our
research and helped to illuminate the complexities of enlargement.
We have also drawn ideas and inspiration from the workshops orga-
nized within the framework of the OEOS ESRC programme and a rangeof conferences at which we presented our ﬁndings. The most impor-tant of these were: the European Consortium for Political Research
Joint Sessions in Grenoble (April 2001) and Turin (April 2002); the con-
ference co-organized by James Hughes and Michael Keating on ‘EUEnlargement and the Regions’ funded by the Robert Schuman Centreand held at the European University Institute in Florence (May 2002);
the Central and East European International Studies Association con-
ference in Moscow (July 2002); the OEOS conference on ‘Convergenceand Divergence in the New Europe’ held at the University of Sussex
(July 2002); the workshop on ‘States of Transition in Europe: Linking
the Internal and International Dynamics of Change’ organized byGwendolyn Sasse at the LSE (June 2001); the ‘Opposing Europe’
seminar co-organized by Claire Gordon at the LSE (December 2002)
as part of the series of ESRC research seminars on ‘The ComparativeParty Politics of Euroscepticism in Contemporary Europe’ (ESRC no.R451265110); and the end of project OEOS policy dissemination
seminar titled ‘Institutional Reform, Citizenship and Civil Society in
the Enlarged Europe’ co-organized by James Hughes and DarioCastiglione (University of Exeter) and held at the LSE (March 2003).
We are also grateful for the moral support from several colleagues
within and outside the LSE. Dominic Lieven has been a considerateand inspiring head of department during the last two years of the
project, which in no short measure helped us to draw the book
to a conclusion. In particular we appreciate immensely the time andeffort taken by our colleagues and friends Waltraud Schelkle, Eiko
Thielemann, Margot Light, Klaus Goetz, Heather Grabbe, Frank
Schimmelfennig and Uli Sedelmeier, and Jan Zielonka, all of whomoffered comments, insights and encouragement of the work at the
various stages of its progress. The ESRC project funded three periods ofPreface xi

sabbatical leave (for James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Peter John)
which allowed us to fully concentrate our attention on the research
and were vitally important for the completion of the research and dataanalysis. James Hughes also thanks the Robert Schuman Centre forAdvanced Studies of the European University Institute in Florence for
awarding him a Jean Monnet Fellowship in the European Forum
for the academic year 2001–02.
Parts of chapters 3 and 6 draw on our previously published articles
and chapters ‘Conditionality and Compliance in the EU’s EastwardEnlargement: Regional Policy and the Reform of Sub-nationalGovernance’, Journal of Common Market Studies , Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep-
tember 2004); ‘Saying “Maybe” to the “Return to Europe”, Elites andthe Political Space for Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe’,European Union Politics , Vol. 3, No. 3 (September 2002); ‘EU Enlarg-
ement, Europeanisation and the Dynamics of Regionalisation in theCEECs’, in Michael Keating and James Hughes (eds), The Regional
Challenge in Central and Eastern Europe: Territorial Restructuring andEuropean Integration (2003); and the working papers published as part
of the One Europe or Several series (http://www.one-europe.ac.uk/).Full details of the outputs from the project are available on the ESRC’sRegard database (http://www.regard.ac.uk/).
Above all, we would like to thank Helen Wallace, the ﬁrst Director of
the OEOS programme, and currently Director of the Robert SchumanCentre, for commissioning the project and for her patience and under-
standing in allowing the project to be reshaped so soon after its inception.
She has been a generous mentor of our project and her encouragementhas been important for us in completing the ﬁeldwork, disseminating ourﬁndings and delivering the book long after her ofﬁcial involvement in the
ESRC programme had ended.
J
AMES HUGHES
GWENDOLYN SASSE
CLAIRE GORDONxiiPreface

List of Abbreviations
ACP/EC Africa, the Caribbean and the Paciﬁc Countries/European
Community
AWS-UW Solidarity Electoral Alliance-Freedom Union
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CEECs Central and Eastern European (Candidate) Countries
CEORG Central European Opinion Research Group Foundation
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CMR Comprehensive Monitoring Report
CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in EuropeDG Directorate-General of the EU
EBRD European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
ECU/ecu European currency unitFRY Federal Republic of YugoslaviaFSU/CIS Former Soviet Union/Commonwealth of Independent States
FYROM Former Yugoslav Republic of MacedoniaHDF Hungarian Democratic ForumIMF International Monetary Fund
ISPA Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession
NATO North Atlantic Treaty OrganizationNDP National Development Plan
NPAA National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis
NUTS Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentOEOS One Europe or Several? ESRC Research Programme
PAO Public Administration Ofﬁce (Hungary)
PHARE Pologne-Hongrie: aide à la reconstruction économique
PSL Polish Peasant PartyRDA Regional Development Agency
RDC Regional Development Council
SAPARD Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural
Development
Tacis Technical Assistance CIS
TEU Treaty on European Union
USAID US Agency for International Development
xiii

xiv
CROATIALUX.p0
EU 25 (1 May 2004)
Central and East European
Countries (CEECs)
Candidates for EU Membership
ITALYFRANCENETHERLANDS
CORSICA
SARDINIABELGIUMGREAT
BRITAIN
IRELANDN.
IRELAND
DENMARK
GERMANY
SPAINPORTUGAL
GREECEFINLAND
AUSTRIASWEDEN
NORWAY
ESTONIA
Tartu
Katowice
PecsMaribor HUNGARYCZECH
REP.
CYPRUSPOLAND
SLOVENIA
MALTALATVIA
ROMANIASLOVAKIA
BULGARIALITHUANIA
SWITZ.ICELAND
SICILYALBANIA
CRETELUX.
MAC.BELARUS
UKRAINERUSSIA
RUSSIA
B.-H.
YUGMOLDOVABlack Sea
Baltic Sea
AtlanticOceanMediterranean SeaTURKEYCROATIA
Map 1 EU-25 2004

Introduction
The EU’s accession strategy has proved a success. It has sup-
ported the candidates in their drive to reach precisely deﬁnedgoals at a number of staging posts. The most powerful motiva-
tion for achieving the necessary reforms was the clear and
credible prospect of joining the EU.
Günter Verheugen, Commissioner DG Enlargement
1
The key question on the EU side was not whether enlargement
should take place, but how and when. But the ‘when’ and‘how’ were difﬁcult problems with a continuing fear in many
quarters that the applicant countries had not made sufﬁcient
progress or preparation to apply the EU rules and policies.
Most important, the key factor in ensuring a good preparation
was the conditionality of the accession process.
Graham Avery, Chief Adviser DG Enlargement
2
We were like mice in laboratories.
From authors’ interview with an Estonian ofﬁcial in Brussels3
This is the end of World War Two.
Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla on the result of the Czech
referendum on EU accession4
The absence of alternative ideological or systemic paradigms for the
Central and East European Candidate Countries (CEECs), other than theappeal of a vaguely deﬁned ‘return to Europe’ encapsulated by EU mem-
bership, has underpinned the study of enlargement. There is a wide-
spread assumption of power asymmetry derived from the supposedly
1

unprecedented scope for EU conditionality to both shape the policy and
structural outcomes in the new member states, and to promote the
normative assimilation of their elites. In recent studies of conditionalityand enlargement there is an evident tendency to mythologize the posi-tive relationship between the two especially where, as can be seen above,
authors have been closely involved in the process itself. This con-
ventional understanding of conditionality emphasizes the asymmetricpower relationship between the actor applying the conditionality and
encouraging ‘socialization’ and the complying and ‘socialized’ actor on
the receiving end. The EU’s conditionality for the accession of newmembers is thus seen as constituting a powerful incentive and disciplin-
ing structure for the CEECs. In principle EU conditionality should give
the Commission a sanctioning mechanism to impose compliance withthe Copenhagen criteria and the adoption of the acquis communautaire
(hereafter acquis ) on the CEECs as a precondition of their joining the
Union. If this logic of conditionality works in practice then we should beable to track clear causal relationships between the Commission’s use ofconditionality and the compliance of the candidate countries through
policy, or institutional adjustments and normative change. In the
absence of direct causal linkages, has EU conditionality been a myth?
We depart from the conventional approaches to the study of condi-
tionality, which tend to take its causative effects as a given, and thenproceed to examine its outcomes. This book argues that the phenome-non of conditionality is insufﬁciently understood within a narrowly
positivist framework whereby EU conditionality is seen as a formal
instrument for the transposition of the EU’s rules, norms and institu-tional templates to the CEECs.
5It is a study of the phenomenon of EU
conditionality as well as an empirical investigation of the process of itsoperation. It asks whether we can attribute any ‘Europeanizing’ effectsfrom EU conditionality in institution-building, norm construction(including attitudinal impacts) and convergence with regard to enlarge-
ment. We aim to demonstrate that our wider process-based deﬁnition of
EU conditionality, which includes not only the formal technical require-ments on candidates but also the informal pressures arising from the
behaviour and perceptions of actors engaged in the political process,
offers a deeper understanding of the enlargement process as a dynamicinteraction between international incentives and rules and domestic
transition factors.
The phenomenon of conditionality as an ideal type has certain essential
characteristics. It should involve a consensus on its substance between theactor(s) applying it and the actor(s) who must fulﬁl it. It should be deﬁned2Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

by clear criteria which are veriﬁable. The fulﬁlment of conditionality
should be readily subjected to testable benchmarks. The power ﬂows in
the process of employing conditionality should be readily transmitted andunderstood by all concerned, and should lead to outcomes (whetherrewards or sanctions) that have been explicitly predetermined (Figure I.1).Introduction 3
Rewards/Sanctions
Powerful actor
(socializer)Weak actor
(socialized)
Compliance
Figure I.1 Conventional model of conditionality
Our analysis focuses on three key issues arising from the use of con-
ditionality and the role of the Commission as the EU’s institutionalmotor for enlargement. Firstly, we examine the nature of EU condi-tionality. What were its main elements and were they consistent overtime? Moreover we locate EU conditionality within a historical context
of Western conditionality. Secondly, we focus speciﬁcally on the role
of the Commission as the key EU agency with the chief responsibilityfor monitoring and reporting on the candidates’ progress in meeting
the conditions for membership. Did it act as a uniﬁed actor with a clear
understanding of conditionality and with a coherent and consistentapproach to compliance and implementation in the CEECs? Moreover,
did the Commission communicate the requirements of conditionality
clearly and consistently to the candidate states over time? How impor-tant was conditionality for strengthening the Commission’s capacity to
ensure compliance and ‘systemic convergence’ between the EU and the
candidates? Thirdly, we explore how effective conditionality was byexamining the actual policy and institutional outcomes in the CEECs,and by testing how resilient the domestic institutions were in resisting
conditionality, instrumentalizing it and preferring endogenous policies
and structures over EU ‘models’. Thus our deﬁnition of conditionalityis one that deﬁnes it by the process of its application rather than by
an ideal-type assumed power relationship (see Figure I.2). It is the inter-
action between multi-level actors, perceptions, interests, differentrewards and sanctions, temporal factors, institutional and policy
compliance, that characterizes conditionality.

To analyse the impact of conditionality this book takes a policy track-
ing approach to evaluate CEEC compliance in one key policy area that
was generally regarded as being of critical importance for enlarge-
ment: regional policy. In particular, we analyse how the candidatesconﬁgured regional institutional architectures in the context of the
requirements of EU regional policy. This process of regionalization
is understood in this book as the territorial and administrativeconﬁguration of regional governance, both in the form of elected
regional governments and administrative-statistical units. This broad
deﬁnition is applied because both forms of regionalization wereundertaken in the CEECs and because the process was increasingly
shaped from 1996 by the need to conform with the EU’s NUTS
classiﬁcations which are the basis for allocations of the EU’s primaryredistributive instrument, the Structural and Cohesion Funds. This isnot to say that regionalization did not impinge upon the sub-national
arena of regional and local politics but it should not be confused with
regionalism, for whereas the former is concerned with the territorialand administrative conﬁguration of the state the latter involves the
political mobilization of regional identities and interests.
6Moreover,
the sub-national arena of regional and local politics is critical for theinterrelated processes of post-communist political and economic
transition as well as EU eastward enlargement. For transition to beconsolidated, political and economic changes must be embedded at all
levels of governance. Similarly, EU membership will have an immense
impact on how sub-national actors and institutions would operate.Thus, this empirically grounded book aims to facilitate a better under-
standing of the linkages between the processes of transition and
enlargement.
Four conditions frame the analysis of the trends of regionalization
presented in this chapter. First, regional policy should have been oneof the most signiﬁcant elements in the incentive structure for enlarge-ment given its ﬁnancial implications for both the Union and the new
members. Along with agricultural subsidies, regional policy will be a4Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
Conditionality Multi-level actors
Perceptions
Rewards/sanctions
Timing
Compliance
Figure I.2 Process-based model of conditionality

main conduit for ﬁnancial aid ﬂows from the EU to the new members.
The CEECs stand to beneﬁt substantially from the EU’s structural funds
and regional and cohesion policy upon accession to the Union on 1May 2004. The ﬁnancial package agreed at the Copenhagen Council inDecember 2003 committed €40.8 billion to the ten new members in
2004–06, over half of which (€ 24.45 billion) is to be spent on ‘struc-
tural actions’ (see Table I.1).
7The new member states are also expected
to be the main beneﬁciaries of regional funds in the next budgetarycycle, from 2007–13, irrespective of how the budget is reformed. Thisincentive structure, underpinned by the power asymmetry characteriz-ing the relationship between the EU and the CEECs, left considerable
scope for EU conditions, rules and norms to shape institution-building,
perceptions and practices in the transition countries. The institutionalconﬁgurations, capacities, norms and attitudes at the regional and
local levels in the CEECs will have a direct impact on the future expen-
diture of signiﬁcant EU funds. One could therefore expect a signiﬁcantand detectable impact of the EU on sub-national governance in the
CEECs as well as a degree of convergence in the institutional outcomes
across these states. In fact, regional policy was one of the most pro-tracted issues in the negotiations between the EU and the CEECs.
Previous analyses of eastward enlargement have described the formal
architecture of regional institutional changes in the context of admin-istrative and economic reforms during the 1990s.
8Our analysis
speciﬁcally aims to explain the extent to which this architecture wasdesigned and evolved in relation to enlargement conditionality.
9
Secondly, despite the prominent role of regional policy within the
EU, the institutional environment at this level of governance is ﬂexiblyarranged. Regional governance is a sovereignty issue of the memberstates, and the EU’s emphasis in regional policy is on process andoutcome rather than on particular institutional models. Accordingly,
theacquis is very ‘thin’ on regional policy. The divergent models inside
the EU and the poverty of legal requisites in the acquis counterbalance
the potential leverage of EU conditionality on the candidate countries.We can therefore hypothesize that the impact of EU enlargement on
the CEECs has been constrained by the lack of institutional detail tiedto conditionality in this policy domain.
Thirdly, the apparent thinness of the acquis in the ﬁeld of regional
policy contrasts with the centrality of this domain in EU policy-making and its budgetary implications. The lack of a complex set of
explicit and codiﬁed institutional rules in the acquis and even the
Structural Funds Regulations suggest a wider scope for informal or ‘soft’Introduction 5

6Table I.1 EC aid to the ten accession countries, 2004–06 (as ﬁnalized in December 2003) (million euros)
Country Objective 1 Objective 2 Objective 3 Interreg Equal Cohesion Total
fund*
Czech Rep 1,454.27 71.30 58.79 68.68 32.10 936.05 2,621.19
Estonia 371.36 0.00 0.00 10.60 4.07 309.03 695.06
Cyprus** 0.00 28.02 21.95 4.30 1.81 53.94 113.44
Latvia 625.57 0.00 0.00 15.26 8.03 515.43 1,164.29
Lithuania 895.17 0.00 0.00 22.49 11.87 608.17 1,537.70
Hungary 1,995.72 0.00 0.00 68.68 30.29 1,112.67 3,207.36
Malta 63.19 0.00 0.00 2.37 1.24 21.94 88.74
Poland 8,275.81 0.00 0.00 221.36 133.93 4,178.60 12,809.70
Slovakia 1,041.04 37.17 44.94 41.47 22.27 570.50 1,757.39
Slovenia 237.51 0.00 0.00 23.65 6.44 188.71 456.31
Total 14,959.64 136.49 125.68 478.86 252.05 8,495.04 24,451.18
Notes
* Average; ** Including the Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (FIFG).
Of the Objective 1 funds 61 per cent will be from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), 25 per cent from the European Social Fund (ESF),
12 per cent from the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF)-Guidance Section and about 2 per cent from the F IFG.
Source: inforegio news, Newsletter, No. 118, January 2004.

conditions as well as individually tailored guidelines and pressure from
the Commission during the enlargement process. Informal condition-
ality increases the likelihood of inconsistency in the message commu-nicated by Commission ofﬁcials over time. Depending on the power ofdomestic actors, the impact of the EU could still be signiﬁcant, though
it could also be ambiguous or even contradictory. An inconsistent
Commission policy would contribute to confused, incomplete or weakinstitutional outcomes in the CEECs. By tracing the developments in
the Commission’s approach to regional policy before and during the
accession process, the domestic policy responses of the CEECs, and theinteraction between the two, this book attempts to shed light on these
dynamics.
10
Fourthly, the pre-accession negotiations have exhibited a ‘regional
deﬁcit’ in that they have been conﬁned to the Commission on the EU
side and national elites from the executive structures in the CEECs. Thelack of involvement of sub-national actors in the preparation for EUregional policy suggests a cross-national preference for minimalist and
formal rule adoption, including a bias against politically empowered
regions. Moreover, one could expect disengaged sub-national elites tobe more Eurosceptic than the acculturated ‘Europeanized’ national
elites. The role of elites at the regional and local levels tends to be over-
looked by theorists and practitioners whose focus is on the power andbargaining strategies of national elites and the nation-state level as the
critical units of analysis in studies of transition and enlargement.
11Too
little attention has been paid to the hierarchy of elite power within
states, not only as regards the power and networks of different sectors ofthe elite, but also to the ways in which power may be institutionalizedat different territorial levels of governance.
Sub-national elites are important policy gatekeepers in two key
respects: ﬁrstly, they are critical for coherent rule compliance and theimplementation of whatever new rules of the game are devised; and
secondly, they act as a key mechanism for embedding commitment to
the rules by the ﬁltering of norms into society. Our research into theengagement and perceptions of sub-national elites aims to demonstrate
empirically how deeply embedded these norms are and where there are
different intensities of elite assimilation into EU norms. Existing differ-ences in the normative commitment of elites in the candidate coun-
tries to EU norms is a useful predictor of future commitment and
compliance strategies and problems.
Our policy study is comparative across institutions, countries and temp-
orally. Chapter 1 of this book sets out the conceptual framework, drawingIntroduction 7

on the literature on Europeanization, conditionality and transition. We
offer a critical exploration of the relationship between conditionality
and Europeanization. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the historical-structural legacies of sub-national government informing the initial start-ing conditions and choices faced by the CEECs at the outset of
transition, and charts the broader policy trends in regionalization across
all the CEEC states. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of the Commission’sapproach to regional policy and regionalization. We analyse interviews
conducted with ofﬁcials in the Commission and the CEEC delegations in
Brussels to illustrate the perceptions of the key actors during the negotia-tion process and the interactions between the Commission and the
CEECs. Chapter 4 presents a systematic analysis of the EU’s main moni-
toring and enforcement mechanisms during the enlargement process, inparticular the Commission’s annual Regular Reports and their emphasis
on the need for regional ‘administrative capacity’. Chapter 5 offers a
comparative case study of regional policy and regionalization byanalysing the two main trends of regionalization in the CEECs: administrative-statistical regionalization (Hungary) versus democratized
regionalization (Poland). The interaction between domestic politics and
external incentives and pressures regarding regional reforms is com-pared. Based on large-scale elite interviews in four key regional cities in
the CEECs, Chapter 6 examines the extent of normative and attitudinal
‘Europeanization’ among the sub-national elites.
As we shall see, the conclusion to this book emphasizes the ﬂuid
nature of conditionality, the inconsistencies in its application by theCommission over time, and the weakness of a clear-cut causal relation-ship between conditionality and policy or institutional outcomes inthe CEECs. The domestic institutional changes in the CEECs in the
context of EU adaptational pressures have varied signiﬁcantly across
countries, with considerable room for manoeuvre for domestic actors.These ﬁndings are in line with the tentative conclusions drawn from
some of the more empirically grounded studies of Europeanization
which have detected lower levels of Europeanization and convergencewith regard to political structures than in speciﬁc policy areas. While
real or perceived external pressures have interacted with domestic tran-
sition politics to shape the institutional design during the latter stagesof regional reform in the CEECs, on balance, domestic institutional
choices made during the early transition period outweigh and actually
constrain the importance of external factors during enlargement.Moreover, sub-national elites have by and large been disengaged from
the accession process. Their decisional calculus has been dominated by8Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

immediate problems related to the transition process. While they are
not actively Eurosceptic, these elites still exhibit a relatively low level
of connectedness with the EU as an institutional actor and frameworkfor policy-making, and thereby pose a major challenge to the effectiveimplementation of EU policy in the short to medium term.
The analysis draws on two main bodies of evidence. Firstly, we con-
ducted a large-scale programme of structured elite interviews with atotal of 287 sub-national elites from key regional cities in four candi-
date countries: Tartu in Estonia, Pécs in Hungary, Katowice in Poland
and Maribor in Slovenia. These interviews were supplemented by 35interviews conducted with middle to high-level ofﬁcials in the EU
Commission and CEEC delegations in Brussels. The interviews were
carried out over a three-year period (1999–2002). Secondly, we providea systematic study of the EU’s own documentary record of the enlarge-
ment process, primarily through its Opinions and Regular Reports on
the CEECs. Consequently, our study investigates enlargement at threelevels – the European, the national and the sub-national.Introduction 9

1
The Logic of Enlargement
Conditionality and Europeanization
Despite the importance of conditionality during the current EU
enlargement, there are few theoretical or empirical studies of the
concept. The study of EU enlargement conditionality is characterized
by a concentration on the analysis of its correlation with macro-leveldemocratization and marketization, rather than empirically tracking
clear causal relationships in policies and institution-building. Most
studies tend to focus on two cumulative levels of conditionality.
Firstly, they attach great salience to the broad ‘principled’ or normative
conditionality established by the Copenhagen European Council in
December 1993, the so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’, which was subse-
quently elaborated in the Accession Partnerships for individual candi-date countries from 1997. Secondly, they emphasize the ‘technical’
preconditions for the CEECs to accelerate the adoption of and adapta-
tion to the acquis in order to fulﬁl all the responsibilities of member-
ship. The speedy adoption of the acquis was the benchmark for
measuring CEEC progress on accession – a condition that only Austria,
Finland and Sweden, all advanced industrial countries, had previously
met prior to membership. There is a wide spectrum of opinions as to
whether EU conditionality has had positive or negative effects on the
CEECs. Grabbe views the way that conditionality has operated as afactor that has potential to frustrate moves toward greater European
integration in the medium term because conditionality involves costs
to the CEECs in the implementation of what is essentially a ‘movingtarget’ within an ‘evolving process that is highly politicized, especially
on the EU side’.
1Smith, in contrast, stresses that conditionality per-
forms the vital task of enforcement of the ‘admission’ rules to theUnion ‘club’.
2There is a consensus among these studies that the condi-
tionality for the adoption of the acquis has strong causal effects in the
10

steering of policy and institutional change in the CEECs. Grabbe
describes the levers of conditionality available to the Union as ‘power-
ful tools to shape institutions in CEE’ which made policy-makers‘choose EU models because of the incentives and constraints imposedby the EU accession process’.
3She has also argued that the ‘readiness’
of the CEECs to join is a ‘political question on the EU side’.4
Schimmelfennig et al. have qualiﬁed these assumptions by treating the
EU’s normative democratic conditionality as a ‘reinforcement strategy’
rather than a strong causal mechanism in its own right.5The emphasis
in these studies tends to be on the salience of conditionality at themacro-political level, rather than tracking speciﬁc impacts on policy-making in the CEECs. In general, EU conditionality has been viewed asan important lever for ‘democracy promotion’, and is seen as having
made a signiﬁcant contribution to ‘foreign made democracy’ in the
CEECs.
6
While existing studies have assessed how the EU has constructed
conditionality and described the mechanisms by which the EU hasattempted to implement it in the CEECS, the fundamental problem withthe use of the concept of conditionality remains that it is underpinnedby positivist assumptions. Positivist assumptions that conditionality gen-
erates compliance and or adaptation are tautological and, thus, are not
analytically meaningful since they tell us nothing about the substantivenature of conditionality or the nature of the compliance and the rela-
tionships between the two. These relationships can only be analysed by
observation of how they work together in the real world. Two key prob-lems remain very weakly analysed and explained. Firstly, there is the
question of the scale of commitment and effectiveness of compliance of
the CEECs in their policy implementation in response to conditionality.We need to distinguish better between the transposition of the acquis
into domestic law, which the EU’s own Regular Reports tend to equatewith a successful outcome of conditionality, and the actual implementa-tion of policy. The latter can only be demonstrated empirically by track-ing policy changes over time, and this is precisely where there is a gap in
the existing study of EU enlargement.
7In studying conditionality and
compliance it is important to distinguish between the effective imple-
mentation of policy derived from EU conditionality, which is generallyweak, and rhetorical or formal conditionality and compliance, which isstrong.
Secondly, the analysis of conditionality tends to be too one-dimen-
sional, in the sense that it does not sufﬁciently contextualize the EUconditionality of the 1990s’ enlargement process by comparing it withEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 11

previous, parallel, and sometimes overlapping models and applications
of international conditionality, or locate it within the evolution of
internal EU debates and developments that have shaped its applica-tion. EU enlargement conditionality is in fact more comprehensible if it is seen as part of a broad pattern of ‘Western’ international con-
ditionality. Conditionality involves the exercise of power. It involves,
according to Schmitter, ‘the deliberate use of coercion – by attachingspeciﬁc conditions to the distribution of beneﬁts to recipient countries
– on the part of multilateral institutions’.
8This kind of implicitly co-
ercive conditionality reached new levels of intensity in the EU’s
enlargement process to the CEECs. In the case of EU conditionalitythree categories of power are inherent in the conditionality for enlarge-ment: economic power, bureaucratic power and normative power. The
Commission’s motivations and actions in driving enlargement have
not been systematically explored. Nevertheless, the growing power ofthe Commission and the EU’s own drive for integration and supra-
national governance is strongly correlated temporally with the process
of enlargement in the 1990s. Having been tasked by the CopenhagenCouncil of June 1993 to manage the enlargement process the
Commission has instrumentally employed its enhanced role as one of
the levers to justify the further expansion of its competences throughthe new constitution and to engage in budget maximization.
9
Conditionality toward the CEECs was strongly shaped by the transfer
of development aid models, policies, personnel and institutionalculture, and consultants from the bilateral aid programmes of memberstates, and from the EU’s existing development aid programmes to theDeveloping World.
10The EU was engaged in the provision of aid or
‘development assistance’ to the CEECs from 1989, that is to say severalyears prior to the beginning of the enlargement process. The EU’s maininstrument for delivering aid to the CEECs was PHARE, created in 1989and run by the EC Commission as a conventional developmental
aid programme modelled on those provided to the Third World.
11
Consequently, within the Commission an institutional culture thatviewed assistance to the CEECs in terms of an asymmetric power rela-
tionship between ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’ was strengthened. It wasonly in 1997 that a review of PHARE’s mission reoriented it and tied itexclusively to the goals of ‘accession’, primarily, the preparation of the
CEECs for the obligations of membership and, in particular, assistance
with the speedy transposition of the acquis . The ‘eastward enlargement’
of the EU became a gargantuan extension of the EU’s external develop-
mental strategy, the key difference being that the prospective members12Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

would be steadily connected to and ultimately included within the
EU’s internal economic developmental strategy for its own poorer
regions through its regional policy and structural and cohesion funds.EU conditionality also reﬂects a shift in the economic interest of domi-nant EU member states away from their long-standing ‘historic’ ties
with former colonies in the ACP (encapsulated by the defunct Lomé
Convention) to a focus on the ‘Europeanization’ of the CEECs and thepotential vast new markets in the region.
The argument has been made that opposition from existing member
states to eastward enlargement was outﬂanked by ‘rhetorical entrapment’resulting from the process by which the EU deﬁned the rationale for
enlargement and its conditionality. Since the project of European integra-
tion was legitimated around a collective identity based on liberal normsof capitalist democracy, and as enlargement conditionality was steadily
infused with these norms, the EU became politically obligated to open
membership to those European states which complied with thesenorms.
12The plausible counter-argument to this view traces the logic of
enlargement back to national interests and realpolitik.13The rhetoric sur-
rounding enlargement and EU conditionality was strongly embued by amission civilisatrice approach of ‘Europeanization’. The perception was
promoted whereby the political and economic models in core memberstates were seen as normatively ‘superior’ and readily transferable to dis-
place ‘inferior’ models in candidate countries, and where a speedy substi-
tution of values by candidates and their compliance with EU norms wasequated with the quality of their commitment and ‘Europeanness’.
However, intergovernmentalism in EU policy-making also means that in
many policy areas there are different traditions, norms and modelscompeting with each other. Consequently, there is no single EU policy
template in many policy ﬁelds and its norms are generally so nebulously
stated and erratically enforced that they lend themselves to wide interpre-tation. Aid dispersion is a case in point, as the models of aid and
conditionality pursued by member states varied widely, from the pater-
nalistic and interest-based models of former colonial powers such as theUK and France, who have strong records of post-colonial tied aid, to
the more normatively driven and humanitarian oriented aid strategies of
the Scandinavian countries.
International conditionality
International conditionality is embedded in the delivery of foreign aid
and development assistance, whether bilateral or multilateral. StudiesEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 13

of this kind of conditionality are generally focused on Western aid to
the Developing World. This kind of aid conditionality is typically seen
as involving ‘donors’ in pursuit of their own self-interest, and ‘recipi-ents’ who are subject to donor conditionality and, consequently, are ina position of dependency.
14In principle, aid conditionality in the
Developing World provides a reservoir of debates about policy practicesand ideas that can inform our understanding of EU economic assis-tance to the post-communist states of Eastern Europe and the processof EU enlargement. While there is no commonly agreed deﬁnition of
international conditionality, the literature tends to agree on three
main aspects. Firstly, as Stokke explains: ‘conditionality is not an aimin itself but an instrument by which other objectives are pursued’.
15
Secondly, there has been a steady evolution and expansion of con-
ditionality since the end of the Second World War, with an increasing
linkage between aid disbursement and conditions imposed by donors,and a greater complexity in the nature of the conditionality. Two maincategories of conditions are employed: positive conditionality takes the
form of rewards for compliance, and negative conditionality involves
punitive actions and sanctions to secure compliance. Thirdly, whilesuperﬁcially one might differentiate between altruistic and interest-
based motivations in the giving of aid, studies generally accept that
donor interests are paramount and the developmental interests of therecipient are secondary. This suggests that one of the key deﬁning
characteristics of the concept of conditionality is that it operates in an
environment of power asymmetry between dominant and subordinateactor(s). Furthermore, the domestication of donor norms through aid
conditionality has tended to override and marginalize local knowledge
and supplant rival models as they are necessarily presented as ‘inferior’.
The early Cold War period in the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a
congruence of complementary changes in the management of aid that
embedded two key notions of the aid conditionality of the European
colonial era: the transference of superior norms, and the tying of aid todonor security and economic interests. The ﬁrst was evident in the way
that the development needs of the emerging post-colonial states were
managed. The new institutions of global governance (the UN, the IMFand World Bank) became the key international agencies for the man-
agement of aid, and new channels for the post-colonial transfer of
norms, expertise and technology from the advanced Western states tothe Developing World.
16Concurrently, the US protected its security,
economic and sectional interests in Europe through the Marshall Plan,which was conditional on recipient states having an ‘open market14Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

economy’ and agreeing to the procurement tying of aid.17The latter
was an attempt to promote and induce systemic change and is a direct
antecedent of system-transforming aid conditionality that becamestronger in the late 1970s. A serious side effect of these aid practiceswas, in effect, a ‘double whammy’ for the recipients to the extent that
they not only were subject to economic conditionality and procure-
ment tying, but also these instruments meant that the value of the aidwas often signiﬁcantly eroded by higher costs and reverse ﬂows of
funds to donors through the purchase of ‘expertise’ from private sector
consultants.
International conditionality has evolved from ‘ﬁrst generation’ eco-
nomic conditionality to a ‘second generation’ of combined economicand political conditionality. The ‘ﬁrst generation’ conditionality wasthat of IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programmes followingon from the development of IMF formal guidelines on conditionality
in 1968. During the 1970s IMF conditionality for credits to debt-
plagued states in the Developing World was increasingly targeted atpromoting a global trend for neo-liberal macroeconomic reorganiza-
tion. A policy orthodoxy developed around the adoption of ‘Chicago
School’ neo-liberal economic policies of market liberalization, budget-ary austerity and ﬁnancial administrative reform. Historically, the
aims of international aid are concerned with the promotion of ‘sys-
temic and private sector interests – economic, cultural, ideological,strategic and/or political – of the donor country’. In sum, then, aid is
‘an instrument to pursue foreign policy objectives’.
18The result was ‘a
world economy more closely integrated and more intrusive in the
domestic policy affairs of developing countries’, while social unrest andprotest grew.
19
There was a paradigm shift in ‘Western’ aid conditionality in the early
1990s to take advantage of the political opportunities created by the fallof communism. To supplement neo-liberal economic policies andadministrative reform, policy-makers placed a much greater emphasis onthe export of ‘Western’ political norms, in what is often referred to as
‘democracy promotion’ or ‘democracy-building’.
20The new conditional-
ity involved a much greater intrusiveness by international organizations
for systemic change in particular states. The substantively new characterof ‘second generation’ conditionality is that it is based on a notion thatgained sway among Western governing elites around 1989–90 which
held that there was a ‘symbiosis between democracy and develop-
ment’.
21In fact, the idea that there is a correlation between democracy
and development, in the basic sense that ‘economic abundance’ providesEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 15

ideal conditions for democracy, had been made by Lipset and other
modernization theorists thirty years earlier, and debated at length in the
1960s.22
There is a clear temporal relationship between ‘second generation’
conditionality and the fall of communism, but the latter was not atrigger. The shift to a more overt coupling of economic and politicalconditionality developed over time during the 1980s. There are strongreasons why neo-liberal ideology favours such a linkage in principle.
Markets prefer non-interventionist or weak but stable states. Liberal
Democracy is the preferred means of delivery because it dilutes statepower and allows a greater latitude for the free play of markets.
23The
fall of communism and the removal of Soviet hegemony in EasternEurope created new security and economic national interests for theUSA and the member states of the EU, and opened new opportunitiesfor them to advance and protect these interests. It also created new
dilemmas for the application of international conditionality, for as
Stone’s study of IMF lending to post-communist states demonstrates,where US foreign policy interests were paramount the credibility of
conditionality generally was undermined.
24
The EU and conditionality
The question of the leading role of the EU in systemic transformationin Eastern Europe falls within what has been referred to as a ‘Western
project’ to encourage democracy in Eastern Europe.
25In fact, there is a
clear and logical progression between the traditional agenda of inter-national aid conditionality and the new role of EC and EU conditional-ity. Following the collapse of communism in 1989, aid conditionalitywas one of the main instruments employed by the EC/EU to expand its
inﬂuence in Eastern Europe and to promote systemic change. Initially,
the primary mechanism was direct tied aid through the PHARE techni-cal assistance programme created in 1989 along with the G24 Poland
and Hungary aid programme (though the Commission coordinated
both). Subsequently, once the enlargement process became a seriousnear-term prospect from 1996–97, PHARE aid incentives and other pre-
accession instruments like SAPARD and ISPA were supplemented by
the even greater potential beneﬁts of massive developmental assistancefrom EU structural funds. Consequently, one of the principal beneﬁts
for the CEEC candidates to comply with enlargement conditionality is
the coffers of developmental aid that will be open to them once theyare members of the EU. 16Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The new European agenda of coupling economic and political con-
ditionality in its policy towards the post-communist states of Eastern
Europe originated with an OECD Development Assistance Committeereport at the time of the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989.
26The
EBRD, established in May 1990, was the ﬁrst multilateral organizationto entrench a link between economic and political conditionality in itsfounding charter, though this has proven to be a formal rather than anactual policy.
27The rhetorical pace in European politics was set by the
UK when in a speech at the Overseas Development Institute in Londonin June 1990 British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd speciﬁcally relatedthe new policy agenda of tying aid in Africa and elsewhere with ‘goodgovernment’. Economic success, Hurd argued, ‘depends to a large
degree on effective and honest government, political pluralism, and
observance of the rule of law, as well as freer, more open economies’,and that henceforth aid disbursement would be inﬂuenced by a reci-
pient country’s record on ‘pluralism, public accountability, respect
for the rule of law, human rights and market principles’. Furthermore,the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe, according to Hurd,
offered ‘ample evidence that economic and political liberalization are
inseparable’. Rather enigmatically, he stated that ‘aid must go where itwill do good’.
28For Hurd there was a clear link between the capacity
of the ‘West’ to promote Liberal Democracy and its aid disbursementpolicies, whether in Africa or Eastern Europe. The British position wasfollowed by a cascade of similar policy statements from other Europeanand Western governments during 1990 and 1991 which transformed
the concept into a new Western orthodoxy.
29In November 1990,
USAID made ‘progress towards democracy’ a condition for its aid.
Following Hurd’s speech, several signiﬁcant landmarks paved the
way for political conditionality to become rapidly embedded in EC
norms. The European Council took up the political conditionality
agenda and the June 1990 Dublin Summit issued a Declaration on the
importance of human rights and good governance in Africa.30The
CSCE’s Paris Charter for a New Europe of November 1990 embodiedthe new rhetoric about democracy, and at the Rome Summit inDecember 1990 democracy promotion and human rights protectionwas extended to become a normative principle of the EC’s external
relations in general.
When the EC, contemporaneously with the collapse of communism,
forged a policy consensus on the broad mission and principles of con-ditionality in its external relations, and in particular towards the states
undergoing post-communist transition in Eastern Europe, it developedEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 17

a uniquely comprehensive compound conditionality of the old ‘ﬁrst
generation’ IMF/World Bank economic conditionality of market
liberalization and administrative reform embodied in the ‘Washingtonconsensus’, and the ‘second generation’ political conditionality ofdemocracy promotion, rule of law and respect for human rights. It is
this totality of economic and political elements, and the attempt to
operationalize them simultaneously across a whole region of states,that makes EU conditionality exceptional in its scope and intent. It
informed the Europe Agreements between the EC and the Central and
East European states in 1990–91 which gave most preferential eco-nomic status on the basis of the new marketizing, democratizing and
human rights criteria. Two key decisions followed which further
embedded the linkage between economic and political conditionalityin EC policy. Firstly, the Luxembourg Summit of June 1991 resulted in
the ‘Declaration on Human Rights’ which proclaimed respect for uni-
versal human rights as one of the ‘cornerstones’ of the EC, stressed theattachment of the European Council to ‘the principles of parliamen-tary democracy and the primacy of law’, including the protection of
members of minorities, and declared these to be the basis for ‘equitable
development’.
31Secondly, the Council and the representatives of
member states meeting of 28 November 1991 passed a resolution onEC strategy for development which instituted a ‘common approach’ onlinking ‘good governance’ with development aid and included punitivesanctions for non-compliance.
32
These declarations formed the framework for the human rights and
democracy clauses of the Maastricht Treaty of European Union agreedin February 1992 and effective from November 1993. Title 1, Article F(2) of the treaty made respect for human rights as guaranteed by theEuropean Convention a general principle of EC law, ipso facto inform-
ing ‘all of its activities’. Title 5, Article J. 1 (2), creating the CFSP
Second Pillar, made the ‘development and consolidation of democracyand the rule of law’ as well as ‘human rights and fundamental free-
doms’ principle objectives of the EU’s external relations.
33Title XX
Article 177 (2) of the Treaty of Amsterdam of 1997 restated the policy
commitment to linking development aid to a ‘general objective ofdeveloping and consolidating democracy and the rule of law and tothat of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’.
34
In fact, the new declared conditionality policy was saturated with
inconsistency in its implementation, the details of which are well doc-umented.
35There have been numerous cases demonstrating the incon-
sistency with which the EC, Western governments and multilateral18Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

organizations applied conditionality and their backsliding from sanc-
tions when their own selﬁsh economic and security interests were con-
sidered to be paramount to normative political conditionality. Theclearest cases include: China (after 1989), Indonesia (1991), Algeria(1992), Nigeria (1993), Turkey (1995), Colombia, Egypt and Israel.
36
There have also been many examples from the Former Soviet Union
post-1991 where Western economic and security interests have largely
negated the link between political conditionality and economic assis-tance, in particular with regard to Russia and the other resource-richstates such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Consequently, the post-communist experience of aid conditionality
offers many additional cases to validate Stokke’s assessment thatWestern aid conditionality ‘has been conﬁned to a very large extent to
declaratory policy’.
37
There was also much incoherence from the EU itself, with ‘each
country touting its own model’.38One suspects that an additional com-
plication was the clash of political cultures over how to manage condi-
tionality within the Commission itself, whose functionaries are recruitedfrom across the member states and therefore are acculturated by verydifferent political, economic and social models of governance and devel-
opment. Such differences do not co-exist easily in a bureaucratic setting,
and certainly do not make for consistency in administrative action.There is, moreover, the underlying dynamic of any aid conditionality
employed by a multilateral organization, namely, the conﬂicts of inter-
ests among the donors. In the case of enlargement to Eastern Europe theconﬂicting interests and divisions among existing member states are
well established.
39
When the European Council at Copenhagen in June 1993 issued a
declaration of the broad norms that new members would be required to
meet, thereafter known as the ‘Copenhagen criteria’, it drew directlyfrom the norms previously established by the CSCE Paris Charter andthe EU’s own Europe Agreements with the East European states, which
were being drafted at the time. The Copenhagen declaration of condi-
tionality was simply a succinct restatement of the, by then, well estab-lished norms in the EU’s external relations (with the exception of the
reference to minority rights protection), but it now became the founda-
tion for EU enlargement to proceed (see Box 1.1).
40If the conclusion
drawn by studies of ‘second generation’ international conditionality isthat it is a ‘declaratory policy’, which is not meaningfully or consistentlyapplied when it conﬂicts with Western self-interest, then what is theimplication for EU conditionality? Does it ﬁt within this trend?Enlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 19

20Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
Box 1.1 Three stages in the normative development of EC/EU conditionality
Europe Agreement
‘REAFFIRMING their commitment to pluralist democracy based on the rule of
law, human rights and fundamental freedoms, a multiparty system involvingfree and democratic elections, to the principles of a market economy and tosocial justice, which constitute the basis for the association;
‘RECALLING the ﬁrm commitment of the Community and its Member
States and of Hungary to the process of the Conference on Security andCooperation in Europe (CSCE), including the full implementation of allprovisions and principles therein, particular the Helsinki Final Act, theconcluding documents of the Madrid and Vienna follow-up meetings and theCharter of Paris for a new Europe.’
Source : Excerpt from the Europe Agreement with Hungary (1993), L 348
(31/12/93).
Copenhagen Criteria
‘The European Council today agreed that the associated countries in Central
and Eastern Europe that so desire shall become members of the EuropeanUnion. Accession will take place as soon as an associated country is able toassume the obligations of membership by satisfying the economic andpolitical conditions required.
‘Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of
institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights andrespect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioningmarket economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressureand market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes thecandidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership includingadherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union.
‘The Union’s capacity to absorb new members, while maintaining the
momentum of European integration, is also an important consideration inthe general interest of both the Union and the candidate countries.’
Source : European Council (1993), Presidency Conclusions para. 7 A (iii),
Copenhagen European Council, 21–22 June.
Treaty of European Union 1997
Article 6 (ex Article F)
‘1. The Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect forhuman rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principleswhich are common to the Member States.’

Enlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 21
EU ‘democracy promotion’
A multilateral strategic vision and consensus on broad principles
inevitably runs into difﬁculties when tested against state-speciﬁc inter-
ests and objectives. In the realm of post-communist economic transitionthere was a consensus among the advanced democracies around the
need for a ‘shock therapy’ application of neo-liberal policies known as
the ‘Washington consensus’. There was no such consensus, however,about the ‘Western project’ for consolidating democracy. The tenets of
Western economic orthodoxy had no equivalent in the political sphere
as there were radically different views as to what were the most appropri-ate institutional models for Eastern European countries. Consequently,the EU and the US competed by promoting rival models through their
aid delivery programmes.
41
The political environment in which conditional economic aid is
delivered is critical for determining the credibility of the conditionality
and the results of the aid. Western aid to post-communist states, andUS aid in particular, was often targeted at supporting corrupt leaders or
elites committed to a ‘pro-Western’ foreign policy and the neo-liberal
economic agenda, to the detriment of democratic institutional devel-opment and political accountability. This tendency took an extreme
form in Western policy toward Russia and the Former Soviet Union,
but was also a policy trend that was evident in some Eastern Europeanstates.
42While Western support is widely seen as having been critical
for the democratic consolidation of many states in Eastern Europe, andsigniﬁcant progress toward democracy in others, there is a widespreadfailure to sufﬁciently distinguish either between periods of conditional-
ity or the different forms of conditionality applied to Eastern Europe.
The EU’s economic interests and developmental objectives had
caused it to re-divide post-communist Europe into three main zonesof inﬂuence in the early 1990s. The ﬁrst zone was the EU’s ‘near
abroad’ of states in Central and Eastern Europe, which as the mostlikely candidates for EU membership were designated the ‘CEECs’.
43Article 49 (ex Article O)
‘Any European State which respects the principles set out in Article 6 (1)may apply to become a member of the Union.’
Source: Excerpts from the Consolidated Version of the Treaty of European Union
(1997).

Geographically contiguous to the EU this zone offered an immense
new market for the EU, where states as a whole were viewed as more
subject to and willing to comply with EU conditionality, and where‘democracy promotion’ was, in any event, progressing apace irrespec-tive of the EU. Secondly, the FSU/CIS zone, which was of vital
economic and security importance to the EU, but where the prospect
of EU membership was remote, if not inconceivable.
44Thirdly, the
Balkans zone of the FRY, which was a paramount security concern forthe external relations of the EU but where membership was seen as amore distant prospect.
Enlargement conditionality required new EU commitments in terms of
the establishment of new ﬁnancial instruments, institutional structuresand expertise. Although PHARE was created in 1989, budget lines tosupport democracy promotion and human rights were only created in
late 1991, that is to say after the ﬁrst democratic elections in most Central
and East European states. During the 1990s, aid budgets for the CEECsexpanded dramatically, as did the competences of the Commission
to manage the disbursement of aid. One of the interesting features of
the set-up of PHARE within the Treaty on European Union is the ratherunusual, and from an EU law viewpoint anachronistic, division of com-
petences between the First and Second Pillars regarding policy towards
Eastern Europe. PHARE is funded from the Commission’s budget, and theCommission administers it, but it is legally in the Second Pillar, that is, itis subject to the control of the European Council. The explanation for
this highly unusual arrangement is the desire by member states to control
external relations with Eastern Europe and to constrain the developmentof the Commission’s competences or the European Parliament’s inter-
ference in this respect. This situation contrasts with Development Aid,
which is funded by member states separately. In the critical transitionperiod of 1991–96, the EU provided 57 per cent of the total cumulative
G24 PHARE assistance amounting to over 6.6 billion ecus.
45
The bulk of the EU’s efforts and aid disbursements were channelled
to the support of economic transition and the building of viable
market economies as opposed to support for political transition,institution-building and democratic consolidation. Paradoxically, thisimbalance in aid was most signiﬁcant during the early transition phase
in 1989–95, prior to the initiation of the enlargement drive. An indica-
tion of the priority attached to ‘democracy-building’ is that PHARE’sactivity heading ‘civil society and democratization’ accounted for just
approximately 1 per cent of the total PHARE funds distributed in the
CEECs (see Table 1.1). Furthermore, there is an inherent tension, if not22Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

in practice a contradiction, between the EU’s accession objectives for
PHARE from 1997 of building institutional capacity in arenas necessary
for the market and improving the ‘absorption’ capacity (that is, thecapacity to apply for and spend EU funds appropriately) of states, andthe consolidation of democratic accountability over state decision-
making in these nascent democracies. The fact that the overwhelming
bulk of EU economic assistance channelled through PHARE was tar-geted on the priorities of the economic, rather than the political,
dimensions of transition suggests that the EU was intentionally seeking
to inﬂuence the sequencing of transition in this direction. Moreover,the EU prioritized aid delivery to those countries that were considered
to be most economically important for the EU, as about one-third of
PHARE funding allocated in 1990–96 went to just two countries:Poland (20.9 per cent) and Hungary (10.3 per cent).
46
Consequently, although the EU’s rhetoric stressed that the political
Copenhagen criteria must be fulﬁlled before the accession process
could begin, in practice EU aid has been overwhelmingly targeted onimproving the market economies of the CEECs. This prioritization inEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 23
Table 1.1 Total PHARE commitments, contracts and payments (inc
cross-border cooperation) by country and sector, 1990–98 (in million euros)
Country
Partner country Commitments Contracts Payments
Albania 493.13 347.82 315.88
Bosnia & Herzegovina 282.33 206.98 152.11
Bulgaria 746.94 518.13 479.44
Czech Republic 389.73 246.12 196.46
Estonia 162.83 116.76 95.48
FYROM 167.33 127.68 93.57
Hungary 864.04 586.59 566.92
Latvia 206.57 149.56 115.07
Lithuania 272.03 197.33 146.46
Poland 1,731.51 1,386.04 1,251.30
Romania 971.85 675.75 598.13
Slovakia 253.23 149.45 132.95
Slovenia 131.29 95.65 77.67
Ex-Czechoslovakia 232.71 228.85 229.17
Multi-country 880.69 701.07 544.67
Horizontal 1,104.68 963.51 593.81
programmes
Total 8,890.88 6,697.3 5,589.10

aid disbursement for economic development and the administrative
and institution-building and capacity-building required by advanced
market economies has been strengthened by the accession process.47
The pattern of aid suggests that the EU focus on economic develop-
ment, while expecting the CEECs to meet political conditionality
more or less independent of aid, is driven by the EU’s overridingconcern with markets rather than democracy or human rights.
Conditionality dilemmas in the acquis
The widespread use of the term ‘conditionality’ both in EU and academic
sources suggests that there is a perceived consensus over its meaning. In24Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
Table 1.1 Total PHARE commitments continued
Sector
Sector Commitments Contracts Payments
Administration & public 761.23 395.35 291.58
institutionsAgricultural restructuring 562.60 459.01 438.57Civil society and 104.84 79.79 64.95democratizationEducation, training and 1,012.09 959.93 867.51researchEnvironment and nuclear 753.12 544.62 447.19safetyFinancial sector 268.68 257.82 248.76Humanitarian, food and 533.02 521.07 501.52critical aidInfrastructure (energy, 2,145.59 1,298.24 958.04transport and telecoms)Approximation of legislation 84.07 73.81 19.66Consumer protection 12.91 12.63 8.97Private sector, privatization 1,156.02 924.98 815.81& restructuring, SMEsIntegrated regional measures 340.15 124.91 83.34Social development and 272.84 233.64 202.37employmentPublic health 105.57 98.92 88.46Other (multidisciplinary, 778.15 712.59 552.39general TA. etc.)
Total 8,890.88 6,697.3 5,589.10
Source : PHARE 1998 annual report; http://www.europa.eu.int/ comm/enlargement/pas/
phare/statistics/index.htm.

principle, conditionality should be based on a catalogue of succinct cri-
teria, as well as clear enforcement and reward mechanisms to ensure the
credibility and predictability of its application. The Copenhagen criteria,however, do not deﬁne the benchmarks or the process by which EU con-ditionality could be enforced and veriﬁed. The perception that there is
clarity is sustained by the ubiquitous use of the metaphor of the ‘club
rules’ in describing EU conditionality. Thus, conditionality is seen as agatekeeping mechanism embodying clearly identiﬁable and generally
understood norms, rules and institutional conﬁgurations that are applied
consistently and with some continuity over time to regulate the entry ofnew members. Even if we accept that conditionality is an implicitly
coercive instrument wielded by the Commission to secure certain desired
policy or institutional outcomes, we must also recognize that the fea-tures of EU conditionality, in particular its prescriptive essence, are far
from being well deﬁned. The ambivalence and ambiguity is evident in
the way that the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ were highly politicized and oper-ationalized in a selective manner. By the time enlargement negotiationsaccelerated from 1997 it is doubtful that the political conditionality as
laid out in the Copenhagen criteria was a signiﬁcant factor in the process
at all, as the democratization of the CEECs was generally accepted as areality and a starting-point for the other three Copenhagen conditions.
Nevertheless, the creation of a ‘queuing’ system for enlargement in
December 1997 ostensibly strengthened EU conditionality as a sig-niﬁcant lever for prioritizing economic conditions and regulation
through the Council’s ‘Accession Partnerships’ with each candidate
country. The priority was to secure the transposition of the acquis rather
than to promote the consolidation of democratic society. The Opinions,Accession Partnerships and the Regular Reports on each candidate
country, as we shall discuss in Chapter 4, created a new vocabulary of
loyalty and new means of auditing convergence and compliance.
48
The weight of conditionality, consequently, fell on the CEECs
through the ‘technical’ requirements to adopt the 80,000-odd pages oftheacquis . The conditionality of the acquis itself, however, was ﬂawed
by its inherent structural characteristics, and especially its unevenness.In fact, an acquis consisting of some 80,000 pages of law and regula-
tions, and divided into thirty-one chapters for ease of adoption duringenlargement, could not be uniformly conditional across policy areas.Fundamentally, the acquis reﬂects the evolution in the power balance
in the EU between the competences of member states and the EU-levelinstitutions. The acquis is supposed to dress states with the technical
accoutrements of laws and regulations that build their capacity toEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 25

operate effectively as new members of the Union, but the pattern of
technical detail in the acquis is not uniform but is in fact highly
uneven both across and within policy areas. Thus, where the detail in
theacquis is ‘thick’ on a particular policy issue we can plausibly expect
it to provide strong leverage for the Commission to achieve particular
outcomes in its interactions with the CEECs, but where the acquis is
‘thin’ we should expect the explicit leverage, and thus the formal con-
ditionality, to be weak. Consequently, a useful initial hypothesis would
be that the EU conditionality does not have a uniform logic, but rather
has a wispish nature that shifts and transforms depending on thecontent of the acquis , the policy area, the country concerned, and the
political context.
This ambivalence and vagueness of the acquis across policy areas, we
argue, has signiﬁcantly weakened the impact of conditionality. We
follow Olsen’s observation that the EU’s effectiveness at institution-
building and policy change even within the Union has varied acrossinstitutional spheres such as competition policy, monetary affairs,external and internal security, culture and so on, and thus there is
need for greater sensitivity to the ‘dynamics of various institutional
spheres and policy sectors’.
49Moreover, Olsen also notes that clear
causal relationships between the EU and changes at domestic policylevels are difﬁcult to trace since causation operates in both directions.Such processes are, he believes, best studied as ‘an ecology of mutualadaptation’.
50This kind of ﬂexible method of case study, we believe, is
the most appropriate method for analysing the application of EU con-ditionality during enlargement. We distinguish between two main cat-egories of conditionality: between formal conditionality , on the one
hand, which embodies the publicly stated preconditions as set out in
the broad principles of the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ and the legal frame-
work of the acquis , and informal conditionality , on the other hand,
which includes the operational pressures and recommendations
applied by actors within the Commission to achieve particular out-
comes during their interactions with CEEC counterparts in the courseof enlargement. These two forms of conditionality are not always easily
distinguishable since often they operate in tandem. Similarly, we dis-
tinguish between the adoption of the acquis , a largely formal process of
legislative engineering, and adaptation to the acquis , a largely informal
process, by which mainly legal and institutional norms and practicesare adjusted to the new ecology of enlargement.
The analysis which follows in subsequent chapters demonstrates how
the unevenness of the acquis was reﬂected in a great deal of variation in26Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

the leverage of conditionality, and gave the Commission and the CEEC
governments a wide degree of ﬂexibility. Thus, while thinness and
ambiguity in the acquis reduced the formal conditionality of enlarge-
ment, paradoxically it increased the space for the use of informal condi-tionality, giving the Commission greater scope for ambiguity and
imprecision in its policy recommendations to the CEECs. Similarly,
while thinness of the acquis may have reinforced the power of the
Commission to make politically determined assessments as to whether
a particular candidate country had complied with the conditionality for
membership, it also gave candidate countries more leeway over select-ing from the menu of the acquis in an à la carte fashion.
51
Conditionality and Europeanization
As with the term conditionality, the term ‘Europeanization’ has become
a part of the common currency of academic debates about the nature of
the EU and the project of European integration, and yet it remains arather nebulous notion. There is still no coherent explanatory frame-work for the concept though there is a general emphasis on how dom-
estic adaptation to European norms, structures and policies is facilitating
greater systemic convergence and advancing European integration. Thesigniﬁcance of speciﬁc domestic ‘context conditions’ in the study of
Europeanization has only been emphasized fairly recently.
52Similarly,
the ‘Europeanizing’ effect of EU conditionality for eastward enlargement
to the CEECs has so far been generally assumed rather than empiricallyinvestigated. As with the term ‘conditionality’, ‘Europeanization’ impliesa consensus on rules and their transmission mechanisms within the EU,
with clear-cut benchmarks, and consistency and continuity in rule
adoption over time.
Per deﬁnitionem ‘Europeanization’ suggests a ‘top-down’ diffusion of
common political rules, norms and practices in Europe, but there aresigniﬁcant differences of opinion as to the substantive content of theconcept and whether it has meaningful effects within national political
systems.
53When deﬁned broadly, Europeanization is most often associ-
ated with ‘domestic adaptation to the pressures emanating directly or
indirectly from EU membership’.54It is also seen as a process that
involves ‘the penetration of national and sub-national systems ofgovernance by a European political centre and European-wide norms’.
55
With speciﬁc reference to EU regional policy Europeanization has been
described as ‘a positive external shock for promoting institution-
building, learning and policy-making innovation at regional and localEnlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 27

levels’.56At its most fundamental, Europeanization is viewed as ‘ways of
doing things’ which are ﬁrst deﬁned and consolidated in the making of
EU decisions and then incorporated into ‘the logic of domestic discourse,identities, political structures and public policies’.
57A key assumption in
this regard is the existence of a mis-ﬁt between state-level and EU-levelrules and norms, which pushes the former to converge with the latter.Studies by political scientists of ‘Europeanization’ tend to emphasize oneor more of three key dimensions: its source at the EU level (though there
is a lack of precision as to which EU institutions are responsible or have
the most effect), its impact on advancing the convergence of institutionsand policies, and its role in the norm diffusion essential for ‘European’
identity construction.
58By linking institution-building and identity-
formation at the European level with domestic change in member states,
‘Europeanization’ has come to be widely regarded as a main transmissionbelt for the project of European integration.
59
A fundamental problem for the concept, however, is that macro-level
and policy-level studies are inconclusive about the causal effects of‘Europeanization’ and demonstrate the persistence of deep structuraldivergences across national and policy contexts. Macro-analyses of politi-cal structures detect lower levels of Europeanization and convergence
than policy-level studies.
60Studies have suggested that variation of out-
comes is inherent in the process of ‘Europeanization’. For some the varia-
tion is ‘incremental, irregular, uneven over time and between locations’,suggesting a kind of determinism or developmental inevitability to‘Europeanization’.
61For others the variation in impacts and outcomes is
more deeply structural and indeterminate because the ‘domestic impactof Europe varies with the level of European adaptation pressure ondomestic institutions and the extent to which the domestic context …facilitates or prohibits actual adjustments’.
62Such weaknesses of
‘Europeanization’ as an analytical tool in the study of EU governancehave led Goetz to question whether it is ‘a cause in search of an effect’.
63
Nevertheless, it is generally assumed that the enlargement of the EU
has conﬁrmed the successful operation of ‘Europeanization’, where con-ditionality has been employed by the EU as a ‘reinforcement strategy’ tosecure compliance with its norms.
64In principle, there were incentives
for CEEC elites to engage in a kind of competitive ‘European emulation’and to cooperate with the Commission. The ideocratic and institutionaldebilitation arising from the exit from communism and the subsequentpolitical and economic transitions, potentially made the key actors and
elites in the CEECs weak protagonists in the accession negotiations. The
EU’s capacity to pressure for policy and institutional change was further28Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

enhanced by the fact that the CEECs were transitioning countries that
were engaged contemporaneously in fundamental systemic reform that
required good relations with the EU. The adjustment to be made by theCEECs, moreover, often involved satisfying conditionality in ‘new’policy areas that had had no clear equivalents under the previous com-
munist regime. The process involved wholesale changes in rule of law
and regulation, policy-making, institution-building and normativeadaptation.
As we shall discuss in the following chapters, however, the detailed
analysis of the application of EU conditionality in practice does notsubstantiate positivist assumptions about norm transfer and ‘European-
ization’, but rather demonstrates the ambiguities, inconsistencies and
contradictions of the process of enlargement.Enlargement Conditionality and Europeanization 29

2
Communist Legacies and
Regionalization
Studies of transition generally focus more on the immediate events
and processes and less on the historical background which shapes it.
Nevertheless, historical legacies and the extent to which a transition
state has a ‘usable past’ are generally recognized as having an impor-tant bearing on the transition outcome.
1The term ‘historical legacy’
and the issue of ‘usability’ are, however, not systematically researched
in the study of transition. Paradoxically, the more routinely employed
concepts of ‘path dependency’ and ‘initial starting conditions’ tend tofocus on the predetermining effects of decisions taken at the outset of
the transition process rather than exploring the inﬂuence of histori-
cally rooted factors which may be equally important.
2Moreover, it is
also important to take into account not only whether a ‘usable past’ is
present in a particular case but also whether the elites that drive the
transition process are willing to draw on it. The decisional calculus ofelites is of central importance in transition studies as successful reforms
are viewed as being largely dependent on the attitudes and behaviour
of elites and how differences between elite segments are negotiated in
the ‘games’ of transition.
3This kind of emphasis on the role of elites in
implementing universalizable progressive change tends to overlook
how the context in which transition occurs can have signiﬁcant con-
straining effects on the outcome. Transition states are not a tabula rasa.
Schmitter’s deﬁnition of transition as an ‘interlude’ between regimes is
much too passive in this regard as it suggests a pause and thus fails to
capture the essential dynamic attributes of transition, which involve
the transformation of one type of regime into another. Consequently,
the legacy of the old regime will continue to loom large over the tran-
sition process itself. Transitions involve the dismantling of the old
regime, generally by the transformation of old elite power networks
30

and the institutional structures which they colonize. It generally
involves signiﬁcant change to the institutional architecture of the state
organization. This is not to say that such structures and institutionsmust be completely displaced, as this would not be a transition but arevolution. Logically, then, transition is the bridging period between
regimes which links the old and new structures and elites in a dynamic
interplay of change, which is mainly characterized by new forms of‘institution-building’.
One of the most underestimated aspects of post-communist tran-
sitions in Eastern Europe is the extent to which they are inﬂuenced bythe legacies of the communist regimes.
4While we do not wish to argue
that historical legacies overly determine post-communist transitionoutcomes, the communist-era institutions were the starting-point fordomestic political struggles and the interaction with EU conditionality.A speciﬁc institutional legacy, including in some cases politicized
and regional-level governing structures, meant that post-communist
political choices and EU conditionality did not evolve in a vacuum.Moreover, historical legacies also underpinned the resurgence of
national and regional identities in the context of transition and
Europeanization.
5As Wolczuk has pointed out: ‘Democratization,
administrative efﬁciency, ﬁscal considerations, EU accession require-ments and so forth were cited as the compelling reasons for regional-ization, rather than the accommodation of diversity.’
6
On coming to power after the Second World War communist leader-
ships rode roughshod over pre-existing regional and local identitiesand territorial organization, and imposed changes to the territorialorganization of power based on two main logics; ﬁrstly a power logic,to ensure that state organization was adjusted to secure the power
and control of communist parties; and secondly, a functional logic, to
conﬁgure state organization in a way that maximized the efﬁciencygains expected from the centrally planned economy. This chapter
explores the communist legacy in the organization of sub-national
governance structures in Eastern Europe to highlight the complexitiesof reform faced by post-communist leaderships as they grappled with
reform during transition. It demonstrates how one of the key legacies
inherited from communism was a systematic weakness of effectiveinstitutions of governance at the regional and local levels. The reason
for this legacy is straightforward. Communist systems were highly cen-
tralized authoritarian systems that were institutionally engineered tosecure compliance with communist rule. Communist systems were
organized around the Leninist principles of ‘democratic centralism’,Communist Legacies and Regionalization 31

the key element of which was the subordination of nominally inde-
pendent state structures to the will of the party organization, which
itself was highly centralized.
The second part of this chapter explores the different approaches
taken by the newly established post-communist governments after
1989 to the reform of sub-national government. In their search for
alternatives to the communist model, the post-communist regimeshave often looked back to their pre-communist pasts, and to the coun-
tries of Western Europe. Equally, they have been faced with a dilemma
of adapting structures that were inherited from communism andwhich have an economic functional logic, for example the communist
era statistical-planning units. One of the ﬁrst democratizing reforms
implemented by the new post-communist governments was thereintroduction of local and municipal self-government. In contrast,
the establishment of meso-level or regional structures of government
has been a highly contentious arena of reform, and as we shall discusslater, in many states it was stalled by party political struggles andcrowded reform agendas, thus leading to a somewhat anachronistic
situation where power was strongly centralized. In the latter part of
the 1990s, the regional reform issue was given a new urgency by theEU enlargement process and in particular by a framing of the debate
and negotiations over regional policy in a way which created pressure
to accelerate regionalization in order to adapt the institutionalenvironment to the EU’s regional policy requirements.
The communist model of sub-national governance
Though governing systems in the countries of Eastern Europe were
characterized by a considerable degree of authoritarian uniformity
throughout the communist period, this was in stark contrast to thevaried history and evolution of sub-national government arrangementsin the region up until 1945. Prior to the communist takeover, there
was a diversity of local government systems in the countries of Central
and Eastern Europe. In those countries and regions which had beenpart of the Habsburg empire, such as Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia
(the Czech lands), and Galicia, a relatively strong system of local self-
government had been established. This system remained in place withcertain alterations until 1945.
7The Polish lands had been divided
among the three neighbouring imperial powers until 1918 and as aconsequence were governed according to three different systems ofsub-national administration – the Prussian, Russian and Habsburg –32Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

with differing degrees of centralization and decentralization over time.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War a number of
Eastern European countries initiated decentralizing local governmentreforms. In the case of the Baltic republics, newly absorbed into theSoviet Union, the highly centralized, hierarchical system of soviets
subject to party control was quickly introduced. Likewise, following
the communist takeover in Central and Eastern Europe, the countriesof the region proceeded to established systems of government based on
the soviet model, which allowed no room for genuine democratic
accountability in local or regional self-government.
8
Under the communist one-party-state system, the role of local gov-
ernment was viewed radically differently from the principles espousedby the liberal democratic systems. In the post-war Western Europeandemocracies, issues of local democracy and the search for the mostefﬁcient mechanisms for service provision predominated.
9The essential
role of local government structures was closely tied to two overridingpriorities of the communist system of power: ﬁrstly, the maintenance ofpolitical control by the party and, secondly, the efﬁcient managementof the centrally administered economic system (primarily the imple-
mentation of central planning decisions in the localities). These two
goals inﬂuenced the shape and functioning of sub-national governmentarrangements as well as the organizational and territorial reforms that
were introduced at different times during the communist period.
Broadly, the prioritization of the power logic took precedence in theearly period of communist rule, while the prioritization of the func-
tional logic came to predominate in the later years of communist rule as
the economic system increasingly failed to deliver growth and commu-nist parties found themselves overwhelmed by managerialism in the
shift from an extensive to a more intensive pattern of economic produc-tion.
10For the communist party leaderships both of these objectives
necessitated a highly centralized, hierarchical system of sub-national
governance embodied in the organizational principle of ‘democraticcentralism’. This principle had two main elements: that the decisions ofhigher party bodies were binding on lower party bodies, and that party-
state organs and party secretaries at every level were formally selected
by the party membership, either directly or indirectly (although inpractice the selection was made by the higher echelons of the party
apparatus).
11
Given that ‘democratic centralism’ was a common underlying orga-
nizational principle the actual conﬁguration of local government struc-
tures was relatively homogeneous across Eastern Europe during theCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 33

communist period. A vertical pyramidal system of ‘elected soviets’
(councils) extended down from the national structures at the centre to
the regional, district and local levels. In the case of federal systemssuch as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia there wasalso a constituent republic level. These organizational structures pro-
vided a façade of popular legitimacy for the regimes while real power
was highly centralized to communist party structures. While localcouncils were supposedly democratically elected, the elections were a
sham as candidates were vetted by the communist party apparatus, and
in most cases electorates were offered no choice of candidates. Localcouncils and their executive apparatuses were subject to multiple levels
of oversight by parallel and generally overlapping hierarchies, by verti-
cally superior bodies in the soviet administrative hierarchy, and byhorizontally superior bodies in the territorial equivalent communist
party apparatus and its higher bodies. A key mechanism of control
employed by the communist party was the nomenklatura system of
appointments, which allowed it to approve all important positions inpolitical, economic and social life, and saturate the elite structures with
its members. The key personnel at each level generally held equivalent
posts in party and soviet bodies, and the key power-holder at theregional and local levels was the party secretary. In this so-called
‘command-administrative’ system the lines of control and communica-
tion moved along the vertical hierarchies, top-down, and there was alack of horizontal interaction, and accountability in general, across
different levels of government and between local and regional govern-
ments.
Under the soviet system there was no authoritative separation
between representative bodies of local government (in generic terms
the ‘soviet’) and the public administration (the executive council of
the soviet). In addition, in line with the emphasis in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology on social unity, conﬂicts of interests between the
national, regional and local level were mediated in secret by the com-
munist party. In other words there was no need for the representationof local interests, because either these were synonymous with the inter-
ests of the party, and therefore the country as a whole, or alternatively
these were manifestations of the phenomenon of ‘localism’, which wasassumed to be in opposition to the party and thus constituted a threat.
In principle then, the role of sub-national government structures was
to act as a ‘transmission belt’ for party control from the central govern-ment level down through the structures of the state. In reality as
socialist countries modernized and became more complex, regional34Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

and local leaders (both in the state and party structures) had to be
power-brokers, balancing and mediating between the centre and
the local interest.12The economic means at their disposal, however,
were limited as local government competences were characterized by a‘gulf between the fairly wide and unspeciﬁed functions to be fulﬁlled,and the lack of ﬁnancial and other resources available for theirfulﬁlment’.
13
As the institutions of sub-national government were an appendage
of the communist party in the localities, they became an importantmechanism for implementing the ‘leading and guiding role’ of theparty in the country. Organized in a dual but parallel and intersectinghierarchy of party and state institutions, the state administrative units
were charged with the implementation of party policy decisions taken
at the centre, while the party organs at each level were responsible forexercising ‘control’ over the implementation process. Not surprisingly,
there was a considerable divergence between the principles behind the
organization of the system and the way it actually functioned. In prac-tice the roles of party and state organs were often blurred; party
ofﬁcials were under pressure ‘from above’ to meet plan targets and thus
ended up having to interfere in day-to-day management decisions inorder to circumvent bottlenecks and other problems arising from the
inherent structural defects of central planning. This intensiﬁed author-
ity leakage from the state structures to the party apparatus, and led toan actual hollowing out and supplanting of the state by the party.
The particular form of organization of the soviet-type centrally
planned economy with all the important (and many minor) economicdecisions being taken by the planning agencies and sectoral (branch)ministries at the centre, created an additional chain of control of sub-
national government – the ministerial structure. Similar to the state and
party vertical line structures described above, the ministerial system wasstructured in vertical hierarchies from the branch ministries in the
centre down to the economic enterprises in the localities, in some cases
with the presence of intermediary managing units at the regional level.The branch ministries operationalized the central plans through their
enterprises in the localities. The centrality of the plan to communist
society meant that economic enterprises also often supplanted localgovernment by performing important service provision locally (build-
ing roads, running schools and hospitals, providing welfare services and
so forth). The functional importance of the managers was often trans-lated into political dominance of the party apparatus in many areas,thus further undermining the authority of local government structures.Communist Legacies and Regionalization 35

Moreover, the fact that the ministerial system was based on the sectoral
organization of the economy whereas the party-state apparatuses were
structured along territorial lines was a major source of tension in thecommunist system and posed a perennial problem of coordination oflocal government. This tension between sectoral and territorial manage-
ment was one of the main contributing factors to the intermittent
waves of economic and administrative reform that were introducedthroughout the communist period in the countries of Eastern Europe.
14
The territorial–sectoral problematic was exacerbated by the fact that the
economic organization of each country into planning regions (for the
convenience of the sectoral planning and administrative authorities)did not necessarily coincide with the political territorial organization ofthe party-state.
15These functional problems with the one-party state
and the command economy provided the main impetus for perestroikaunder Gorbachev.
16
During the communist era most states in the region made
attempts at local government reform. Given the weakness of politi-cal accountability and the coercive power of the communist state,territorial boundaries were changed according to shifting politicaland economic exigencies with little or no concern for the historical
and socio-cultural identities attached to particular regions and areas.
Public administration, as Surazska et al. have argued, was consideredto be ‘a short-term organizational task rather than a long-term insti-
tutional one’.
17The nature of territorial organization and reorganiza-
tion varied depending on the orientation of different leaderships
and the goals behind the particular reforms. Notwithstanding inter-mittent efforts to maximize the efﬁciency of territorial organiza-tional arrangements for the operation of central planning (for
example by changing the number of territorial units, re-weighting
the relationship between sectoral and territorial units, and shifts inthe balance of competences between central, regional and local gov-
ernance units), there was a pattern of continuity in the basic institu-
tions of sub-national political and economic governance in Centraland Eastern Europe. In fact, the basic institutional architecture in
the late 1980s was more or less unchanged from that which had
been established in the post-1945 period when communist partiescame to power across the region. The reforms (with the exception of
the federal reforms in Yugoslavia in 1974, and Czechoslovakia in
1968) did not fundamentally alter the highly centralized nature of the communist system of governance and the largely impotent
structures of local government. 36Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The relatively stable continuity that characterized the communist
organization and operation of sub-national governance systems in
Eastern Europe is diametrically opposed to the trend towards decentral-ization and deconcentration which emerged to varying degrees in thecountries of Western Europe in the post-war period. Devolving respon-
sibilities to the regions (or at the very least establishing deconcentrated
state organs at the sub-national level) was not only seen as a conduitfor providing improvements in the delivery of services but also was
viewed as an important mechanism for raising low levels of public par-
ticipation and empowering citizens at the local level, and thus exertinga check on central government. The idea that competences should be
rooted at the levels which were most appropriate for delivering good
governance is a rather ambivalent one, but it is embodied in the princi-ple of ‘subsidiarity’ in the EU, ﬁrst formally adopted as an integral part
of the EC’s regional policy in 1988 and later entrenched by the Treaty
of Maastricht (1992).
18
The trend for the rationalization of smaller local government units
into larger entities was common to both Eastern and Western Europe,though the rationale was different. Since the 1970s, states in WesternEurope have undergone major reforms of regional and local govern-ment that have reduced the number of territorial authorities, in many
cases endowing them with new competences and in some cases devolv-
ing new powers. This process was partly driven by strategies for mod-ernizing service provision and, from the early 1980s, by ‘New Right’
ideology that favoured ‘shrinking the state’ through privatization and
the use of private sector agencies to deliver public goods at the locallevel. In contrast, the system of economic management in communist
countries meant that the party-state organs were responsible for the
entire formal economy and not just key services. Though economicpolicy-makers and planners in Eastern Europe, especially in the late
communist period, were also motivated by the need to improve service
provision and were seeking ways of improving economic performancein the economy as a whole, the notion of ‘shrinking the state’ or‘reining in the state’ was anathema in the context of the soviet-style
communist system. For much of the period communist leaderships
failed to recognize that the economic problems that dogged theireconomies were derived from structural ﬂaws in the centrally planned
economy itself. Even those reforms which introduced some element of
decentralization, such as Kadar’s ‘new economic mechanism’ weredriven more by a goal of technocratic and managerial improvements to
central planning rather than fundamentally changing its modusCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 37

operandi or ideological foundations.19Furthermore, the use of territor-
ial reorganization to create larger regional structures and to rationalize
the distribution of communes and villages into larger intermediarystructures was often directed at breaking up the power bases of regionalleaders who were seen as acting too independently of the control of
the communist party in the centre.
20
The communist-era legacy described above directly impinged upon the
post-communist transition debates about the reform of sub-national gov-ernment. The communist legacy involved tiers of local and regional state
institutions which had little ﬁnancial or planning responsibility, andperformed the function of a systemic transmission belt for ‘top-down’
party directives. Moreover, these tiers of state administration were
designed to control participation and act as a check on spontaneouspolitical mobilization ‘from below’.
Transition and the reform of sub-national governance
Following the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe,
the newly installed democratic governments moved quickly to reform
their systems of local government. In a reaction against the over-centralization of the communist era all the countries in the regionpassed legislation in the early 1990s granting broad rights of auton-
omy to local self-governing units and abolishing or signiﬁcantly cur-
tailing governance structures at the regional level, which was the levelmost associated with the former communist party apparatus through
the regional party secretaries.
21The reforms of the early transition
period established a ﬁrm legal basis for the jurisdictional separation of
central and local governments, with the system of self-government atthe lowest level enjoying the most autonomy, while central govern-ments retained a strategic role of supervising the legality of local gov-
ernment activities and controlling the funding arrangements.
22In the
absence of provisions for the regional tier, central government ran the
administration at the county level and above. Thus the centralizedmanagement of many governance functions persisted, largely throughthe proliferation of deconcentrated units of state administration, that
is, state administrative bodies that were located locally but controlled
and funded centrally. An exception to this rule was Hungary, wherethe HDF passed a 1990 Law on Self-Government which instituted a
prefect-like system of Commissioners of the Republic who oversaw
local government operations and the activities of local branches ofstate administration in seven regions and the capital. This system was38Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

abolished by the socialist government through amendments to the
law in 1994 (see Chapter 5).23
Having taken this major step towards democratization at the local
level, the new national governments opted to delay decisions over
the organization and functions of the regional or meso-levels of gov-ernment. The reasons varied from country to country but generallyincluded: ﬁrst, a reluctance to decentralize further fearing a loss of gov-
ernment control of political and economic transition; second, the
limited resources at the disposal of central government; third, the deephostility among pro-democracy parties towards the perceived ‘conserv-
ative’ regional tier of government due to the pivotal role of regional
party secretaries under communism; fourth, a lack of consensus amongthe main political parties about how to reorganize the meso-tiers,
including how to reconﬁgure the state territorially, the number of
regions, and the extent of devolution of competences; ﬁfth, a political–-ideological cleavage between more reformist and neo-liberal national
ruling elites and more conservative regional and local elites, where old
communist elites remained inﬂuential; and sixth, an unwillingnessamong the newly empowered local-level elites to relinquish powersupwards to a regional level.
The immense rent-seeking opportunities inherent in administrative
power during transition provided a sub-text for this struggle overreform. In addition, electoral sequencing also had a damaging effect on
centre–regional–local relations and the potential for institutional
reform. In many cases the different sequencing of national and localelections, combined with political cycles, led to situations of con-
frontation between ideologically opposed central and local govern-
ments as was the case in Hungary from 1990 to 1994, Poland from1993 to 1998, and Romania from 1992 to 1996. Such territorializedpolitical conﬂicts slowed down the process of decentralization, and
indeed, in some cases resulted in recentralization.
24
The organization of sub-national government in the countries of
Eastern Europe in the ﬁrst half of the 1990s shared a number of
common characteristics and contradictory trends. With the passage oflocal self-government legislation across the region, the number of self-governing units at the local level mushroomed in a direct riposte to the
communist-era practices of extreme centralization, disenfranchisement
and forced amalgamation of local government units. Thus, contrary tothe processes of rationalization and reduction in the number of local
authority units that have characterized the development of local gov-
ernment in Western Europe in recent decades, the post-1989 trend inCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 39

most of the CEECs has been for multiplication and consequently
greater fragmentation. The extremely small size of many of these local
self-government units made for a high degree of dysfunctionality asthey lacked a sufﬁcient tax base to fund service-provision. This notonly greatly complicated the politics of resource allocation by the
central governments, but also increased public disenchantment with
the decline of service provision and the transition process in general.
The problems arising from the dysfunctional fragmentary nature of
local government provided an additional disincentive for furtherdecentralization, if not offering a rationale for recentralization ten-dencies at the national level. Attempts to voluntarily amalgamate or
promote cooperation among local government units, however, have
had minimal success. Legislation in Hungary, for example, to regularizethe procedures for amalgamations both on a voluntary and compul-
sory basis has proved to be unenforceable.
25In Estonia, there has been
a similar apprehension towards mergers among local self-governing
units despite generous incentives offered by the central government.The failure to establish appropriate ﬁnancing arrangements at the locallevel to enable the newly empowered local governments to carry out
their competences also fostered this trend to frame reform in terms of
recentralization. The elimination of the former regional level organswithout regard to consideration of alternative structures contributed to
a ‘democratic deﬁcit’ at the meso-level of governance.
26In the majority
of countries of the region then, the immediate post-communist period
saw the establishment of a single tier of self-governing structures at thelocal level and deconcentrated units of central government at themeso-level. In the short run at least, this framework inspired a trend
towards greater centralization of resources and responsibilities. Thus,
we see two opposing trends: a push for self-government at the locallevel but without providing the necessary administrative and ﬁnancial
resources required to make it effective; and the continued centraliza-
tion of governmental tasks relating to the regional level.
The question of regionalization was not altogether absent from the
policy agenda, although the situation varied across the region. In anumber of countries provision was made in the new constitutions forthe establishment of a regional tier of government as was the case in the
1993 constitution of the Czech Republic, although a moratorium was
imposed on its implementation. In Poland, the post-communistSolidarity government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki had even drawn up the
necessary legislation for the establishment of a self-governing tier at the
regional level in 1992, but following the fall of the Solidarity coalition40Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

government in 1993 and the election of the ﬁrst post-communist
socialist government formed by the SLD in coalition with the PSL, the
regionalization process was blocked due to political opposition on thepart of the PSL and disagreements over the shape and number of regionsto be established.
27The debates and development of regionalization in
Poland and Hungary is further analysed in Chapter 5.
Regionalization and enlargement pressures
The prospect of EU enlargement from 1993 onwards was slow to con-
centrate the minds of the CEEC elites on how best to comply with the
details and implications of EU conditionality on regional policybeyond the general democracy criterion. The design of sub-nationalgovernment structures has involved policy choices about appropriate
organizational models (number of self-governing tiers, role and loca-
tion of deconcentrated state ofﬁces (if any), relation of executive andlegislative structures, ﬁnancing arrangements) as well as the regional
territorial breakdowns particularly in terms of establishing a regional
development framework (see Table 2.1). The problem of design hasbeen compounded by the weakness or absence of legal provisions con-
cerning the activities of local government. Following the decentraliza-
tion of power to the local level in the early 1990s, local units ofgovernment have not only inherited a whole range of new com-
petences that were previously performed by the central government or
sectoral ministries, but they have also been given inadequate ﬁnancial,administrative and personnel resources to perform the new functions.
28
Paradoxically, the blurring of the separation between party and state
structures that was so characteristic of the communist period has
carried over into the post-communist period as the roles of local stateadministrative bodies and of local self-governments are poorly demar-cated and are suffused with party political clientelism. In addition,
neo-liberal tight ﬁscal policies, whether driven by pressures from inter-
national lenders or ideological rectitude on the part of governments,has meant that there have been scant resources and questionable will
on the part of central governments to fully fund the local level.
29
During the period of communist rule, territorial organization was
regarded as an instrument to further the goals of the party at the
centre, which meant that governments regularly resorted to manipulat-ing territorial arrangements and to introducing administrative changesin the search for short-term solutions to particular institutional or eco-
nomic problems. This practice of manipulating levels of territorialCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 41

42Table 2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs
Form of Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Poland Slovenia
governance
Regional 14 regions with No regional level No regional level 16 regions No regional level of
elected assemblies of government of government (województwa) with government
based on a party list some self-governing
system (2000) powers (1999), with
quasi-prefects
(wojewoda) appointed
by PM. Elected regional assemblyelects a Marshall
RDA/ROC
a1 ‘Regional National RDA set 8 RDAs based on 16 RDAs under Polish 12 functional planning
Coordination Group’ up in 1997 7 NUTS II regions Agency for Regional regions corresponding
in each NUTS II conﬁrmed in 1999 Development to NUTS III statistical
region as a basis for units created in 1999,
RDCs with provision for RDAs
County 77 districts with 15 counties. No 19 counties with 373 districts (powiaty) No district level
assemblies composed county self- elected assemblies including 65 urban
of delegates from government. municipalities with
local self-government Govemor elected councils
authorities appointed by
centralgovernment for 5 years

43Table 2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs continued
Form of Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Poland Slovenia
governance
State Ofﬁces Powerful and State State ofﬁcials at State administrative 58 deconcentrated
extensive system of administrative local level ofﬁces are integrated state administrative
state district ofﬁces ofﬁces at county appointed by into administration units largely carried
were abolished in level to supervise central government over from the
late 2002 legality of local and have speciﬁc communist system
government acts powers in key
policy areas
Local Approx. 6200 local 254 municipalities 3126 local self- 2489 self-government 193 municipalities (11
government governments. Mayors with considerable governments authorities (gminy) urban) of varying sizes
elected by local autonomy over with extensive with elected councils. and with responsibility
councils, both have a local services. powers over Mayor elected by the for local service
4-year term Largely local affairs. local council
dependent on Mayors directly
national budget. electedLocal councils elected for 3-yearterm. Mayors elected by local councils
NUTS II 8 NUTS II regions The whole country 7 NUTS II regions Województwa The whole country is
regions created in 1998 is classiﬁed as a created in 1999 correspond to 16 classiﬁed as a NUTS I
NUTS I and NUTS II regions and NUTS II region
NUTS II region until 2006

44Table 2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs continued
Form of Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Poland Slovenia
governance
Current state Still not clear how Process of Powerful county- Consolidation of Further regional
of reform far state ofﬁces will voluntary merger based interests województwa level governance reform
withdraw from of local obstruct stronger continues unlikely
previous roles governments regional
underway government

45Table 2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs continued
Form of Slovakia Romania Bulgaria Latvia Lithuania
governance
Regional 8 regions with elected No regional 9 regions headed No regional No regional
assemblies governance tier by governors governance tier governance tier
appointed by the
central government
RDA/RDCaRegional Coordinating 8 Regional No RDAs. A number No RDAs. The No RDAs
and Monitoring Development of ‘experts’ are Regional
Committees Agencies created appointed by Development
established at the in 1998 under regions and Law of 2002
NUTS II level and the National government to the established a
regional development Agency for Ministry of Regional National
agencies at the Regional Development Regional
NUTS III level Development. Development
Subordinated to Council
Ministry ofDevelopment andPrognosis in 2000
County 79 districts 41 counties (judets) 273 municipalities, Two-tier system 10 districts headed
plus Bucharest, with councils and of 26 districts by governors
with directly most mayors being and seven cities appointed by the
elected councils directly elected with the PM
headed by combined
presidents. Prefects functions of
appointed by the districts and
government municipalities

46Table 2.1 Sub-national government in the CEECs continued
Form of Slovakia Romania Bulgaria Latvia Lithuania
governance
State ofﬁces 22 branches of state N/A N/A 5 ministries are N/A
administration deconcentrated
partly to local
ofﬁces.
Local 2675 local self- 2688 communes, Almost 4000 urban 69 towns, 56 municipalities,
government governments, and 263 town and rural councils 1 regional, and with elected
dependent on central governments, of with minimal powers 483 rural councils andgovernment for which 84 have municipalities, indirectly elected
funding municipality responsible for boards headed by
status. Directly basic services mayors, Some
elected councils ﬁnancial
and mayors. independence based
Legally have on local income
similar status and taxes
powers as judetslevel
NUTS II 4 NUTS II regions 8 NUTS II regions 6 NUTS II regions The whole The whole country
regions country is is classiﬁed as a classiﬁed as a NUTS I and NUTS I and NUTS II regionNUTS II region.
Current state Regional boundaries Strong political Further Further regional A new law on
of reform are highly ethniﬁed focus on centralized decentralization of governance regional development
and controversial government powers likely reform unlikely is in preparation
Note:aRegional Development Agency/Council.

organization to achieve particular political and economic ends con-
tinues to have a strong inﬂuence in the post-communist period. Thus,
another factor explaining why the process of regionalization has beenheavily politicized during the transition is that regional and localgovernment is an important mechanism of political control and
patronage dispersal for governments and opposition alike, and the
parties have jockeyed for position to maximize their advantage fromany institutional outcome.
30Once countries opened negotiations with
the European Commission on their accession in 1998 and began thelengthy process of fulﬁlling the political and technical criteria formembership the focus of party political struggles over regional issuesshifted to include the question of how to conﬁgure the regions to
match the NUTS II criteria and thus maximize the beneﬁts from EU
structural funds, thereby reinforcing the political instrumentalizationof regional issues. Discussions about regionalization became an
integral part of the accession negotiations. At the same time, the
Commission was attempting to shape the regionalization process byemploying PHARE to provide technical advice on regionalization
strategies to meet the requirements of Chapter 21 of the acquis.
What inﬂuence the Commission had on the shape of the reforms is
discussed in Chapter 3.
Hungary was regarded as an ‘icebreaker’ in this regard, and cooperated
quickly and closely with PHARE ofﬁcials in designating statistical-planning regions that matched NUTS II criteria in 1995–96.
31Other
large CEEC states, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, andBulgaria lagged some two years behind and, as we shall discuss below,did not accelerate their regionalization plans until 1998, after the ﬁrstRegular Reports had criticized their weaknesses in this area. The smaller
candidate states such as Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have
settled on a two-tier structure with deconcentrated administrative ofﬁcesat the regional or county level. Romania has also followed this path with
self-governing units at the local level and a system of centrally
appointed prefects at the county level.
Case studies
Czech Republic
Prior to the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, administrative and
territorial organization differed considerably in the Czech lands and
Slovakia. Under the Habsburg empire’s dual monarchy, Slovakia was
subject to centralized, hierarchical rule from Budapest as part of theCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 47

Hungarian kingdom, whereas the Czech lands, which belonged to the
Austrian part of the empire, enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy
with three tiers of local government (municipalities, districts andregions) each with its own elected body.
32Despite initial intentions to
adopt a prefect type administrative system at the time of the establish-ment of Czechoslovakia, in the event the land system with limited self-government was introduced enabling the central authorities to better‘manage’ the substantial German and Hungarian minorities in the
country. After the Second World War and in the wake of the communist
revolution in 1948 the ‘land’ system in Czechoslovakia was replacedwith 20 new sub-national territories ( kraje) (including Prague). The kraje
resembled the small prefect type units that the pre-war government hadcontemplated but never implemented.
33The country was divided into a
hierarchy of national committees at the local, district and regional levelswhich, as in all communist systems, were responsible to the party ratherthan to their local constituents. The constitutional and administrativereforms of 1960 halved the number of regions and concentrated more
power to the regional party secretaries. The latter process was consoli-
dated further by the post-Prague Spring reforms of October 1968, whenthe unitary state was replaced by a federal system.
34
With the collapse of the communist regime, Czechoslovakia, like its
neighbours throughout the East European region, moved quickly topass new legislation to reform local self-government, granting bothpolitical and economic powers to municipalities. Further constitu-tional-administrative reforms in 1971 had consolidated the role of the
National Committees as a key link between the centre–regional–local
command chain of the communist party, and thus during the transi-tion they were viewed as an obstacle to democratization. There was
widespread agreement on their abolition but the question of what kind
of regional-level government should replace them was left unresolved.The neo-liberal governments of Klaus preferred to keep strong central
control in order to push through reforms with the minimum of insti-
tutional challenges from ‘below’.
35The provisions of the legislation on
local self-government contributed to the proliferation of local munici-palities (with elected assemblies and local administrations) creatingserious problems of fragmentation and deterring further decentrali-zation. Between 1990 and late 1993 the number of municipalities
increased by 50.9 per cent reaching a total of 6196.
36This was in part a
democratic reaction to the extreme centralization of the communist
period, and in part the result of the ﬁnancial incentives contained inthe legislation. 48Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Thus, despite the democratic euphoria of the early post-communist
period, the Czech Republic in fact remained a highly centralized state.
The absence of county-level government structures left an institutionalvoid that was ﬁlled by sectoral ministries and other national agencieswhich proceeded to establish deconcentrated ofﬁces with overlapping
territorial responsibilities.
37In effect the deconcentrated ofﬁces of state
administration, established at the district level to carry out the func-
tions delegated by the central government, were the most powerfulinstitutions in local governance.
38The seventy-seven district ofﬁces
were headed by nominees of the central government and were sup-posed to act as a check on the indirectly elected district assemblies(composed of the delegates of local self-governments). These assem-blies enjoyed the critical function of approving the budget of the dis-
trict ofﬁce. This system was, in essence, a return to the Habsburg
administrative model of central supervision of local self-government.
39
While Articles 99 and 100 of the 1993 Czech constitution provide for
the establishment of regional self-government (what is termed a tier of‘higher territorial self-governing bodies’), the delay in establishing aregional tier was largely due to the opposition of the main governingparty, Vaclav Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party (ODS) (1992–97) which
favoured turning the districts ( okresy) into the higher territorial self-
governing tier.
40The main variants included the retention from the
communist era of the nine districts of the Czech part of the former
Czechoslovakia plus one new one for Moravia, or alternatively, 17 newregions based on large urban centres. Another proposal was that thecountry be regionalized or federalized based on the ‘historic’ districts of
Bohemia and Moravia. Some opponents of regionalization argued that
the Czech Republic should be considered one region comparable insize to Bavaria and therefore did not need to be further sub-divided.
41A
Constitutional Act on the Formation of the Regions was approved byboth chambers of the parliament by the end of 1997, by which timethe Klaus government had lost power, although it did not enter forceuntil 1 January 2000. The act established 14 regions ( kraje), but it was
only in 2000 that the legislation on the powers of the regional assem-blies and rules for their election was passed. Subsequently, in 1998eight so-called ‘cohesion’ regions conforming to NUTS II criteria were
formed, each overlapping with one or more of the kraje.
Hungary
In the post-1867 Habsburg era, the Hungarian kingdom of the dual
monarchy instituted a centralized hierarchical system of territorialCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 49

administrative structures leaving little place for autonomous local self-
government. Following the accession to power of the communists in
Hungary a two-tier soviet-type system of sub-national government wasintroduced in 1950 with soviets at the county and local level. Thecounty ( megyek ) system, which has its roots in the Middle Ages, was
largely left unchanged at that time, though county borders werechanged subsequently. Under Kadar, the public administration systemwas reformed in 1968 to introduce a degree of electoral competition at
the local level. However, although compared with other Eastern bloc
states more competences were increasingly devolved to the sub-national level in the late communist period, the essence of the central-
ized, hierarchical communist system remained unchanged until the
collapse in 1988–89.
Local government reform was a key element of the transition in
Hungary. The 1990 Local Government Act was preceded by three yearsof policy debate and preparation which was supported by the reformistwing of the Communist Party.
42It resulted in the establishment of
a two-tier, non-hierarchical system of self-government at both thecounty and local levels, with each level of government enjoying itsown separate mandate and jurisdiction.
43The stipulation in the consti-
tution that any enfranchised citizen of a village, town or county isentitled to local self-government resulted in the mushrooming of localgovernment units. The number of municipalities virtually doubledbetween 1991 and 1998 from 1607 to 3154.
44At the county level, 19
self-government units with councils – initially elected indirectly byrepresentatives of local governments but post-1994 by direct voting –were formed with a four-year mandate. Local authorities have exten-sive constitutionally protected powers over local affairs. In addition
provision was made for a network of state administrative ofﬁces, inde-
pendent of the county and municipal governments and responsibledirectly to the central government. These deconcentrated state admin-
istrative ofﬁces operating at the county level manage administrative
matters that fall outside the authority of local self-governments inseveral areas, including land registration, tax administration and public
health.
45
A third short-lived institutional feature of the Hungarian system was
the establishment in 1990 of the ‘Commissioners of the Republic’ who
were appointed by the president for seven ‘regions’ and the capital. Ineffect, these regions were created on the basis of the communist-eraplanning regions.
46Their main responsibilities involved prefect-like
supervision of the legality of the operations of local governments and50Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

the coordination of the activities of the local state administrative
authorities. Given the fragmentation and lack of capacity of local self-
government units, the number of state administrative ofﬁces pro-liferated and the Commissioners of the Republic became powerful andproactive actors at the regional and local levels, to the increasing
disgruntlement of the municipal and county governments.
47In 1994,
when the Hungarian Socialist Party came to power, the Commissioners
of the Republic were abolished and replaced by a system of publicadministration ofﬁces (PAOs) in the counties and the capital which hadessentially the same functions although heads of PAOs were henceforth
to be appointed by the Minister of the Interior. At the same time greater
responsibility was handed over to county-level self-governments. Underthe two-tier system established in Hungary, there is a high degree of
jurisdictional autonomy between central and local affairs and also
between the two tiers of local government (see Chapter 5).
48
Poland
Prior to Poland’s formation in 1918, the country had been divided
between three different empires – Russia, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire – each of which had different governance systems
and operated different degrees of central control at the sub-national
level. Government was more authoritarian in the eastern part ofPoland, which was part of the Russian empire, while in Galicia the dual
administrative system of the Austro-Hungarian empire was in place,
and in the areas that were part of the German Reich (Posen, WesternPrussia and parts of Pomerania) a more centralized system was in place
based on the two-tier Napoleonic structure.
49With the accession to
power of the communists, these differences were subsumed under the
soviet system of rule. Poland had a three-tier sub-national governingstructure – gminy at the local level, the powiaty at the district level and
województwa at the regional level – which formed the integrated, cen-
tralized hierarchy that was a characteristic of all soviet-type party-statesystems. While there was a certain degree of continuity in the territor-ial organization of Poland in the early communist years some changes
were introduced. For example, administrative changes were introduced
at the municipal level, the larger local units (the gminy) were split into
smaller units, and rural administration was carried out by the powiaty
which in practice meant the amalgamation of smaller units.
50A com-
prehensive territorial reorganization was introduced in 1975 resultingin the restructuring of the województwa andpowiaty levels. The historic
appellation województwo was retained but the new regions were muchCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 51

smaller (a third of their former size) and the powiaty were totally abol-
ished. Rather than facilitating central economic and political manage-
ment, the 1975 reforms actually weakened the communist systemowing to the disruption caused by the abolition of the deep-rootedpowiaty which was a key level for securing communist control.
51The
reforms were soon abandoned and followed by a cycle of recentraliza-tion that was spurred on by the rise of Solidarity and the imposition of military rule in 1980–81.
52Thus the basic centralized top-down
approach remained largely unchanged until the collapse of thecommunist government.
Local government reform was on the agenda at the round-table talks
between the Communist Party and Solidarity in 1988–89. Following
the accession to power of the Mazowiecki government in August 1989,
legislation was quickly passed to re-establish self-government at thelocal level.
53The 1990 Local Government Act transformed Poland from
a three-tier system into a two-tier system with strong central govern-ment and local government limited to about 2500 local authoritiesresponsible for all public activities that were not assigned to otherpublic institutions.
54In the initial post-communist period, the meso-
level remained weak, dominated by state deconcentrated organs: 49regions remained as institutional appendages directly subordinate tothe central government, as did 287 district ofﬁces of state administra-tion that retained responsibility for the most important services.
Assemblies of representatives from the municipalities were established
in the 49 regions, but their powers were limited.
55A Task Force for
Regional Policy was established by the Mazowiecki government in1989 to draw up plans for the reconﬁguration of territorial governmentin Poland. There was interminable wrangling over the shape of a futuremeso-level tier of government, and given the instability of govern-
ments in the mid-1990s the reform was continually postponed. The
Polish Peasants Party, for example, which formed part of the governingcoalition from 1993 to 1997 vigorously opposed the reinstatement
of self-government at the powiaty level for fear of losing power and
alienating their supporters in rural areas and small towns.
56
Thus, paradoxically, in the ﬁrst decade of Poland’s post-communist
rule, while there was a consensus about the desirability of decentraliza-
tion, what transpired was a process of centralization.57While some new
responsibilities were decentralized to the local level following the 1990reform, the capacity of municipal governments to act was constrained bytheir weak ﬁscal position resulting in a return to some of the operationalpractices of the communist era. In particular, there was a resurgence in52Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

the power of sectoral hierarchies directed by the central government at
the meso-level as regional administrative branches of particular economic
ministries were established in some areas. Finally, in 1998, a year after theaccession to power of the Solidarity Electoral Alliance-Freedom Uniongovernment (AWS-UW), a series of laws were passed that paved the way
for a three-tier self-governing system, including the re-establishment
of the województwa level, but this time with elected regional self-
governments. Moreover, the new regions were demarcated to comply
with the EU’s NUTS II criteria (see Chapter 5).
Slovakia
As part of the Hungarian kingdom in the late Habsburg period, Slovakia
was subject to hierarchical centralized rule from Budapest. During thecommunist period as part of the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republic,
the three tiers of sub-national governance in Slovakia were structured
along the lines of the soviet model. Following the collapse of commu-nism, the key regional tier of government in Czechoslovakia, the
national committees, was dissolved. Under the municipal law passed in
the autumn of 1990, local self-governments (with limited competences)were established in Slovakia with state administrative units at the dis-trict and sub-district level. As in other states, the number of poorly
resourced local self-governing units mushroomed. Though the creation
of a second tier of self-government units and a new territorial divisionwere proposed in the concept of public administration reform drawn up
by the government of prime minister C ˇarnogursky in 1991, the ﬁnal
decision was left until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia was agreed and
the new parliament of an independent Slovakia was in place. After the
June 1992 elections, the government was preoccupied by the political
and economic problems of separation, as a result of which the problemsof public administration were pushed further down the political agenda.
The accession to power of the nationalist and highly centralizing gov-
ernment of Vladimir Meciar (1994–98) led to a further delay in theintroduction of decentralizing reforms to the regional and local levels.
58
In 1996, the law on the territorial and administrative arrangements
of the Slovak Republic and the law on local state administration wereapproved. The reform was essentially a state administrative rather thana decentralizing reform. The number of state administrative regionswas increased from four to eight and the number of districts was
doubled from 38 to 79. Thus, Slovakia had four levels of administra-
tion (central, county, district and local level). The county and districtlevels were state deconcentrated units rather than self-governmentCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 53

structures. The counties were headed by a ‘principal’ appointed by the
government. Regions and districts had no independent resources as
their budgets were drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior and fundedexclusively from the central treasury. Meanwhile, the 2850 local unitsenjoyed the rights of self-government but were weakened by their lack
of independent ﬁnancial resources. The regionalization process was
further complicated by the presence of a territorialized Hungarianminority in the south-west of the country, bordering Hungary.
Consequently, regionalization became a highly politicized issue due to
Slovak fears about Hungarian separatism, and Hungarian demands forautonomy. Meciar’s regional demarcation of 1996 drew the regional
boundaries in a way which gerrymandered the Hungarian minority,
splitting its population across several regions and thus weakening itspolitical presence in the regions.
59
The EU was sharply critical of the perceived authoritarianism of the
Meciar government and accession negotiations with Slovakia werefrozen. When the more liberal and pro-EU government of MikulasDzurinda came to power in 1998, the decentralization of public admin-istration was a key aim because of the pressures to accelerate Slovakia’s
EU accession process. Nevertheless, the reform was delayed by coalition
disagreements about the number and shape of the regions. There werethose that supported a four-region structure as under the former com-
munist system, the opposition favoured eight regions to match the
existing state administrative regions which they themselves had set upwhile in government, and the centre-right governing parties and the
Hungarian coalition partner party had proposed a twelve-region solu-
tion (as this would have made one Hungarian-dominated region a cer-tainty).
60Finally, in July 2001 the Slovak parliament passed the new law
on local public administration which provided for the devolution ofgovernment prerogatives to eight regional self-governing entities whichconformed with EU NUTS II criteria. Although the government itselfhad, in the end, approved the establishment of twelve new regions, this
proposal was defeated by a temporary coalition of nationalist opposi-
tion and governing parties. The demarcation of the new regional struc-tures ensured that the power of the Hungarian minority would be
diluted across several predominantly Slovak populated regions.
Slovenia
Although a centralized planning economic management and political
system was established in Yugoslavia in 1945, from the early 1950sonwards measures leading to the decentralization of political and54Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

economic decision-making began to be introduced. In 1949 a quasi-
federal system was introduced with six republics and two autonomous
provinces. In 1952 the multi-tier sub-national governance system wasstreamlined into districts and communes, the latter being based on theamalgamation of smaller towns and villages. In 1963 the central govern-
ment went a step further, abolishing the districts and thus leaving the
system of communes as the main unit of sub-national self-government.Accompanying economic reforms granted greater independence to enter-
prises and opened the way for the market to play an expanded role in the
Yugoslav economy.
61Perhaps the most important difference between
Yugoslavia and the other communist countries in the region is thatpublic administration was separated from the economy and in addition,both administrative and economic organizations at the sub-national levelover time enjoyed substantial autonomy.
62
As part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia was divided into 65 relatively large
municipalities and communes, which performed the functions both ofcentral state administration and of local authorities and enjoyed con-siderable political power.
63During the 1970s twelve functional plan-
ning and administrative units managed the increasingly mixedeconomy. Despite the institutional legacy of Yugoslav federalism, itsclose geographical proximity to EU and West European states withfederal or highly decentralized systems of local governance (Austria,
Italy and Switzerland), and to post-communist transition states such as
Hungary that were engaged in rapid decentralization to the communallevel, Slovenia exhibited no contagion effects to reform its local gov-
ernment system. After independence, the state-directed fused system in
which municipalities typically performed both state administrative andlocal government functions was retained. The new constitution of
Slovenia, enacted in 1993, made provision for self-government at both
the local and regional level, but it was not until the passage of the1993 Law on Local Self-Government that the path was cleared for the
establishment of local self-governments at the municipal level. At
present there are 192 municipalities (11 of which are urban municipal-ities). These vary considerably in terms of size, population and eco-
nomic power. In addition, there are 58 state administrative units
whose jurisdiction may extend over several municipalities dependingon the speciﬁc competences.
64No further steps have been taken to
establish a meso-tier of self government. Article 143 of the constitutiongives the obcine (communal municipalities) the right to join together to
create regions on a voluntary basis but no attempt was made to do thisuntil 1998. Slovenia, like Estonia, is a small country with no historicalCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 55

tradition of regional governance and no obvious political functional
need for it. Nonetheless the debate over the possible territorial break-
down of a regional self-governing tier has surfaced on a number ofoccasions. In particular, successive Slovenian governments have beenconcerned at the prospect of losing structural funds due to the wealth
concentration around Ljubljana. Consequently, to avoid this problem
Slovenia tried to demarcate two NUTS II regions but has been blockedby the Commission (see Chapter 3).
Estonia
As one of the republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia had its own
republican Supreme Soviet in Tallinn, with the dual structure of soviets
and party organs extending from the Estonian capital down to thecounties and localities. The revitalization of ‘socialist self-government’
during perestroika provided a catalyst for movements for autonomy
and independence in the Baltic republics, ultimately contributing tothe break-up of the Soviet Union.
65In Estonia, the democratization of
local government proceeded slowly at ﬁrst, but accelerated as therepublic moved towards independence in 1989–91.
From 1989 to 1993 Estonia had a two-tier system of local self-gov-
ernment comprising units at both the municipal and county level. In
1993 Estonia rationalized this into a single tier that was organized in
a vertical, centralized structure. The elected intermediary structure atthe county level was replaced by an appointed stratum of state
administrative ofﬁcials. The single tier system of local self-govern-
ment includes 253 municipalities (46 urban and 207 rural). Localauthorities enjoy considerable autonomy, are responsible for admin-
istering public services and have their own budget, although they
remain ﬁscally dependent on the centre since 65 per cent of localgovernment resources comes from a share of state income taxes and
grants. County-level governance is an appendage of central govern-
ment. The 15 county governments (the territorial division has notbeen amended in the course of the transition) are responsible fororganizing and coordinating the work of national institutions at the
local level and for implementing national policies in accordance with
the law and instructions of the government. They also exercise asupervisory role over local self-government institutions. The county
governor is a political appointee of the prime minister (in consulta-
tion with local government representatives), and serves for a ﬁve-yearterm. In addition, county assemblies made up of representatives of
local self-governments have minor competences. 56Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

In 1995 the Estonian government introduced a policy encouraging the
voluntary merger of local governments, with the aim of reducing the
number of units from 247 to around 100. The ﬁrst amalgamation tookplace in 1998.
66Given the extremely slow progress on the voluntary
merger scheme a set of ﬁnancial incentives has been introduced to fostergreater uptake of this option.
67There is no regional self-government in
Estonia and little evidence of elite support for meso-level government,although this is not to say that the question of regionalization has beenabsent from the political agenda. Perhaps the most controversial aspectand greatest disincentive to reform is that regionalization may result in
local political power shifting to the territorialized minority of russo-
phones (mainly ethnic Russians) in a few areas, such as Narva, and evenpossibly the capital Tallinn, a prospect that generates fears about
Estonian ethnic hegemony and the territorial integrity of the state.
68
Romania
From its formation in 1919–20, Romania was administered in a very
centralized manner, with a system of counties and prefects. With theestablishment of communist rule, a system of rayon (or territorial pro-
duction complexes) and provinces was set up in 1950 to carry out plan-ning and public administration tasks. Intermittent reforms andterritorial reorganizations took place throughout the communist
period with the aim of increasing political control and improving eco-
nomic management although the intrinsic hierarchical structures ofadministration remained unchanged. The most far-reaching reform
was introduced in 1967 when the rayon system and provinces were
replaced by a system of counties ( judet) and communes, a process
which included the forced mergers of villages to form the smallestunits of public administration. This reform instituted a system of sub-
national territorial arrangements along the lines of the former pre-communist monarchical model. A limited decentralization ofmanagement which took place in the wake of the 1967 reform was
largely undone in 1980 when there was a further retrenchment of the
central planning system by making county-level party committees fullyresponsible for economic performance in their respective regions.
69
The collapse of the Ceaucescu regime in December 1989 did not lead
to immediate reforms to the system of governance at the regional orlocal levels as the ﬁrst reforms came only in 1991. This time-lag incomparison to other post-communist states reﬂected both thecountry’s historic centralist traditions and its hesitant post-communist
transition path. The ﬁrst local elections were held in the autumn ofCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 57

1992, embedding a two-tier non-hierarchical system of administration.
At the local level there are 2688 communes (made up of one or several
villages) and 263 towns of which 84 have the status of a municipality.In each local unit, there is a directly elected council and mayor, whichenjoy powers of self-government. Despite the passage of the Local
Public Administration Act (1991) there are few safeguards of the inde-
pendence of local governing units against control from central author-ities.
70The 41 counties plus Bucharest make up the intermediary tier
and form the basic architecture for deconcentrated public administra-tion. Each county is headed by a prefect who acts as the central gov-ernment representative at the local level, and thus oversees theimplementation of government policy at the sub-national level. At the
county level there are also directly elected councils which coordinate
the activities of local administrations. The county council elects a pres-ident from its ranks to perform executive functions at the county level
although in practice the prefect tends to dominate at the county
level.
71Following the 1996 amendments to the law on public adminis-
tration, additional responsibilities for regional development weredevolved to the counties (including spatial and economic planningand investment programmes). The ﬁnancial instruments available forregional development initiatives are extremely sparse, and the prob-
lematic ﬁnancial relationship between central and local levels of gov-
ernment has undermined the supposedly non-hierarchical relationshipbetween the different levels of government and between the state
deconcentrated and self-governing organs.
72
Ultimately Romania remains a highly centralized country and
despite its size, no moves have been taken to introduce an intermedi-
ary self-governing tier between the centre and the local level. As inSlovakia, the reluctance to establish elected regional governance islargely politically motivated by the fear of separatism from the territo-
rialized Hungarian minority.
73Indeed, when PHARE coordinated the
establishment of eight macro-regions in Romania under the Law on
Regional Development of July 1998, it proved to be too controversialas it was seen as empowering the territorialized Hungarian minorityand constituting a threat to the territorial integrity of the state.
Conclusion
While regional and local governance under communism was relatively
uniformly structured, it was subject to strong political controls from
the centre and was driven by predominantly functionalist goals, with58Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

sub-national units acting as an organizational pillar of the one-party
state and central planning. Two main contradictory trends were
evident in the post-communist era: decentralization versus recentral-ization. The decentralizing impetus occurred in those states which tol-erated a fragmentation of state authority leading to a proliferation of
local governance units (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia) as a key
means of overcoming the authoritarian legacy of communism andaccelerating transition. This trend was characterized by four features:
ﬁrst, new local government self-ﬁnancing regulations provided an
incentive for fragmentation in local government that led to the prolif-eration of municipalities and communes; second, it was partly an
opportunistic reaction and assertion of power by sub-national elites to
the weakness of central states in the early phase of transition; third,the competition between central and local elites over distributive
issues, in particular the rush into ‘nomenklatura privatization’ was
reﬂected in ideological and institutional struggles between reformistcentral governments and more conservative regional and local authori-ties; and fourth, this trend was a democratizing reaction to the overly-
centralized and functionalist ‘command-administrative’ communist
system. This reaction resulted in the abolition or diminution in therole of regional government, a level which under communism had
been a critical link in the authority chain between central and local
rulers. Signiﬁcantly, in many states post-communism led to a revival ofthe political mobilization of local identities within historically
bounded sub-national government, as in Hungary where the counties
are resisting efforts to politically regionalize the country. Elsewhere,new functionalist criteria were developed in the organization and ori-entation of regional and local governance, as in the new regions of
Poland.
The second trend involved a reconcentration of power to the centre,
though the reasons for this varied. The reimposition of strong centralgovernance was driven by authoritarian reactions by central elites to
democratic transition (Slovakia), or was impelled by the need forstrong central government in states where sovereignty was perceived
to be threatened by territorialized internal minorities or an external
power (as in Estonia). In some states it was motivated by a combina-tion of authoritarian reaction and fear of territorialized internal
minorities (as in Romania). In their search for a new institutional
architecture of regionalization, policy-makers in the CEECs wereinﬂuenced by a number of push and pull factors. On the one hand,
the resonance of the pre-communist and communist-era legaciesCommunist Legacies and Regionalization 59

tended to frame the political debates over policy options. A desire to
combat the power logic of the communist system of control promoted
in many states a drive for decentralization to the local level ratherthan the regional. On the other hand, the existence of the frameworkof economic and planning regions inherited from the communist era
and its functional logic, compounded by the pressure from the
Commission for a regionalization that matched the technical stan-dardization of the NUTS system, exercised an enormous pull for
regionalization to proceed, particularly in the larger countries.
Consequently, the imperative of ﬁnding appropriate organizationalforms and of developing adequate administrative capacities to meet
the requirements for EU regional policy acted as a catalyst for the
reform of regional government in the CEECs. The reforms, however,as we shall see in Chapter 5, were shaped in the main by the domestic
constraints and context of transition. 60Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

3
The Commission, Conditionality
and Regional Policy
When the EU ﬁrst acknowledged that those associated CEECs that
‘so desire’ could become members, at the Copenhagen European
Council meeting in June 1993, it expressed the political and eco-
nomic conditions for membership in vaguely worded and normativestatements of intent in the ‘Copenhagen criteria’. As we discussed in
Chapter 1, the criteria laid down three conditions for applicant
states (the stability of their democracy, the proper functioning of
their market economy, and their capacity to integrate with the EU)
and a fourth condition related to the EU’s own capacity to absorb
the new members (see Box 1.1). Although the details of how these
conditions were to be met were not elaborated at the time, by impli-cation it was understood that some objective criteria would be
devised by which to evaluate applicants. The fourth condition gave
the EU a pocket veto on the accession of new members, since it
would take the ﬁnal decision on whether it was ready to enlarge. The
Copenhagen Council also ordered organizational changes to
progress the accession including a reinforcement of the PHARE pro-
gramme of aid and technical assistance which had been established
in 1989 and was already managed by the Commission, the establish-
ment of a ‘structured’ multilateral dialogue of high-level meetingsbetween the Council, Commission and the candidate countries (at
the level of heads of state and government once a year, and ministe-
rial level once or twice per year depending on issue area), and thecreation of a special task force to train ofﬁcials from the candidate
countries in EU law and operational procedures. By these means the
convergence of the candidate countries’ legislation with the acquis
would be accelerated and their national elites could be acculturated
into EU norms and mindsets.
1
61

Following the Copenhagen summit, the Commission pursued a ‘pre-
accession strategy’ for enlargement which focused on bilateral relations
with the national governments of applicant states.2The strategy for-
mulated at the Essen European Council 1994 was built around the bynow four established pillars of the EU-CEEC relationship; the ‘EuropeAgreements’ on the liberalization of trade which were negotiated in1991–92 (signed between 1991–96, but came into force between
1995–98), PHARE, the ‘structured dialogue’, and legislative alignment.
The bilateralism inherent in the strategy for enlargement was steadilyreinforced both at the Essen European Council in December 1994 and
the Madrid European Council in December 1995.
3What is striking
about this cumulative bilateral strategy is that the process of enlarge-
ment was structured as one for negotiation between the EU and thenational elites of the applicant states. While this approach made sense– the EU is, after all, a union of sovereign states – it did leave an
Achilles heel in the process by excluding other elites (notably in our
case, the regional and local elites) and the wider public from participa-tion at all stages of the process. These actors would only be included in
the ﬁnal stage, after the negotiations had been concluded and the deci-
sion required ratiﬁcation by the people of each candidate country.
Though in line with previous rounds of EU enlargement, the lack of
involvement of sub-national actors in the preparation of the candi-dates for EU regional policy is indicative of the Commission’s ‘top-down’ approach to the processes of enlargement and ‘Europeanization’
in the CEECs and constituted a ‘regional deﬁcit’ in enlargement.
4The
paradox is that while the EU marginalized the participation of sub-
national elites in its enlargement strategy, among its main concernsover integration was the issue of how best to organize and involveregional and local governments in the implementation of EU policy.
After all, the administrative and ‘absorption’ capacity of these levels is
seen as critical for the success of the whole enlargement project. At theEssen European Council 1994, for example, issues of regional coopera-
tion and infrastructural integration via trans-European networks were
introduced into the pre-accession strategy, and regional developmentbecame one of the priorities of PHARE. The regional dimension of
enlargement was also discussed at the Madrid European Council
(1995), not surprisingly as Spain was a major beneﬁciary of EU struc-tural funds and it put on the EU agenda the implications of enlarge-
ment for the allocation of structural funds. The Madrid Council
introduced a supposedly clarifying condition to the effect that the can-didate countries must have the ‘administrative capacity’ to implement62Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

theacquis.5It was only at this stage, two and half years after the
Copenhagen criteria were formulated, that the Commission was
charged to prepare a detailed analysis of the impact of enlargement on the EU (especially agriculture and structural policy) and draft‘opinions’ evaluating each applicant country individually.
The Commission’s report ‘Agenda 2000 for a Stronger and Wider
Europe’, published in July 1997, formulated a ‘reinforced pre-accessionstrategy’, which sidelined the ‘structured dialogue’ and introduced a
strategy shift from multilateralism to bilateralism in the negotiations
over accession negotiations. The shift was explained as offering a bettermechanism for addressing the country-speciﬁc needs identiﬁed in the
Commission’s Opinions on the preparedness to join of each applicant
country which were published contemporaneously. There was barely anyreference to the regional or local dimensions in the Commission’s evalu-ation of the fulﬁlment of the Copenhagen criteria. The shift in focus
from the national level as the unit of analysis was evident only in the
Commission’s Opinions on the readiness of each applicant state, as onlyhere, for the ﬁrst time, was regional ‘capacity’ identiﬁed as a heading for
the underlying lack of preparedness of the CEECs for membership.
6
Consequently, instruments such as the ‘reinforced pre-accession strat-egy’, ‘Accession Partnerships’ between the EU and applicant states, the
‘National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis’ (NPAA) to beimplemented in each candidate country, and PHARE aid, were targetedto building or developing the ‘capacity’ for integration.
Hereafter, enlargement was viewed as a monogamous affair based on
the new ‘Accession Partnerships’ between the EU and applicant states.The Accession Partnerships were designed as multi-annual structuring
devices, detailing priority areas and PHARE programming. They were
initially tied to the Commission’s 1997 Opinions and were to bereviewed and revised as necessary. The candidate countries signed their
Accession Partnerships in 1998, and they were subsequently revised in
1999 and 2002. The revisions were adopted by the Council based onthe proposals made by the Commission which, in turn, were tied to
the assessments presented in the Commission’s annual monitoring
device, the Regular Reports. While emphasizing that the processes of‘deepening’ and enlargement were complementary and feasible within
the EU’s resource ceiling, ‘deepening’ in this sense referred to the neb-
ulous expectation that candidate states must have the capacity notonly to adopt but also to implement the acquis. Not surprisingly, the
vision of enlargement that was promoted by the EU and the govern-
ments of applicant states was of a ‘national’ one, symbolized by theThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 63

NPAA. Moreover, the short- and medium-term priorities under the
NPAA did not focus on regional policy issues, as the Regular Report
sections on the NPAA demonstrate.
The ‘Agenda 2000’ and the ‘Opinions’ provided the basis for the
decisions at the Luxembourg European Council in December 1997 to
proceed with enlargement by commencing accession negotiations
with ﬁve of the CEECs (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,Poland, Slovenia), plus Cyprus.
7The basis for the negotiations with
these ‘in’ states, which opened on 31 March 1998, was the generalCopenhagen condition that they must adopt the acquis . Their
progress in this regard was to be monitored by the Commission inRegular Reports on each country. This condition was also the basis
for the extension of the accession negotiations to a further ﬁve CEEC
states (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia), plus Malta,agreed at the Helsinki European Council in December 1999.
Essentially then, by making the adoption of the acquis the touch-
stone for enlargement to proceed, the EU set the membership hurdle
for the CEECs and other applicants at a height that existing
EU member states had achieved mostly only after a long period of
life within the EU. Only Austria, Finland and Sweden, all advancedindustrial countries, adopted most of the acquis in advance of acces-
sion to the EU. Moreover in all previous enlargements prior to thecommitment to establish the single market, the scale and complexityof the acquis and necessary adaptation rates were much smaller and
more manageable. This has made the challenge of the transposition
of domestic legislation even greater for the CEECs particularly given
the simultaneity of the EU alignment process with the massive polit-ical and economic transformations which have been underway in
the region since the collapse of communism.
After 1998 regional policy became one of the most important aspects
of enlargement for the Commission given its substantial ﬁnancialimplications (as we discuss later). Consequently, both the Commission
and the CEEC governments had a strong incentive to pay particularattention to the arrangements for managing regional policy during and
post-enlargement. The Commission’s approach to its conditionality on
this issue was, however, divided and inconsistent over time. During theearly enlargement phase the Commission focused on the institutional
territorial-administrative conﬁgurations in each candidate country, but
as the process progressed to a conclusion it became increasingly moreconcerned with the ‘capacity’ of the CEECs to access and manage thefunds at central and regional levels and deliver effective use of them. 64Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Costs and beneﬁts
During the enlargement process of the latter half of the 1990s only
very modest sums were expended by the EU to assist the CEECs in
their adjustment to the demands of accession. The main cost to theEU came through the PHARE programme funding commitments
which led to expenditures of just under 5.6 billion ecus in fourteen
countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the period 1990–98(see Table 1.2). The enlargement completed on 1 May 2004 produced
a sharp increase in budgetary subventions from the EU to the new
members of almost € 24.5 billion over a two-year period in Structural
and Cohesion Funds alone (see Table I.1). Considerable strains willarise from enlargement on the EU’s funding of regional policy
through the structural funds and many current regional beneﬁciaries
will lose out if the present system for allocating funds is not reformed.Currently, the EU allocates funds on the basis of two key identiﬁers of
regions that are ‘lagging behind’ and in need. Priority regions and
areas (that is, ‘Objective 1’ regions) are identiﬁed on the basis of theNUTS II classiﬁcation system. Such regions are identiﬁed as those with
a per capita GDP of less than 75 per cent of the Community average.
The sums involved are huge; in the period 2000–06 the total budgetallocations for regional policy in the EU amount to €213 billion, of
which €195 billion are structural funds, 69.7 per cent of which are
allocated to Objective 1 regions.
8The vast majority of the 53 NUTS II
level regions in the CEECs have per capita GDP levels well below thethreshold of 75 per cent of the EU average to qualify for Objective 1funds, and with the exception of a few areas they are likely to con-
tinue to beneﬁt for a long period.
9The enlargement of ten new
members will lower the EU average GDP and will thus eliminate
mathematically many (perhaps as many as 27) of the 46 regions fromthe existing EU-15 which qualify for structural funds under the
present arrangements (see Map 2).
The ﬁnancial implications of enlargement have been a major
concern for the existing member states, particularly with regard to theconsequences for CAP and regional funds. The Berlin European
Council in March 1999 agreed expenditure ceilings for the post-accession period which envisaged, assuming enlargement would occur
in 2002, that about € 40 billion would be committed to the potential
new members between 2002–06.
10The ‘big bang’ enlargement agreed
at the Helsinki Council, including the ten countries of the CEEC group
plus Malta and Cyprus (the ‘Helsinki Group’), has had to be managedThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 65

within the Berlin expenditure ceilings.11The ﬁnancial package agreed
at the Copenhagen Council in December 2002 essentially adhered to
the Berlin ceilings by committing €40.8 billion to the ten CEECs in
2004–06, over half of which ( €21.7 billion) was to be spent on ‘struc-
tural actions’ which will largely be shaped by and beneﬁt regional
policy.12Some economic models suggest that the CEECs will, on
average, beneﬁt up to ten times more from enlargement than the EU-
15.13In contrast, the political and economic costs of enlargement will
affect the EU-15 ‘asymmetrically’, with negative impacts felt most inthose countries such as Spain and Portugal that are the current majorrecipients of Structural and Cohesion Funds and whose geographiclocation makes them less likely to beneﬁt from increased trade with the66Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
Atlantic
Ocean
Mediterranean SeaMadeira
Canaries
CyprusGuyane
AÇores0 km 400Regions below the threshold of 75%
Regions eligible until the end of 2006
with GDP/head > 75% EUR25
Regions eligible until the end of 2006
with GDP/head > 75% EUR15
Other regions
EUR = 100
Map 2 Regions with GDP/head less than 75% of the EU average (1997–98–99)

CEECs. Although the new member states will have to contribute some
€15 billion in membership contributions to the EU budget while
having a limited absorption capacity in the initial post-enlargement
phase, and they will lose out from the staggering of the CAP funds tothe new members over a ten-year period, the Copenhagen Council also
agreed temporary budgetary ‘compensation’ to ensure that the new
members would be ‘no worse off’ after joining.
The costs of enlargement look very different depending on how they
are calculated.
14For example, in the absence of budgetary reform, the
increased costs of the enlargement countries through structural fundsalone are projected to account for about 25 per cent of the total EUbudget and will have to be sustained over a long period of time sinceGDP per capita in the CEECs is now and will continue to be signiﬁcantly
lower than the EU average.
15This perspective on the costs is clearly
politically sensitive. In principle, however, the EU can easily cope with
the net ﬁnancial costs of enlargement. The current cap placed onfunding which limits the combined total annual receipts from structuraland cohesion funds to a maximum of 4 per cent of national GDP is not
optimum for the developmental needs of the CEECs and would slow
down economic convergence.
16The options that the EU will have to
address with regard to regional funding reforms before the end of 2006for the next ﬁnancial perspectives (2007–13) are threefold. First, there isa reform option. This would rationalize, reduce and target funds to thepoorest countries (the so-called ‘cohesion model’) or to the poorest
regions (the so-called ‘concentration model’). The underlying idea
behind reform is that the richer EU states would manage the costs of their own regional development problems and thus curtail the
Commission’s inﬂuence, and in return they would reduce their contri-
butions to the overall EU budget. Second, there is the status quo option.This would maintain the existing system more or less intact, preserve
the Commission’s role in regional policy, but with some reformulation
of the thematic and/or territorial priorities. Third, there is an expansionoption. This would see the funds for regional policy increased to ensure
that the existing beneﬁciaries (the so-called ‘statistical effect regions’) do
not lose out by moving above the GDP threshold after enlargement,while the new members also beneﬁt fully.
17Such options will put the
GDP threshold and the ceiling of the EU’s total budget spending (cur-rently 1.24 per cent of GDP) at the centre of negotiations. The ﬁnancingof regional policies could also change to a system in which each countrypays or receives proportionally to its distance from the average EU per
capita income level. The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 67

A Commission model of regionalization?
The institutional architecture of regional policy within the EU is highly
diverse and ﬂexibly arranged. The implementation of regional policy is
overwhelmingly a competence of the member states and their ‘ownrules’ (see below). Consequently, how regional policy functions in the
EU is essentially determined by how the government of member states
is spatially and institutionally organized, varying widely along a spec-trum from unitary-centralized states to federalized-decentralized states.
The Commission’s role in regional policy while largely being con-
cerned with the dispersion and management of funds also interactswith its other more powerful roles in competition policy and state aidregulations where it has established ‘guidelines’ for state aid to under-
developed regions. The Commission’s effect on institutional models of
government is indirect. The divergent models of sub-national govern-ment inside the EU and the absence of clear institutional requisites are
evident in Chapter 21 on ‘Regional Policy and Co-ordination of
Structural Instruments’, which is one of the thinnest parts of the acquis
as organized for the enlargement negotiations. The thinness of the
acquis in the ﬁeld of regional policy contrasts with the centrality of this
policy domain during enlargement, and in particular its budgetary
implications. In general, it has been regarded as one of the most prob-lematic areas for fulﬁlment of the acquis by the CEECs.
18The structural
thinness of the acquis in regional policy constituted a formal condi-
tionality gap. How did the Commission respond to the weakness ofleverage provided by the acquis ? We can assess this by examining three
questions. First, when formal conditionality was weak did theCommission employ informal or ‘soft’ conditionality to inﬂuence insti-tutional choices in the CEECs? Second, how consistent was the
Commission in dealing with the CEECs over a content-poor part of theacquis ? Third, how effective was the Commission in shaping domestic
agendas and institutional choices in this policy area?
A further paradox of enlargement is that while parts of the Com-
mission seem to have been inﬂuenced by the ideal of ‘multi-level gover-
nance’ and in particular by the desirability of institutional change in thecandidate countries which would build ‘participation’ at the regional
level in the making of regional policy, concurrently, sub-national actors
were by and large structurally excluded from the enlargement negotia-tions. The interactions between the Commission and the CEECs over
compliance with Chapter 21 of the acquis led to a general perception
among key actors in the CEECs that the Commission was attempting to
foist an EU ‘model’ of regionalization on them. 68Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The perception of an ‘EU model’ arose in a context where many of
the Commission actors involved in the technical aspects of enlarge-
ment in PHARE and the Commission’s ‘country teams’ had beeninﬂuenced by the ongoing debates within the Commission over thereform of regional policy in the early 1990s. Contemporaneous with
the institutional changes introduced at Maastricht, the early 1990s saw
a major debate in the then EC over the issue of which institution, theCommission or member states, was best positioned to deliver ‘value for
money’, while also developing norms of ‘partnership’ and ‘subsidiarity’
in the use of regional funds. For the advocates of the multi-levelgovernance approach, the boost to regional funds from the ‘Delors
packages’ were attempts to empower regional actors. In practice, inter-
governmentalism prevailed as the implementation of the 1993 reformfollowed no single model or template, with regions being more or less
empowered depending on the national political institutional arrange-
ments of member states and their ‘own rules’.
19The diversity of
regional and local government in the EU, spanning the spectrumbetween federal and unitary states, evolved largely on the basis ofcountry-speciﬁc historical factors and the interaction of European,national and regional and local politics. Similarly, the procedures for
using structural and cohesion funds are not uniform, but rather they
vary according to the institutional arrangements for regional and localgovernment in each member state. Regional policy and the dispersion
of regional funds per se, therefore, may not necessarily connect
regional elites and networks either with each other or with EU insti-tutions, in particular where such funding is absorbed into national
government budgets.
20The extent to which sub-national actors have
become engaged with EU policy-making institutions, instruments and
processes varies widely, both within and across member states.21
The Commission has repeatedly complained about its lack of power
in regional policy in the member states and criticized the weak ‘part-nership’ between central and sub-national authorities in the operationof structural funds.
22Although the Commission was itself internally
divided in the struggle over competences and by different visions ofregional policy based on departmental interests, parts of it appropri-ated the concept of ‘multi-level governance’ to describe its overallmission in regional policy.
23These debates over institutional reform
within the EU were an immediate frame of reference for Commissionofﬁcials when the drive for enlargement began in the mid-1990s.
There is evidence to suggest that Commission ofﬁcials who had been
frustrated in an attempt to extend the Commission’s competences in
regional policy by the 1993 reform, were motivated to use enlargementThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 69

conditionality to pursue their particular agenda for the implementa-
tion of regional policy in the candidate countries. The acquis , however,
offered them little by way of leverage to assert conditionality, since
there are few areas of the acquis as ‘thin’ as that of Chapter 21 dealing
with regional policy. In particular, EU law, regulations and guidelines
are sparse on the institutional requirements for the implementation of
regional policy. For example, the general provisions on the structuralfunds state: ‘In application of the principle of subsidiarity, the imple-
mentation of assistance shall be the responsibility of the Member
States, at the appropriate territorial level according to the arrangementsspeciﬁc to each Member State, and without prejudice to the powers
vested in the Commission, notably for implementing the general
budget of the European Communities.’
24This regulation clariﬁes that
there is no EU legal template for institutional or other aspects ofregional policy and regionalization.
When the Commission assumed responsibility for enlargement in 1994,
it did so with weak administrative resources for dealing with the CEECs. A
new Directorate General had to be established (DG Enlargement) and its
staff was recruited largely from other DGs (DG Regio, DG External Affairs)and departments in national governments with relevant expertise in
delivering technical and structural assistance, often at the regional level.
Some of DG Enlargement’s functionaries had career tracks specializing indevelopment aid. The modus operandi in regional policy during enlarge-
ment was one where the Commission and the private sector consultancies
employed through PHARE stressed the ‘partnership’ between the publicand private sectors at the EU, national and sub-national levels at both
the programming design and implementation stages. Furthermore, the
Commission’s track record of involvement in the operation of structuraland cohesion funds demonstrated that states with weak administrativecapacity and poor control at the regional and local levels were more likely
to have serious problems with the mismanagement of funds or even with
accessing them in the ﬁrst place. Moreover, the Commission had becomeused to interacting with institutions, networks and lobbies of organized
actors from the sub-national level which had mushroomed in Brussels,
despite the apparent strengthening of the role of the member states in thispolicy area after 1993.
25
Thus, the enlargement process from 1994 onwards became infused
by a carry-over of policy practices and preferences within the Com-mission from earlier debates about regional policy in the EU. Someactors in the Commission favoured a more inclusive approach to the‘participation’ of regional institutions in regional policy, and acted as if70Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

conditionality for enlargement gave them a power asymmetry vis-à-vis
the CEECs which could be applied as a lever to ensure compliance. As a
PHARE ofﬁcial put it: ‘We do not impose, but we expect candidatecountries to come up with a compatible structure.’
26He did not deﬁne,
however, what ‘compatibility’ might entail in this respect. Moreover,the Commission was caught up in the general drive from Western gov-ernments and international agencies in the mid-1990s for a speedytransformation in the CEECs, viewing these states as an experiment for
the implementation of neo-liberal policy and institutional models.
The weakness of the formal conditionality in Chapter 21, given thesparse content of the acquis, meant that key actors within the
Commission employed informal conditionality in the pursuit of their
policy objectives in the CEECs.
The ‘capacity’ issue
The notion of ‘capacity’ as part of the conditionality for membership
was ﬁrst addressed, though not elaborated, in the Copenhagen criteria
(see Box 1.1). It was most explicitly linked to the second Copenhagencriterion which referred to the existence of a functioning marketeconomy and the ‘capacity to cope with the competitive pressure and
market forces within the Union’. However, the third and, to a lesser
extent, the ﬁrst Copenhagen criterion are also informed by the notionof capacity. The third criterion refers to the ‘ability’ to take on the
obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of the
political, economic and monetary union. The word ‘ability’ could haveeasily been replaced by a further reference to ‘capacity’ and, in fact,
in the French version of the Copenhagen Council Presidency
Conclusions, the term ‘capacité’ is employed throughout.
27The ﬁrst,
political criterion, asking for ‘stability of institutions guaranteeingdemocracy, rule of law, human rights and the respect for and protec-tion of minority rights’ also implies a notion of institutional capacity.Finally, the fourth condition, aimed at the EU itself, also used the term
‘capacity’, highlighting the need for the Union’s ‘capacity’ to absorb
the new members. There was ambiguity as to what ‘capacity’ meantand what the CEECs were required to do. After the Opinions and pre-
accession strategy of 1997, the ‘capacity’ issue was expanded wholesale
to include elements such as legislation and regulation, and in particu-lar with regard to Chapter 21 the idea of ‘regional administrative
capacity’. Weak administrative ‘capacity’, particularly at the regional
level in relation to Chapter 21, has been repeatedly highlighted in theThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 71

Regular Reports as one of the key shortcomings of the candidate coun-
tries throughout the negotiation process. If taken cumulatively, the
Regular Reports may be seen as an attempt by the Commission to givesome coherence to the notion of building ‘administrative capacity’ inthe candidate states by linking it to the requirements of the acquis in
speciﬁc policy areas, such as sectoral capacity, effective structures andpersonnel for coordinating the negotiation process and adoption of theacquis , administrative and judicial reforms, and the preparation for the
implementation of structural policies.
28
The paradox is that despite the ﬁnancial implications and thus criti-
cal importance of regionalization in the CEECs for the EU, and despitethe Commission’s use of language about institutionally embedding‘partnership’ in regional policy and demanding greater regional ‘capac-ity’, the participation of the regional elites and institutions of the
CEECs in the enlargement process was marginal. The Committee of the
Regions repeatedly highlighted this structural ﬂaw and argued that thenegotiations were a ‘state monopoly’ with regions largely excluded.
29
Nevertheless, as greater knowledge about candidate countries and
experience of managing their differences emerged during the process ofenlargement, it was to be expected that a more differentiated policyapproach would evolve, and this was bound to affect, in particular, thegrey zone of informal inﬂuences on the CEECs emanating from the
Commission. As noted earlier, the shift in the Commission’s policy
approach occurred in 1997. From generally ignoring the implicationsof its own rhetoric about the need for ‘partnership’, and structurally
excluding the key elites and actors at the sub-national level in the
negotiations on regional policy, the Opinions of 1997, for the ﬁrsttime, identiﬁed weak regional ‘administrative capacity’ as a key
problem for enlargement in many of the country reports.
30In the
Opinions, and thereafter in the Regular Reports, the Commission cited
the requirements of Chapter 21 of the acquis as if it provided clear ‘EU
standards’ that were either a lever for the Commission or an incentivefor the CEECs to develop regional policy and institutions. The formu-
laic criticism that the candidates suffered from problems of ‘weak’ or
inadequate ‘administrative capacity’ at the regional level became amantra for the Commission. It did not, however, set explicit bench-
marks for measuring progress toward an appropriate level of such
‘capacity’. Thus, in regional policy an absurd situation arose where theCommission was pursuing a form of conditionality that had a very
weak legal basis in the acquis , and no deﬁnable benchmarks by which
either the Commission or the CEECs could measure compliance. 72Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The thinness of Chapter 21
The Commission’s ofﬁcial guide to the negotiations stresses that there
is no Commission ‘model’ of regionalization: ‘The acquis under
Chapter 21 does not deﬁne how the speciﬁc structures for the practical
management of Structural and the Cohesion Funds should be set up,
but leaves it up to the Member States.’ To comply with Chapter 21 the
candidates must have in place an ‘appropriate legal framework’ toimplement the speciﬁc provisions for regional policy, and agree a
NUTS territorial classiﬁcation with the Commission (via Eurostat).
They must demonstrate ‘programming capacity’. This includes thedesign of a development plan, procedures for multi-annual program-ming of budgetary expenditure, the implementation of the partnership
principle at the different stages (which envisages the involvement of
regional administrative, social and economic actors in the manage-ment of structural funds), ex-ante evaluation of the development plan,
and compliance with the Commission’s evaluation and monitoring
requirements. In addition, they must demonstrate ‘administrativecapacity’, which means they are to ‘deﬁne the tasks and responsibilities
of all the bodies and institutions involved in the preparation and
implementation’ and ensure ‘effective inter-ministerial coordination’.Finally they must show sound ﬁnancial and budgetary management(control provisions and information on co-ﬁnancing capacity and level
of public or equivalent expenditure for structural action) that complies
with the provisions in this area, and demonstrate the ‘additionality’provided by their co-ﬁnancing arrangements.
31In sum, Chapter 21 of
theacquis is concerned with the procedural rather than the institu-
tional mechanisms for regional policy, reﬂecting the Commission’slack of competence in this area.
Much of the content for Chapter 21 came from the Framework
Regulation on the Structural Funds, which does not require transposi-tion into national legislation.
32The weak legal content and nebulous
language used in Chapter 21 reﬂects the fact that it is a member statecompetence. Nevertheless, the Commission made the issue of ‘capac-ity’ in administrative, programming, and ﬁnancial management key
aspects of the Regular Reports and the negotiations over Chapter 21
with the CEECs. The Regular Reports tended to concentrate on theadoption and amendment of laws, regulations and regional develop-
ment programmes as well as the establishment and reorganization of
ministries and coordinating units, while also making very general ref-erences about the need to ‘further enhance’ administrative capacity.The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 73

The Regular Reports of 2001 and 2002 make the most explicit use of
the structural funds criteria for measuring progress, referring systemati-
cally to ‘territorial organization’, ‘legislative framework’, ‘institutionalstructure’, ‘programming’, ‘evaluation and monitoring’, ‘ﬁnancialcontrol and management’ and ‘regional statistics’ (see Chapter 4).
The Commission has tried to build administrative capacity in the
candidate countries for the implementation of regional policy by anumber of pre-accession instruments (PHARE, SAPARD and ISPA) as
well as through speciﬁcally targeted projects. About 30 per cent of
the PHARE budget has been allocated to ‘institution-building’ since the reorganization of PHARE in 1997. While ‘institution-building’ is
deﬁned by the Commission as ‘adapting and strengthening democratic
institutions, public administration and organizations that have aresponsibility in implementing and enforcing Community legislation’,
only a tiny proportion of funds have actually been devoted to these
areas (see Table 1.1). In 1998 the Commission also employed a newdevice, termed ‘twinning’, which involved the secondment or employ-ment of specialists from member states in key administrative posts in
candidate countries as pre-accession advisers with the mandate to assist
in the transposition, enforcement and implementation of speciﬁc partsof the acquis . ‘Twinning’ was extended to the regional level, however,
only in the 2000 programming round.
33Thus, there were no clear
benchmarks for measuring progress by candidate countries towardsachieving an acceptable regional administrative capacity beyond thevague and brief statements in the Regular Reports and any unrecordedadvice given by ‘twins’.
In the absence of a ‘thick’ acquis in Chapter 21 the Commission also
employed the baseline criteria for administrative reform developed bythe SIGMA (Support for Improvement in Governance and Management
in Central and Eastern European Countries) group of the OECD to
deﬁne ‘administrative capacity’. These criteria focused on macro-leveladministrative reform, highlighting the establishment of an indepen-
dent and professional civil service and judicial system, without issuing
detailed recommendations as to the form of sub-national governance.The timing and nature of the civil service legislation passed in the
CEECs after 1997, for example, is clearly correlated with the
Commission’s increased emphasis on administrative reforms. As aresult, some have argued that the public administrative spaces in the
CEECs converge more with each other and norms of ‘Europeanization’
than is the case in the EU itself.
34This understanding of the public
administrative space, however, is focused on the national executive74Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

level. The issue of regional administrative capacity, after all, is a funda-
mental part of the horizontal and vertical conﬁguration of a country’s
administrative space, both with regard to its territorial form and powerallocation. In these latter respects the CEECs diverged widely from eachother, though in this they mirrored the differentiated systems of the EU
member states.
It appears that there were competing views within the Commission
over whether Chapter 21 entailed a ‘model of regionalization’ and howit should be implemented by the CEECs. The differences were within
and between DGs, and views changed over time. The issue hinged onhow to create and standardize regions in the CEECs at the NUTS II
level, the critical level for regional policy, and whether the
Commission should pressure the CEECs to install elected authorities atthe regional level or administrative agencies or quango-type boards.
The key question was whether regionalization was to be political, sta-
tistical, or both (that is, that NUTS II statistical regions would be over-lapped by an elected tier of government). The study by Hooghe andMarks of multi-level governance and the wide variations in regional
policy across member states demonstrates a strong correlation between
‘regional inﬂuence in structural programming’ and strong ‘regionalgovernance’.
35This correlation seems to have informed DG
Enlargement’s views that the ‘partnership’ principle in EU regionalpolicy practices constituted best practice for the CEECs. The goal wasto develop multi-level governance with the appropriate ‘partnership’,‘programming capacity’ and ‘administrative capacity’, with funds allo-
cated to member states on criteria derived from socio-economic devel-
opment at the NUTS II territorial level. The question is whether theseofﬁcials saw this requirement as entailing ‘strong’, preferably elected,
regional governance?
The NUTS statistical classiﬁcation system of Eurostat has been an
important tool for the Commission in its attempts to shape and stan-dardize regional policy. The NUTS system consists of three key levels
(NUTS I, NUTS II, NUTS III). The NUTS II level is the crucial one forregional funds. It provides not only the statistical information and
analysis for regional development planning and programmes, but also
deﬁnes the administrative level at which structural funds and otherregional and cohesion funds are managed. The existing NUTS II
regions in the EU were drawn up independently, largely on the basis of
designations arrived at by individual member states and subsequentlyapproved pro forma by Brussels.
36The Commission even refers to this
EU-15 process as one that is based on ‘gentlemen’s agreements’The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 75

between the member states and Eurostat.37Equally, the manipulation
of NUTS regional demarcation to maximize regional funding opportu-
nities is not without precedent in the EU as the creation of the twoNUTS III level regions (Border-Midland-Western region, and Southernand Eastern region) in Ireland in 1997–99 demonstrates.
In contrast to Ireland, conditionality has allowed the Commission to
intervene directly in the designation of NUTS regionalization in theCEECs. Attempts by candidate states to manipulate the NUTS system to
maximize funding opportunities were rejected by the Commission. For
example, it rejected Slovenia’s proposal to create two NUTS II regions,which would disaggregate its wealthy capital from the rest of the
country, and forced it to adopt one region for the whole country.
38
Furthermore, Eurostat has systematically employed NUTS categories inits interactions with the statistical ofﬁces of the candidate countries to
promote a technocratic standardization.
39
Consequently, one of the reverse effects of the operation of condi-
tionality in regional policy is that it has intensiﬁed the Commission’sattempt to strengthen the legal basis of the acquis for a standardized
NUTS classiﬁcation scheme for the Union as a whole. A draft regula-tion on NUTS regions prepared in 2001 noted that regions were con-
ceived in the existing member states as ‘normative regions’ (sic) which
reﬂect ‘political will’, and further states that the tensions between theCommission and the National Statistical Ofﬁces, in particular during
enlargement, demonstrate the need for clear guidelines on the criteria
for NUTS classiﬁcations. The regulation was enacted in May 2003 afterthe enlargement negotiations had been concluded.
40
The perception of conditionality
Interviews with regional ofﬁcials in the CEECs and with CEEC delega-
tions in Brussels revealed that there was a widespread perception, both
among the Commission and the CEEC actors involved in the enlarge-ment process, that the Commission was pushing for a particular modelof decentralization in regional policy in the CEECs. While the candi-
dates set their legislative machinery to work to rapidly secure the adop-
tion of many aspects of the acquis , regional policy was a key area where
there was open resistance to the Commission’s attempts to interfere.
Such interference impinged upon issues of territorial governance that
overtly and directly were sensitive for political sovereignty.
Before 1998, according to a senior ofﬁcial in the Polish delegation in
Brussels, there was no formal written exchange between the Commission76Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

and the candidate countries on the content of regional policy. The
Commission’s formal views were set out in the Opinions of 1997 and
subsequent Regular Reports which, while they have not been consistentin recommending that the candidates should adopt a particular model ofinstitutional governance at the NUTS II regional level, have commended
states which have made progress on developing what the Commission
termed ‘active’ regional policy, that is, one which involves all govern-ment levels, establishing acceptable NUTS II regions, and building
regional ‘institutions’. This practice constituted an incentive structure
and sent a strong signal that countries which promoted regional partici-pation in regional policy and engaged in institution-building at the
regional level were making progress on accession.
Initially, Hungary was top of the Commission’s chart for progress on
Chapter 21 as the Opinions singled out the 1996 Law on RegionalDevelopment and Physical Planning which established seven planning
and administrative-statistical regions as the ﬁrst in a candidate countryto adopt ‘a legal framework closely in line with the EU StructuralPolicy’.
41Equally, Poland’s proposed development of a democratized
level of regional self-government was commended for moving towardsa ‘modernized regional policy closer to that of the EU’.
42At the same
time, Slovakia suffered from a general EU critique of the Meciar gov-ernment. However, while the Commission criticized its regional self-government reform of 1996 for still leaving regional policy decisions‘overly centralized with all major decisions taken directly by the
Government’, no mention was made of the gerrymandering of the
Hungarian minority.
43In the case of the Czech Republic the Opinion’s
verdict is even harsher: ‘Currently, the Czech Republic has no regionalpolicy.’
44The Commission’s criticism directly stressed the fact that
regional development initiatives in the Czech Republic were imple-mented via sectoral policies at the national level. The problem for theCommission was that ‘there exists no elected [authors’ italics] body
between the State and the communes although the constitution
foresees the establishment of the so-called territorial units of self-
administration’ and that the districts are ‘bodies of state administrationwith general competences (no self-government) [authors’ italics]’.
45
The Commission’s preferences were also transmitted through other
channels: PHARE, some working papers, speeches and bilateral meetingsat ministerial and expert level.
46Interviewees at the CEEC missions to
the EU were forthright in expressing their frustration with what wasperceived to be an overly interfering approach from the Commission inregional policy. An interviewee at the Hungarian Mission explainedThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 77

how there was ‘amazing pressure from the EU because Hungary does
not have regions. We think there was no real need to set up a regional
structure. We have regions – the counties. We have been trying to orga-nize at the NUTS II level. It is driven by Structural Funds. They [theCommission] may deny this fact of imposition. Internally you can see
maps though the Commission won’t admit to it.’
47Hungary went from
‘ice-breaker’ to laggard within a year. The 1998 Regular Report criticized
its failure to further develop ‘institutional and administrative capacityin regional development’.
48An interviewee at the Romanian Mission
described how Commission ofﬁcials pressured them to ‘design NUTS IIlevel regions, which we did not have in Romania … because theCommission tends to favour decentralized management of funds’.
49In
the 1998 report on Romania the Commission openly acknowledged itsdirect involvement in the design of the country’s Law on RegionalDevelopment adopted in July 1998.
50In fact, PHARE showcased its
involvement in Romania’s Green Paper on Regional Development(1997) which was the basis for the law, and which had tied the estab-lishment of a number of macro-regions as planning units to associa-tions of elected county councils.
51The perception of a power
asymmetry meant, as a high-ranking ofﬁcial at the Estonian Mission tothe EU explained, that the Commission saw candidate countries as‘mice in laboratories … anything could be asked of them’. He observedthat the pressure to regionalize was ‘only because of EU policy princi-
ples and in particular money channels’. He noted the key role of PHARE
in applying direct pressure: ‘approval of a particular programme is theirmode of inﬂuence, their way of interference’. While he accepted that it
was in Estonia’s national interest to rationalize the division of local
authorities, he resisted the Commission’s interference on the questionof how many levels to create.
52
Thus, in a policy domain where formal conditionality was weak or vir-
tually non-existent, there was a general perception among those CEECofﬁcials closely involved in the negotiations that the Commission reliedon informal conditionality by carrot and stick methods, whether by sig-nalling criticisms and approval for compliance in the Regular Reports,
channelling PHARE funding to promote particular types of institutional
development and regionalization, or by the positive reinforcement ofcompliant rhetoric and behaviour through personal interactions between
Commission ofﬁcials and their CEEC counterparts.
Commission ofﬁcials are naturally defensive when charged with an
attempt to impose a particular model of regionalization in the CEECs.When questioned on this issue they tended to refer to the requirements78Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

of the acquis on regional administrative capacity for managing struc-
tural funds (though as we noted earlier such requirements are
extremely vague in the acquis), while they also emphasized that nosingle template for administrative reform was being imposed. Anofﬁcial from the Slovenia team at DG Enlargement, who had chaired
the negotiations over the regional chapter, was insistent that ‘no one
has told anyone to establish regional administrations though somepeople in Eastern Europe have gone around suggesting that this is the
case. Regions have to be naturally grown products in Eastern Europe.
All the candidate countries have to do is guarantee that they canmanage the Structural Funds. They could opt for decentralized organs
of central administration. All that is needed is interlocutors – for the
“partnership” prerequisite. No schema has been proposed fromBrussels. All you can say is that the candidate countries have responded
to incentives.’ When asked to clarify the intriguing nature of the
‘incentives’, since if an incentive structure is to work there must be anobjective or policy outcome envisaged, he admitted that there had beena push from the Commission for a particular template of regionaliza-
tion in the CEECs: ‘Some people here in the Commission think that
you can jump stages. In terms of regional policy, there are some whothink it should be aimed at the sub-national level.’
53
An ofﬁcial in the Polish team at DG Enlargement was even more
explicit and stressed that in their work with national agencies on theintroduction of public administration reforms, including civil servicereform, ‘decentralization was the most important objective’.
54PHARE
was the instrument to achieve this by providing the technical expertiseto promote institutionalization at the regional level. In the opinion ofthis ofﬁcial, had the Suchocka government survived in 1993, the Polishreform would have gone ahead much earlier under PHARE’s guidance.
Similarly, senior ofﬁcials at DG Enlargement’s Romania team expressed
their views of regionalization in unambiguous terms: ‘We are lookingfor a mode of decentralized implementation. This is problematic
because of the history of the country.’ They stressed that the develop-
ment regions introduced in Romania in 1998 had been ‘designed withthe Commission’. When asked to explain the objective of the
Commission’s role in Romania’s regionalization, an experienced
ofﬁcial who had been transferred from DG Regio to assist with enlarge-ment in the Romania team declared: ‘We have always been looking for
a mode of decentralization, but we have not found a satisfactory
formula … the search continues [since] this is le clef d’or for successful
regionalization.’
55The Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 79

Policy contestation within the Commission
The Commission itself appears to have undergone a policy learning
curve in the mid-to-late 1990s over enlargement, as evidenced by the
reform of PHARE in 1997–98. Changes in the Commission’s approachto regional policy in the CEECs came later, but were, nevertheless, part
of the policy learning process. Within the Commission, the tension
between conﬂicting policy positions and objectives became moreapparent over time and as the enlargement process progressed. On the
one hand, the early pressures from the Commission were driven by
preferences among some key ofﬁcials within DG Enlargement and DGRegio for an institutional design in the CEECs that would embeddecentralization and partnership with the regions, and on the other
hand, there was a belated realization that efﬁciency and ‘value for
money’ concerns must impel the Commission to rely on the most reli-able, efﬁcient and most easily monitored mechanism of dispersion of
funds, namely central ministries. As one senior ofﬁcial in PHARE
explained: ‘In the smaller countries, structures are being set up at thenational level. It doesn’t make sense to set up regional structures … in
Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia. However, Poland and Romania are too
big to be run from the centre in terms of the practical implementationof Structural Funds … Ten years of work in Eastern Europe has given usexperience in knowing what sort of level is needed. We do have some
doubts about whether the necessary administrative capacity will be in
place.’ This Commission ofﬁcial admitted that a ‘top-down approach’had been imposed from Brussels in the early years of the accession
process, particularly through PHARE’s multi-country programmes. He
acknowledged that ‘in the early years PHARE made the mistake oftelling them [the candidates] what to do … the evaluation reports
demonstrated the unsustainability of the programmes … Since 1997
the emphasis is on a national approach.’ According to the ofﬁcial themain problem by late 2000 was how to make the candidate countries
assume ‘ownership’ of their projects to ensure their sustainability. It
had become clear over time that the Commission had to differentiatemore between the candidates and between large and smaller countries
in particular. The Baltic states and Slovenia, for example, would not be
expected to manage programmes at the sub-national level. This differ-entiated approach to regional policy, as the ofﬁcial admitted, ‘emergedover time’ and led to the closure of PHARE Management Units and the
move to a much more consolidated system. As the ofﬁcial put it:
‘Regional focus does not mean that everything has to be managed at80Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

the regional level. This was not made very clear in our programme in
previous years … in the Programming Instruction Guidelines, [we were
refused access to these documents: authors].56
Inexperience on the part of Commission ofﬁcials was also partly
to blame. As a senior ofﬁcial in ISPA observed with regard to theCommission’s role in the regionalization of Hungary: ‘Colleagues fromStructural Funds [that is, DG Regio] pushed for “regions”. They under-estimated the political games and the intricacies they got involved
in.’
57As another Commission ofﬁcial explained, the regional level in
Hungary was considered to be ‘highly corrupt’, as it was manipulated
by the Fidesz government of prime minister Viktor Orban to secure itspatrimony: ‘all the PHARE projects are located in the municipalities’party structures and all the heads of the regional development councils
are from the governing parties’.
58
Ofﬁcials in the Commission’s Forward Planning Unit accepted that a
major problem with the regional dimension of enlargement was that
there are ‘conﬂicting visions of what the requirements are for havingan appropriate institutional set-up for Structural Funds’. There were,apparently, competing democratizing and technocratic visions. Many
in the Commission, they observed, favoured a more decentralized
approach because they saw it as the ‘more efﬁcient way of taking intoaccount speciﬁcity … and the more democratic’. After the corruption
scandals in the Commission in 1999 (leading to the resignation of the
Santer Commission) policy changed, according to these ofﬁcials, toemphasize management of funds from the national level rather than
the regional or local for fear of mismanagement. The view of these
ofﬁcials was framed by the notion of ‘multi-level governance’, as forthem the 1988 reform of the structural funds ‘placed a new emphasis
on decentralization as a way of elevating the position of theCommission vis-à-vis the member states as well as empowering the
local level. Twelve years on this has been seen to be very successful.’ Atthe same time they recognized that the Commission’s leverage on the
CEECs to develop regions had been applied ‘in heavier ways’ than in
previous waves of enlargement.
59
As enlargement neared its conclusion the Commission modiﬁed its
own mantra of problems with ‘regional administrative capacity’ in thecandidates for new ones that stressed the need for strong ‘managingauthority’ and ‘inter-ministerial coordination’ in regional policy andstructural funds as part of a general concern with post-accession imple-
mentation. In working documents and seminars on regional policy in
February and early March 2001, the Commission clariﬁed that, givenThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 81

its concerns about the weak regional administrative capacity in the
candidates, it wanted centralized management of funds so as to maxi-
mize efﬁciency, streamlining and control of expenditures. According toan ofﬁcial in the Polish Mission in Brussels this policy shift caused ‘asigniﬁcant and noticeable dispute between our country and the
Commission’.
60Having introduced regional self-government in 1999,
and given its great regional disparities between well-developed and
under-developed regions, a general backwards shift in the organiza-tional principle of the state to a reconcentration of power in regionalpolicy to central ministries was a great reverse in Poland. As an ofﬁcial
in DG Regio explained, the Commission was suggesting in effect that
Poland ‘delay their process of regionalization a bit’ so that there wouldbe ‘progressive decentralization’. The Commission’s concern with the
‘absorption capacity’ in structural funds meant that it was a case of: ‘If
you want to have decentralization – ﬁne, but make sure you can usethe money well. Start at the central level and progressively go where
you would like to.’
61
In the ﬁnal Regular Reports in 2002 candidate countries with non-
existent regional government, such as Hungary, that have ‘re-deﬁned’
their ﬁnancial management and control for structural funds andregional policy towards a heavily centralized approach have beenpraised by the Commission, while Poland, the candidate with the
strongest and most democratized regional government level, was criti-
cized for its lack of ‘vigour’ in such central controls.
62It seems that the
closer the reality of enlargement became the greater was the concern inthe Commission to anticipate problems previously encountered instructural funds with Spain, Greece and Portugal, where regional poli-cies and the institutional capacity to manage them, both centrally and
locally, was constructed virtually from scratch and there was initial
signiﬁcant mismanagement of funds. For one Commission ofﬁcial oneof the most serious failures of the PHARE programme was precisely its
lack of impact on the ‘organization of the state’ in the CEECs: ‘it has
not contributed to management at the central level. We createdcapacity at the local level … but errors are unavoidable and there is a
learning curve during the enlargement process’.
63
The competing visions and shifts in approach within the Commission
to regional policy in the candidates reﬂect this learning curve but also
genuine differences in the remits and opinions of the various depart-ments of the Commission, in particular differences within and betweenDG Enlargement and DG Regio over whether to promote centralized or
decentralized management of regional policy in the CEECs. The process82Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

of EU enlargement conﬁrms that the Commission has not been a
uniﬁed actor in the application of conditionality. The Commission did
not have a consistent or well-deﬁned institutional preference forregional policy, though in some countries its actors did pressure fordecentralization. The message from the Commission changed over time
not only in response to practical experience, but also depending on
which ofﬁcials were most engaged, which also ﬂuctuated over time.Those most closely involved with the enlargement project within the
Commission do appear to have preferred a decentralized democratic
regional variant in the early stages, but the ground shifted in favour ofmore centralized management in the latter stages. In such a ﬂuid situa-
tion, where the absence of formal conditionality in regional policy
made benchmarking of clear and consistent rules and evaluation of out-comes against such benchmarks difﬁcult to achieve, the way was
opened for a heavy reliance on informal conditionality by the
Commission. Moreover, the informal conditionality was employed inan ad hoc fashion, thus making for a strong perception in the CEECsthat conditionality existed but was inconsistent.
Conclusion
Given that regional policy is a competence under EU law where the
national governments decide the institutional framework and means
of implementation, the Commission lacked a repertoire of legalinstruments to enforce a particular institutional model on the candi-dates, even if such a uniform ‘EU template’ had existed – which it
did not. The lack of leverage from formal conditionality meant that
in this policy domain elements with the Commission resorted toinformal conditionality vis-a `-vis the CEECs to push their norma-
tively driven preferences for a model of regional decentralization. In
this respect the context in which the enlargement process began iscrucial. EU enlargement conditionality for the CEECs in the area of
regional policy was implemented in a context of a spill-over of
policy contestation within the Commission, where earlier divisionsover the reform of regional policy in the Union still resonated. This
spill-over informed the early stage of the enlargement process and
strongly inﬂuenced perceptions in the candidates that there was aCommission ‘model’ of regionalization that favoured democratized
regional governance and sought to reconﬁgure the governance of
the CEECs in this image. Over time, however, it has become obviousthat the Commission itself has been divided. From early 2001 theThe Commission, Conditionality and Regional Policy 83

Commission began to stress more systematically and proactively a
clear preference for the centralized management of structural funds
in the candidate countries.
Most of the CEEC states began to regionalize only once the enlarge-
ment negotiations were underway, thereby afﬁrming a strong temporal
correlation. The following three chapters test whether there has been a
general pattern of causal links between EU conditionality and policy,institutional and attitudinal change in the CEECs. Chapter 4 analyses
the Commission’s monitoring function during enlargement through
the Opinions of 1997, the 1998 Accession Partnerships and the subse-quent annual Regular Reports, to evaluate what conditionality was
applied in regional policy. Chapter 5 then examines how the CEECs
responded to the pressures from the Commission in regional policy,while Chapter 6 examines the impact of enlargement on the norms
and identities of the elites at the regional level. 84Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

4
Monitoring Conditionality and
Compliance
For conditionality to be credible, it must be clearly benchmarked and
be applied with consistency. Similarly, commitment to conformity and
compliance with conditionality must be fairly evaluated. Regular mon-
itoring was chosen by the EU as the means to communicate the criteriaof accession and assess progress and to highlight shortcomings in adap-
tation by the CEECs. The Opinions of 1997 and the ﬁve sets of annual
Regular Reports from 1998 to 2002 were the main outlets for the
Commission’s monitoring process. These documents are the only
ofﬁcial and transparent public statements of the Commission’s assess-
ments of the progress of the candidate countries over time. The Reports
fell within the remit of DG Enlargement where the monitoring processwas overseen by the Horizontal Co-Ordination Unit that also produced
a manual for the country desks highlighting the issues to be covered.
On the basis of reports from the EU delegations in the candidate coun-
tries, complemented by information supplied by other international
institutions, NGOs and some member states’ governments, the country
desks produced the drafts of the annual Reports. The Co-Ordination
Unit had the task to streamline all of the draft reports in terms of
substance, language, and comparability and to communicate with the
various relevant line DGs, country desks and the legal service inperforming this role.
The political salience of the Commission’s reporting was character-
ized by peaks and troughs. The zenith of their political salienceoccurred at the beginning and the end of the enlargement process. For
example, prior to the beginning of the accession negotiations in 1997,
the Opinions were employed by the EU to legitimate the ‘queuing’system for enlargement which centred on the selection of the
‘Luxembourg Six’, that small group of candidate countries that were
85

permitted to enter negotiations with the Commission over member-
ship in 1998.1This hierarchy of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ among the candidates
created an atmosphere of competitive emulation, transforming
enlargement into a scramble for accession. Some countries, in particu-lar Hungary, saw itself as an ‘ice-breaker’ leading the pack. Some ofthose relegated to the ‘out’ group, such as Slovakia, made an immense
effort to catch up by signalling commitment and compliance in the
two-year period between the Luxembourg Council of 1997 and theHelsinki Council of 1999, when the scale of the enlargement was
revised upwards to include Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia and Malta. Overall, the ‘pull factor’ of EU conditionalityseems to have been strongest in the pre-negotiation phase, in particu-
lar in the case of the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia.
During this phase, the EU’s rhetoric about conditionality primarilycentred on the fulﬁlment of the vague ﬁrst political Copenhagen crite-
rion, which had to be met before the accession negotiations could
begin. Over time the eponymous ‘progress’ Reports essentially becameincreasingly characterized by ‘spin’ and became an attempt to extol thecumulative success story of enlargement. The political salience of the
Reports also peaked at the end of the process in late 2002, when they
were employed to deliver the EU’s ofﬁcial seal of approval for the polit-ical decision to accept ten candidate countries as new members from
1 May 2004. The 2002 Reports and, in particular, the follow-up
Comprehensive Monitoring Reports of 2003 were qualitatively differ-ent from previous reports in that rather than presenting fairly general
assessments and vague recommendations, they offered detailed criti-
cism and policy advice.
The Commission’s reporting mechanism, consequently, served three
main goals. First, it mapped out each country’s trajectory towards EU
membership and provided a base point of reference for the pre-
accession and accession negotiations and the Accession Partnerships.Second, as the only benchmark for the comparison and ranking of the
candidate countries available to the Commission and to the candidates,
the Reports, which were keenly awaited by the accession countries eachautumn, were a key commitment device for generating competitive
‘European’ emulation among the candidates. Third, the Reports allowed
the Commission to highlight and prioritize its own areas of concernover compliance. Moreover, the monitoring structure tracked the
Commission’s own learning curve towards the CEECs, beginning with
the elemental data and formulaic comments in the Opinions and earlyReports but becoming more detailed, differentiated and nuanced over86Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

time. In particular in policy areas where the acquis is thin, the Regular
Reports became the default mechanism for the Commission to deﬁne
and communicate standards of compliance. The Reports attempt tocompensate for such ‘thinness’ of the acquis by cross-referencing other
EU regulations or norms and recommendations of other international
institutions and ‘European standards’. Given the thinness of the acquis
in the area of regional policy the Reports became critically important
for the Commission to showcase its policy preferences and for the can-
didates to identify what the criticisms of them involved. In particular,
as we shall discuss below, the sections of the Opinions and the Reportsdealing with Chapter 21 were generally highly formulaic in their
content and tended to focus on the Commission’s vaguely deﬁned
notion of ‘weak capacity’ to implement the acquis .
In the absence of detailed acquis criteria, there were three obvious
sources the Commission could turn to in its attempt to deﬁne mea-sures and benchmarks: the Europe Agreements, the AccessionPartnerships (from 1998 onwards) and the Regulations on StructuralFunds. The Europe Agreements provide the framework for bilateral
relations between the EC and their member states on the one hand and
the partner countries on the other hand. They cover trade-relatedissues, political dialogue, legal approximation and other areas of co-
operation, such as industry, environment, transport and customs and
ultimately aim to progressively establish a free-trade area between theEU and the partner countries. The EU itself describes them as preparing
‘the way for the EU and the partner countries to converge economi-
cally, politically, socially and culturally’.
2The Agreements commit the
partner countries to the approximation of their legislation to that ofthe EU, in particular in areas relevant to the internal market. The bilat-eral relations are channelled at three institutional levels: theAssociation Councils denote bilateral meetings at ministerial level
reviewing all areas of legal approximation; the Association Committees
(and sub-committees) convene meetings at senior ofﬁcial level toreview individual areas in more detail; and the Joint Parliamentary
Committees bring together members of the national parliaments of the
partner countries and members of the European Parliament. TheEurope Agreements became the framework within which the CEECs
prepared for EU membership, and PHARE was the main ﬁnancial
instrument tied to the Europe Agreements.
The Europe Agreements with all the CEECs include an almost identi-
cal article on ‘Regional Development’. It asked both parties tostrengthen cooperation in the ﬁeld of regional development and landMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 87

use and lists a number of measures that ‘may be undertaken’ to achieve
this goal, such as the exchange of information by national, regional or
local authorities on regional and land-use policy; the provision of assis-tance to the partner country for the formulation of a regional develop-ment policy; joint action by regional and local authorities in the area
of economic development; the study of coordinated approaches for the
development of border areas, areas with regional disparities and inter-regional cooperation; exchange visits to explore opportunities for
cooperation and assistance; the exchange of civil servants and experts;
the provision of technical assistance; and the establishment of pro-grammes facilitating the exchange of information and experience.
3
Thus, the Europe Agreements deﬁned the parameters very widely and
had little to contribute to the deﬁnition of benchmarks in the ﬁeld of
regional policy.
The Accession Partnerships, one of the three cornerstones of the
‘reinforced pre-accession strategy’ proclaimed by the Luxembourg
European Council in 1997 (the others being PHARE and participation
in Community programmes), were drawn up for each candidatecountry in 1999 (and revised in subsequent years).
4They identiﬁed the
priority areas in which a country had to make progress in order toprepare for accession, and the ways in which PHARE was to supportthese preparations. The priority areas in the National Programmes forthe Adoption of the Acquis (NPAA), drawn up by each country individ-
ually, spell out more precise commitments on the part of the candidatestates. The Accession Partnerships, which are only about 15–20 pageslong, frontload the three Copenhagen criteria as their ‘principles’ and
explicitly build on the Opinions and Regular Reports. This link is
further highlighted by the fact that the Regular Reports sum up theshort-term and medium-term priorities of the Accession Partnerships.
Under Chapter 21 the Accession Partnerships emphasize the prepara-
tion of a national policy on social and economic cohesion; a monitor-ing system; institutional and administrative capacity of the bodies
involved in programming and managing funds ‘in line with the
Structural Funds approach’, including the deﬁnition of managing andpaying authorities; ‘a clear division of responsibilities at national and
regional level’; the improvement of administrative capacity through
recruitment and training and inter-ministerial coordination; andﬁnancial control provisions.
5In the majority of cases, a brief reference
to the preparation for structural funds and administrative capacity isincluded under ‘medium-term priorities’ in the subsequent AccessionPartnerships.88Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Over time the cross-references to the Structural Funds Regulations
(see Chapter 3) in the Accession Partnerships became more explicit,
but it is obvious also that they were the only available source for asomewhat more detailed description of EU requirements and were themain basis for conditionality in the area of regional policy.
6
Nevertheless, the tension remained in this ‘thin’ part of the acquis
between, on the one hand, very brief regulatory recommendationsgiven that this was a competence that was in the domain of memberstates and ‘their own rules’ – and, on the other, the Commission’sattempts to build regional administrative and institutional capacity in
the candidate countries. In part, as we discussed in Chapter 3, this
included a normative drive from some actors in the Commission tocreate regional self-governments.
The Opinions of 1997
Since statistical measures of wealth and poverty underpin the EU’s own
methodology for regional policy, it is not surprising that the section on
‘regional policy and cohesion’ in the Opinions of 1997 presents basicdescriptive statistics about each candidate country, in particular theaverage GDP per capita and unemployment rates as well as speciﬁc sec-
toral and regional disparities. Against this background of poverty and
regional disparities the need for an effective regional policy is bothlegitimated and emphasized. The Opinions also acknowledge existing
EU activity in this ﬁeld through the Europe Agreements, which pro-
vided for cooperation on regional development and spatial planning,in particular through the exchange of information between local,
regional and national authorities and the exchange of civil servants
and experts. No further details on the extent and depth of these linkswere provided.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the Opinions offered a snapshot of the can-
didates’ standing on regional reform. Two elements that drew the particu-lar attention of the Commission were, ﬁrst, the extent to whichregionalization in the candidates was a good ﬁt with ‘EU standards’, and
second, what plans or prospects, if any, were there for regional self-
government. Initially, Hungary was the clear leader of the Commission’schart for progress on Chapter 21 as the Opinions singled out the 1996
Law on Regional Development and Physical Planning (which established
seven planning and administrative-statistical regions) as the ﬁrst in acandidate country to adopt ‘a legal framework closely in line with the
EU Structural Policy’.
7Equally, Poland’s proposed development of aMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 89

democratized level of regional self-government was commended for
moving towards a ‘modernised regional policy closer to that of the EU’.8
In the case of the Czech Republic the Opinion’s verdict is even
harsher: ‘Currently, the Czech Republic has no regional policy.’ The
Commission’s criticism directly stressed the fact that regional develop-ment initiatives in the Czech Republic were implemented via sectoralpolicies at the national level. The problem for the Commission was
that ‘there exists no elected body between the State and the communes
although the constitution foresees the establishment of the so-calledterritorial units of self-administration’ and that the districts are
‘bodies of state administration with general competences (no self-
government)’.
9Similarly, in the case of Bulgaria, the fact that the
Commission’s Opinion stresses favourably that there is the possibilityof the new districts, which are envisaged to replace the existing nineregions, gaining self-governing powers is a form of implicit encourage-ment. This impression is reinforced by the Commission’s view that the
draft legislation on regional policies is ‘based on EC practices’, while its
criticism of Bulgaria’s sectoral approach to regional developmentstressed ‘the need for an active regional policy involving all govern-
ment levels’.
10
At the same time the Commission did attempt to differentiate
among the candidate countries according to size. In contrast to the
bigger candidate countries, the Opinion on Estonia makes explicit ref-erence to Estonia’s size and the fact that regional policy ‘should con-tinue to constitute an integral part of the national development
strategy’. Smaller countries, such as Estonia, were not expected to
regionalize but they were expected to develop ‘regional policy instru-ments’ and make ‘progress in establishing a regional development
policy’.
11
The Opinions contrasted the increasing awareness in the CEECs of
the need for an effective regional policy with their weak ‘capacity’ to
deliver it through a coherent strategy, administrative framework andbudgetary instruments. The Commission’s carrot and stick incentivestructure, however, was ambivalent. Rather than offering speciﬁc
policy recommendations, strategies, structures and instruments, the
Commission employed nebulous phrases such as referring to the needto adopt the ‘necessary reforms’, make a ‘major effort of reform’, and
remedy ‘the deﬁciencies’. The Opinions pointed to general failures in
the broadest of terms.
12Bulgaria, for example, was called upon to
improve ‘its administrative capacity to manage integrated regionaldevelopment programmes’, and speciﬁcally in the areas of administra-90Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

tive and budgetary procedures, inter-ministerial cooperation and co-
ﬁnancing arrangements.13In some cases the Commission stressed the
need for new political thinking about regional policy. In the Czech
case the Commission not only censured it for weaknesses in adminis-trative and budgetary issues, but also implicitly criticized its uncertainconstitutional framework and called for action to ‘determine the legal
basis of a Czech regional policy’. In contrast to other CEECs, an opti-
mistic spin was given to this lack of compliance: ‘Given the CzechRepublic’s administrative capacity and with the necessary political
awareness, this should be achieved within a reasonable time-frame.’
14
Estonia was evaluated in very similar terms, highlighting the need for‘political support’ for regional development policy. As regards regional
institutions and policy-making the Opinions’ observations conﬁrmedthe overall differentiation between the frontrunners and laggards.
The Opinion on Slovakia contains the most explicit criticism. Among
the ‘serious deﬁciencies’ in the organizational framework of regionalpolicy it criticized the high degree of centralization: ‘Regional policydecision-making is overly centralised with all major decisions taken
directly by the Government.’
15The controversial Slovak law of 1996 on
territorial-administrative reform, which divided the country into eight
regions (and 79 districts) was only brieﬂy mentioned, yet without anycomment on the gerrymandering of the regionalization to minimize theinﬂuence of the Hungarian minority in the southern regions. In fact,
Slovakia was prima facie in breach of the Copenhagen political criteria as
regards the ‘respect for and protection of minorities’.
16
Consequently, from the outset the ecology of the enlargement
process was one characterized by a readiness on the part of theCommission to criticize the candidate countries for their failures andweaknesses, while at the same time it was less willing to spell out whatreforms should be undertaken and what benchmarks should be fol-
lowed. The Opinions did, nevertheless, signal to the CEECs that the
Commission’s preference in terms of the institutional architecture forregional policy was for a momentum towards some form of regional
‘self-government’.
The Regular Reports 1998–2003
The prominence of the Copenhagen criteria 1998–99
The 1998 and 1999 Regular Reports followed a similar format to the
1997 Opinions by using the ﬁrst three Copenhagen criteria as their
main structuring device for the negotiations. Each country was assessedMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 91

according to the political criteria, economic criteria, the ability to
assume the obligations of membership, and, in line with the Madrid
Council (1995) conclusions a fourth section on ‘administrative capacityto apply the acquis ’ was added. Regional policy fell under the economic
criteria in the reports, and together with employment it formed the
section on ‘economic and social cohesion’. It was also considered sepa-
rately, again under the heading ‘economic and social cohesion’ where itformed part of the section on ‘administrative and judicial capacity’.
The 1998 Reports reinforced the directional impetus provided by the
Opinions for the establishment of an institutional architecture forregional policy in the CEECs. In general, the entries under ‘regional
policy’ are very brief in the 1998 Reports, often amounting to no more
than a few lines. The less progress an accession country made in thisregard, the briefer was the Commission’s reporting and evaluation.
Lithuania’s Report attributes ‘little progress’ and merely refers to the
need to implement the country’s general regional policy guidelines of1998.
17In the case of Bulgaria, for example, which the Opinion did not
credit with the capacity to participate in the EU’s structural policy, thecryptic reference to ‘some progress’ is accompanied by one basic recom-mendation, namely the advice that the relevant ministry needs to bestrengthened.
18The adoption of key legislation or development con-
cepts and the establishment of relevant institutions were evaluated pos-itively, and the failure to do so was criticized, such as in the case ofSlovenia: ‘It is regrettable that a law on regional development has notyet been adopted.’
19Similarly, Slovakia is seen to have made ‘limited
concrete progress’ beyond the recognition of a need for legislation onthe basis of a general state plan on regional policy.
20More generally the
Commission also demanded a ‘strengthening’ of the administrativestructures without spelling out what this meant in practice.Furthermore, for the ﬁrst time the Commission referred to the need forattention to be paid to the question of the ‘implementation’ of laws and
frameworks.
21The Commission’s approach, consequently, maintained
the vague and reactive character of the Opinions rather than evaluating
according to clearly deﬁned standards or benchmarks and proactivelydetailing policy recommendations.
The question as to the causal relationship between the regional self-
government agenda set out in the Opinions and the development ofregionalization in the CEECs will be discussed in Chapter 5. There was,undoubtedly, a temporal correlation. The Reports commended devel-
opments in institution-building at the regional level such as the Czech
parliament’s approval of the territorial division of the country into 1492Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

regions in December 1997, and Romania’s Law on Regional
Development of July 1998 which created eight development regions.
Romania in particular was seen as having made ‘notable progress’. Itslegislation had been drafted with EU assistance, and thus it wasregarded as offering a solid basis for deﬁning national and regional-
level policy and programming structures.
22The 1998 Report on Poland
explicitly states that the territorial state administration reform, due to
enter into force in January 1999, ‘should have a signiﬁcant positiveeffect on the development of a genuine regional policy approach inPoland’ even though Poland’s regional development strategy was ‘still
at a conceptual stage’ and there remained ‘administrative deﬁcits in
the elaboration, co-ordination and implementation of regionalpolicy’.
23The signal was reiterated by a shift in the Commission’s view
on Hungary’s progress on regional development and administrativecapacity. In the eyes of the Commission Hungary went from being an‘ice-breaker’ to a laggard within a year precisely because it was notdeveloping regional-level institutions. For despite the Hungarian par-
liament’s approval of a ‘National Concept on Regional Development’
in March 1998, according to the Commission it had ‘not adequatelyaddressed the short-term Accession Partnership priority relating to the
reinforcement of institutional and administrative capacity in regional
development’. From the Commission’s standpoint Hungary had madeadvances in legislation and in developing concepts in regional policy
objectives, but the ‘accompanying structures and institutions’ were still
too weak and this was what was critical for the management andimplementation of Community assistance.
24In particular, the
Commission identiﬁed ‘difﬁculties in making use of EU funds (PHARE)for regional development’ to illustrate the need for strengthening thecountry’s project development and management capacity, whichwould allow for a greater absorption of pre-accession aid and prepare
for the participation in structural funds.
25Latvia’s assessment stood out
in the 1998 round of Reports. The Commission’s reference to
‘signiﬁcant progress’ on the way to participation in the EU’s structuralpolicy was a strong indication of what benchmarks it was employing: a1998 government concept of regional policy, followed by legislation to
accelerate regional development, as well as the establishment of a
Regional Development Council for the coordination of regional policyat the central, regional and local level were singled out as the positive
developments in Latvia.
26
Over time the content of the Regular Reports that was dedicated to
regional policy and its institutional environment expanded, reﬂectingMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 93

the growing importance of this policy domain for the candidate states
and the Commission. Equally, the Commission’s criticisms become
more explicit and more speciﬁc, though the lack of detail in its policyrecommendations remained. A distinctive focus of the 1999 RegularReports was on the candidates’ attempts to deﬁne regions in line with
the EU NUTS classiﬁcations. Thus, the Report on Bulgaria hailed the
new law on regional development and the law on the administrative-territorial division of 1999 as a ‘signiﬁcant step’, while highlighting
that within this framework clariﬁcation is needed with regard to the
six NUTS II macro-regions and 28 regions at NUTS III level. This refer-ence to the preliminary NUTS classiﬁcation is complemented by a
more general reminder that particular attention has to be paid to the
implementation capacity of the central coordinating unit in theMinistry of Regional Development at national and regional level.
27In
the case of Latvia and Lithuania the Commission clearly states thataccording to EU methodology the whole country will be considered asone NUTS II region.
28In the preceding years the candidate countries
had debated different options for NUTS territorialization, principallywith the aim of creating a coherent structure of statistical units whichwould also maximize the potential receipts from structural funds. Inthe 1999 reports, for the ﬁrst time the Commission revealed its con-
cerns over the relationship between regional self-government and the
effective management of structural funds. There was not a signiﬁcantshift from the Commission against regional self-government at this
time, but its previously strong signal was becoming adulterated.
We can analyse the mixed signals by examining the Reports on the two
countries which were gradually developing forms of democratizedregional self-government: the Czech Republic and Poland. In the case of
the Czech Republic the Report referred in critical terms to the decision todivide the country into 14 regions matching NUTS II criteria and eight
regions akin to those of NUTS III by 2000. The Commission required
‘clariﬁcation’ as to the ‘division of responsibilities between the political(NUTS II) level and the administrative (NUTS III) level in order to ensuresmooth implementation’.
29In contrast, Poland, having introduced its
regional reform in January 1999, received the most emphatic endorse-ment in the 1999 Reports. Under the section on the ‘political criteria’, theCommission applauded the ‘reforms of impressive scope and depth’ overthe previous twelve months, including regional administrative reform.
30
Compared with the Commission’s evaluations of 1997–98, the 1999
Report commends Poland for making ‘major progress’ in strengthening
the legal, institutional and budgetary framework for the implementation94Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

of structural actions despite the fact that regional policy strategy is still at
a ‘conceptual stage’. In particular, the Commission expected that Poland’s
16 new regional governments (coinciding with the NUTS II level) wouldhave ‘a signiﬁcant positive effect on the development of a genuineregional policy approach’. As with the Czech Republic, however, the
Commission made the clariﬁcation of the relationship between the new
political regions and the lower level authorities (at the NUTS III level) an‘urgent priority’.
31
Romania and Slovenia were also favourably commented upon in
1999 with regard to their progress in the legislative and speciﬁc institu-tional frameworks for regional policy at the national and regionallevel.
32The Report on Slovenia illustrates that the Commission’s initial
emphasis on basic legislation is gradually being replaced by a strongerconcern for capacity issues. Thus, Slovenia is urged to ‘rapidly’ estab-lish the institutions ensuring administrative capacity, which is neededfor the efﬁcient management of the pre-accession instruments as well
as subsequent EU structural policy.
33There is an apparent contradic-
tion between the glowing treatment of Romania and the quite severe
criticisms of Hungary. Both countries opted to form their county-levelgovernments into administrative-statistical development regions withappointed boards (voluntarily in Hungary, by law in Romania) rather
than establish elected regional self-government bodies. In the case of
Romania, the Report is extremely vague as to what should happennext, stating merely that ‘further efforts are required to ensure effective
implementation of structural policies including in the area of bud-
getary and ﬁnancial procedures needed and in building the necessaryadministrative structures and management capacities, both centrally
and regionally’.
34The Report on Hungary acknowledges that it has
reached an ‘advanced state of preparation for the implementation of
structural funds’, but states that there has been little progress on the‘concrete implementation of regional policy objectives’. The institu-tional framework for regional policy is classiﬁed as ‘weak’ overall, even
though the linking of the funding of the regional development boards
with the central ﬁnance ministry is seen as a positive development inthe area of ﬁscal management and coordination.
35
The concern about the administrative coherence and functioning of
regional and local tiers of government was repeated in the Report onSlovakia. As in 1998, Slovakia is identiﬁed by the Commission ashaving made ‘no concrete progress’ either in legislation or institutionalframework in preparation for the implementation of structural funds,
despite the fact that it had by now demarcated four NUTS II regionsMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 95

and eights NUTS III regions.36The Commission simply noted that the
territorial and administrative reform process remained ‘unﬁnished’.
The Commission recommended that Slovakia create ‘an independentco-ordination structure with the capacity to implement and monitorregional policy’ but it did not clarify whether this meant at the
regional or national level, or both. Echoing the advice given to the
Czech Republic and Poland, the Commission wanted ‘a clear separa-tion of administrative and political functions’ at the regional level.
37
The emphasis on the acquis and capacity, 2000–02
The 2000 Reports
From 2000 onwards the structure of the Regular Reports changed
signiﬁcantly to reﬂect a much greater attention to the ‘capacity’ of thecandidate countries. The Commission now systematically commented
separately on each of the chapters of the acquis under the section
heading ‘Ability to assume the obligations of membership’. This con-
solidated the evaluation of capacity into one main section whereas pre-viously it had fallen into several sections, including the previous fourth
section on ‘administrative capacity’. In addition, in 1999 and 2000
there is an increasing emphasis on the Commission’s own efforts toraise the capacity level of the CEECs through ‘Twinning’ projects,
which are detailed and given more prominence by including them in
the introductory sections to the Reports. Thus, while ‘administrativecapacity’ to apply the acquis is no longer treated as a separate issue in
the Reports, the theme is evaluated as an integral part of all sectionsand policy areas. The capacity issue becomes the key thread linking allaspects of enlargement. A signiﬁcant inconsistency in the reportingmechanism was also much more evident from 2000 in that the Reports
did not employ a consistent time frame for the measuring of ‘progress’.
The Reports routinely opened with a reference to the level of progressachieved since the last Regular Report. In determining whether a
country made progress or not, however, it is not always clear whether
the Commission is measuring solely against the previous year or over alonger span of previous years. This ambiguity also changes depending
on the country being reported on.
In 2000 the evaluation of developments in regional policy draw
explicitly from the criteria laid out in the Structural Funds Regulationssince they, in fact, constitute the acquis in this area. While the regula-
tions are ‘thin’ and thus do not make for precise benchmarks, they do
at least provide a structuring device for the evaluation. The categories96Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

for evaluation that are drawn directly from the regulations on
structural funds include an agreed NUTS territorial organization, leg-
islative framework, preparation for programming, administrative co-ordination, evaluation and monitoring systems, ﬁnancial managementand regional statistics, followed by a brief ‘overall assessment’. The
overall thrust of the Reports is on whether the CEECs have complied
with these requirements for national-level oversight of implementationand management in order to ensure ﬁscal rectitude.
Indirect references to regional capacity issues are also made in the
sections on ‘short-term priorities’, and under the ‘Reinforcement ofadministrative and judicial capacity’ in the section on ‘Accession
Partnership and National Programme for the Adoption of the
Acquis’, mostly in connection with the management of ISPA andSAPARD funds. Under the ‘medium-term priorities’ regions are
increasingly mentioned under ‘economic and social cohesion’ and in
relation to improving the NPAAs. The Reports on many smallercountries repeatedly noted that the regional and local levels had notbeen covered at all or not sufﬁciently detailed in the NPAAs.
38The
NPAAs are also linked into the Commission’s positive reinforcementstrategy for enlargement. When NPAAs copied the structure of theRegular Reports, the Commission demonstrably approved of them inthe Reports.
As with the 1998–99 Reports, the terminology employed in the eval-
uation of progress in the Reports for 2000 was generally imprecise.Typically nebulous comments included references to ‘no substantial
progress’ or ‘more work is needed’ (Bulgaria), and to ‘no particular
progress’ or the fact that ‘a number of difﬁculties remain’ and ‘effortsneed to be continued’ (Estonia). Nevertheless, the ‘capacity’ issue was
the main theme that imbued the Reports and indicated the priority for
the Commission. Speciﬁcally, this entailed a concentration on con-cepts such as ‘coordination’ and management ‘structures’. A clear dis-
tinction between larger and smaller countries emerges in the way that
the Commission addresses these issues, and there is also for the ﬁrsttime a clear demarcation between the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’ among the
candidates, with Bulgaria and Romania increasingly marked down for
lack of ‘progress’ and placed in the ‘out’ category.
The 2000 Report on the Czech Republic recognized that ‘over the last
three years’ the Czech Republic had made ‘signiﬁcant progress’
overall.
39The positive developments for the Commission included
several capacity strengthening measures: the Act on Support for
Regional Development which deﬁned the competences at national,Monitoring Conditionality and Compliance 97

regional and local level; government guidelines on the management
and organizational structures for the implementation of EC pre-
accession assistance; the legal basis for regional development, especiallybudgetary rules; the contribution of the National Development Plan2000–06; the programming documents for SAPARD and ISPA; and
increased stafﬁng levels in the Ministry for Regional Development.
40
The Commission reports, but does not evaluate, the completion of terri-torial organization in the Czech Republic (14 regions similar to NUTS III
and eight regions corresponding to NUTS II became operational for sta-tistical purposes in January 2000, and for legislative purposes in January2001). Rather the Commission reverts to the default routine call for
‘administrative strengthening’ and ‘further efforts’. It also recommends
obtusely that ‘communications between the central and regional levelscould be improved’.
41
While there is some confusion in the Report on Hungary as to
whether it had made ‘some progress’ or ‘signiﬁcant progress’ overall,the Report repositioned it among the frontrunners with regard to theadaptation to EU regional policy.
42Since the harsh criticisms of the
1999 Report Hungary had adopted the 1999 Law on RegionalDevelopment which strengthened the seven Regional DevelopmentCouncils at NUTS II level (they were transformed into compulsorybodies with a legal status) and improved coordination by entrusting
one ministry – the Economics Ministry – with the control of regional
policy. The Commission appears satisﬁed that Hungary is progressingon the ‘partnership’ principle with local, regional and economic and
social partners now being involved in the planning and implementa-
tion of programmes through the National Regional DevelopmentCouncil and the seven Regional Development Councils. Unusually
for the Commission the report analyses in some depth the positive
and negative features of the 1999 Law on Regional Development. TheCommission welcomed the fact that the law had ‘increased the
importance of the regions which correspond to NUTS level II’ and
‘further clariﬁed the role of different institutions’, but remained criti-cal of the capacity of the framework at the regional level to deliver
‘efﬁcient decision-making and respect for programming principles’.
Consequently, the Report called for Hungary to strengthen the‘working capacity both at national and regional level enabling theimplementation of Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund’ and the
ﬁnancial structures at the regional level. This was understandably
interpreted as Commission pressure for a shift to political regions inHungary (see Chapter 3). 98Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

In the Report on Poland the Commission’s view of ‘signiﬁcant
progress’ overall was linked to the passage of the new Law on Regional
Development and its deﬁnition of a two-tier regional governmentsystem. Poland now had a clearly demarcated, institutionalized anddemocratically elected administrative-political framework at all territo-
rial levels. Furthermore, it had developed the concept of a ‘regional
contract’ to be negotiated by the national government and the 16województwa as the basis for funding regional development pro-
grammes. The Commission expressed some concern about the con-tracts and wanted more clariﬁcation. It was more concerned, however,with the ﬁnancial arrangements between the national government and
the regions. Poland’s new regions had no separate tax-raising powers
and thus depended wholly on the centre. The Report appeared tosuggest that a separate budgetary basis for the regions ‘should be care-
fully examined’.
43The apparent overlap in the responsibilities of the
two leading ofﬁcials in the regions, the marshal and the wojewoda, is
mentioned without comment (these reforms are discussed in more
detail in Chapter 5). While the Report did raise concerns about capac-ity and implementation, the weight was on a positive evaluation of
Poland’s democratized regional governance.
Slovakia’s progress was classiﬁed as ‘limited’. In particular, the
Commission criticized Slovakia’s incomplete and unbalanced territorialand administrative organization. The new territorial-administrative orga-
nization introduced in June 2000 after a heated political debate whichwas fuelled by the conﬂated issues of the territorialized Hungarian minor-
ity and the regional boundaries, created twelve disparate units corre-
sponding to NUTS III regions. The Commission considered that thisconﬁguration was dysfunctional.
44Furthermore, Slovakia was regarded as
lacking some basic coordinating institutional structures such as a ‘leadministry’, and the competences on regional policy were ‘scattered amongdifferent institutions’.
45Slovenia, in contrast, received one of the highest
evaluations by achieving ‘signiﬁcant progress’ in the ﬁeld of regionalpolicy. The number of implementing acts and secondary legislationadopted to build the legal and institutional framework in this policy areaare commented upon favourably. The Commission’s main complaint
about Slovenia was that it was attempting to maximize its potential
receipts from structural funds by anachronistically dividing the countryinto two NUTS II level regions (separating the wealthy capital Ljubljana
from the rest of the country).
46
With the exception of Slovenia, the Regular Reports for 2000 indicate
that progress in the ﬁeld of regional policy is slower in the smallerMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 99

CEECs, most notably Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In these states the
legislative framework and government decisions lag behind the bigger
candidate countries, largely because the order of domestic political pri-orities is such that regionalization is perceived to be less relevant. TheReports on Estonia and Latvia, for example, highlighted that the
Commission was concerned about the slow rationalization of local self-
government by a reduction in the number of units. Estonia, accordingto its Report, lacks ‘administrative co-ordination’ in regional policy and
‘the current structures do not yet seem to provide an appropriate frame-
work’. Similarly, Latvia is told of the ‘urgent need’ to put in place legis-lation preparing for the future use of structural funds.
47This Report
provides one of the more speciﬁc references to the Commission’sprimary concern with the central level of funds management a priori toregionalization: ‘The strengthening of regional structures should focuson the establishment of local and regional partnerships, which may
contribute to planning and project design within the overall partner-
ship structure … To this end, it is of the utmost importance that thenecessary structures for co-ordinated programming, management, mon-
itoring, evaluation, ﬁnancial management and control of Structural
Fund assistance are established at the central level, before a stand istaken on whether a further decentralization is feasible or advisable.’
48
The Report proceeded to state that the main concern is with ‘effective
ﬁnancial management structures’ and ‘operational and transparent
ﬁnancial control’ for EC funds and national resources. That theCommission was attempting to steer regional policy towards strongcentral control in the Baltic states is explicitly stated in the report on
Lithuania, where the law on regional policy is criticized: ‘Above all, the
strong element of decentralization contained in the Law raises someconcerns with regard to the administrative capacity to meet the require-
ments of the implementation of future Structural Funds assistance.’ The
Commission wanted a strong ‘concentration’ of the responsibility forthe preparation for the structural funds to the Ministry of the Interior,
and the primary goal of the ‘utmost importance’ was to strengthen
‘capacity for the regional development planning process at central level’and not at sub-national levels.
49
Two larger candidate countries, Bulgaria and Romania, are strongly
condemned for the slow speed of development in regional policy. Thiswas a sign that the Commission had already consigned them to the ‘out’category as far as the next wave of enlargement was concerned. Bulgaria,for example, was criticized because although it had introduced six plan-
ning regions corresponding to NUTS II the ‘responsibilities at the100 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

regional level are not very clear’. It was told to ‘speed up the implemen-
tation of administrative reform’.50The 2000 Report on Romania reversed
sharply from the Commission’s previous positive evaluations. Even in
the introductory section on twinning, which usually conﬁnes itself tothe latest update on the number and type of projects funded and some-times lists the member states involved in twinning, the Commission has
added an unusually explicit and detailed critique, pinpointing the lack
of commitment on the part of Romania’s national authorities: ‘Thesuccess of twinning projects in Romania depends on the national
authorities’ contribution to smooth implementation. In addition to
assigning adequate staff and providing operational facilities, full partici-pation of the senior management of the beneﬁciary institutions is neces-
sary in order to deliver meaningful institutional and policy reform.’
51
The signal the Commission appeared to be sending was that Romanialacked commitment to the enlargement process. The Report emphasized
the weakness of administrative capacity at both the central and theregional level. Exceptionally, here the Commission attempted to sketchout what its understanding of ‘administrative capacity’ entailed: ‘the
main priority is to strengthen co-ordination and management structures
in order to allow an efﬁcient and partnership-based decision-makingprocess, at regional and local level, that is coherent with national
regional policy. A clear and balanced allocation of responsibilities
should be implemented: at national level, between national administra-tions involved in the future management of structural funds (National
Agency for Regional Development and line Ministries); and at macro-
region level between all the participants involved in the RegionalDevelopment Boards.’
52Our interviews with ofﬁcials in DG Enlargement
suggest that the explanation for this reversal in the estimation ofRomania was undoubtedly related, among other issues, to the coming topower of a new nationalist government and its suspension of the con-troversial macro-regional bodies set up with PHARE assistance.
The 2001 Reports
In the 2001 Regular Reports the Commission shifted its focus once
again. Whereas in the 2000 Reports there had been mixed signals on
the issue of ‘capacity’ and centralized and regionalized forms of man-aging regional policy were evaluated without prejudice towards one
form or the other, in 2001 the Reports concentrated on the capacity of
central governments to manage programming and budgeting, whetherthe levels of stafﬁng and training were adequate, and whether central
governments had provisions for the monitoring and evaluation of theMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 101

use of funds. The gap between the candidates most likely to join in a
ﬁrst round of enlargement and those relegated to a later second round
is also much more clearly reﬂected in the assessment of progress. Mostof the ﬁrst-round accession countries are classiﬁed as having achieved‘good’, ‘some’, ‘further’, or even ‘limited’ progress, whereas the others
are evaluated as having made ‘little’ or ‘no’ progress.
Hungary is acknowledged to have made ‘good progress’.
53Hungary’s
positive evaluation is linked to its compliance with the Commission’s
expectations in several key areas, in particular by the appointment ofthe Ministry of Finance as the future managing authority for structuralfunds, the reinforcement and training of staff in the relevant ministries
and agencies, a simpliﬁed National Development Plan with a limited
number of operational programmes, including a single, centrallymanaged Operational Programme for Regional Development, and the
conﬁrmation of the NUTS classiﬁcation agreed with Eurostat in 1997.
54
The Commission concluded that ‘programming is progressing well inHungary’, though the ‘administrative capacity’, in particular with
regard to the future managing and paying authorities in the ministries,still ‘needs to be considerably strengthened’.
55Areas that are identiﬁed
for improvement include ‘inter-ministerial co-ordination’ and ‘an evenwider application of the principle of partnership’. The Commission,however, also wanted the partnership principle activated at the regionallevel: ‘Genuine partnership structures at regional level, including the
regional and local authorities and other competent public authorities,
the economic and social partners and any other relevant bodies (e.g.minority groups), should be established, and a strong input of the
regions into the programming process taking place at the national level
should be ensured.’
56The Report on the Czech Republic was also gener-
ally positive as it was deemed to have made ‘further progress’. The keyquestion for the Commission was how it would deﬁne the ﬁnancingarrangements for the new regional governments, which became opera-tional in 2001, to guarantee their ability to contribute to the co-
ﬁnancing system for the structural funds.
57The self-governing regions
also had yet to be included in the National Development Plan as part of
the partnership principle. The unanswered question arising from thesereports was what kind of regional inputs could be achieved in a contextwhere the Commission’s emphasis was being placed on centralization,
and in the absence of functioning regional self-government.
The Report on Poland went some way to answering this question.
Despite the development of strong regional self-government in Poland,its Report recognized only ‘limited’ and ‘no particular progress’ since102 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

the last report. By 2001 the 16 regional self-governing units, created in
1999, are seen to be operational and ‘effectively carrying out regional
policy functions’, but the report claimed that ‘developments in this areahave largely stalled’.
58In fact, Poland was making signiﬁcant and exper-
imental reforms to its regionalization. Further institutional changeswere to be made from January 2002 including the creation of seven newdistricts (NUTS III level), and changes in the borders of six districts andtwo regions. Most importantly, a new system of ‘regional contracts’,
concluded in mid-2001 between the elected head of each województwo
and the Minister for Regional Development, now determined the
amount of ﬁnancial support provided to each regional self-government
in 2001 and 2002, though the funds were under the control of the woje-
woda (the regional representative of the central government). For
2001–02 a small budget of just under 1.5 million euros had been ear-marked for the implementation of regional development priorities as
detailed in the ‘regional contracts’. The Commission stressed that ‘thesefunds constitute grants towards earmarked projects and do not for the
moment imply a decentralization of public ﬁnance in the absence of
amendments to the law on the income of regional self-governments’.While the Report recognized that the contract system ‘has the potentialto play a key role in the preparatory process and, in the medium-term,
in Poland’s socio-economic development’, and despite the fact that the
regions had newly established ‘steering committees’ to involve socialpartners in the use of funds, it was not deemed an adequate mechanism
for fulﬁlling the ‘partnership’ requirement.
59
The 2001 Report on Poland sent the clearest signal yet that the
Commission did not want a decentralization of the management of
regional funds at this stage, even where regional self-government wasoperational. The primary concern was with national-level preparationsfor structural funds and regional inputs into that level: ‘At the regional
level variable progress has been achieved with programming, while at
the national level no positive new developments can be reported … Astrong input of the regions into the programming process taking place
at the national level should be ensured.’ Yet, the section on twinning
make some interesting observations about the distinctiveness ofPoland’s regionalization, noting that projects under PHARE 2000
included twinning with regional administrations to enhance their
preparations for structural funds management.
60Moreover, the report
uniquely and enigmatically admits to the reality of divergent modelswithin the EU and the candidates, commenting that ‘nearly allMember States are or will be engaged in twinning, allowing Poland toMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 103

beneﬁt from a variety of administrative models and cultures in the
European Union’.61
In response to previous criticism Slovakia had again reformulated its
territorial organization in July 2001, after more heated domestic
debates, into four regions approximating to NUTS II and eight districtssimilar to NUTS III, but this conﬁguration had still to be ﬁnalized withthe Commission.
62In fact, the Commission regarded these structures
as incomplete: ‘On the regional level no structures exist which couldassume in a credible manner signiﬁcant management tasks in the nearfuture.’
63Like Poland, Slovakia was seen to have made ‘little progress’
since the last report and had ‘little advanced’ in ‘developing the neces-sary structures for the implementation of Structural Funds after acces-sion’. In the case of Slovakia the Commission alternated betweenemphasizing the policy process and the institutional basis on which it
should operate. It accepted that ‘procedures for ﬁnancial control … are
being put in place’ (for example, the Ministry of Construction andRegional Development was established as the future managing author-
ity, and a new implementing agency will be the paying authority), and
that ‘the ﬁrst steps’ have been taken on programming by the draftingof the NDP.
64Nevertheless, the key issue was the establishment of ‘a
clear and reasonable division of responsibilities on the central level andbetween the central and regional level’.
65
According to the 2001 Report, Slovenia made ‘limited progress’ or
‘very little progress’.66This Report records no particular developments
and even ‘no progress’ under key sub-headings of the evaluation ofChapter 21, such as territorial organization and institutional structures,and notes fairly modest changes under the rest, for example stafﬁngincreases, the establishment of working groups or a supervisory board
for the preparation of the NDP, and includes the routine reminder to
strengthen the administrative capacity of the ministerial units desig-nated as managing and paying authorities. Slovenia is most directly
criticized for its proposal to create two NUTS II level regions, which the
Commission ﬂatly rejected.
67
Despite the recognition of ‘some progress’ in both Estonia and
Lithuania since the last Reports, criticisms in these cases focused on theweak capacity of the programming and managing authorities forstructural funds.
68The Commission was particularly concerned that
there should be a strong centralization of management in both coun-tries and thus approved readily of the designation of the Ministry ofFinance as the future managing authority and paying authority forsome funds.
69Lithuania remained one of the few accession states to104 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

agree its provisional NUTS classiﬁcation with the Commission. Latvia’s
assessment is much more critical. It had made ‘limited progress’ since
the last Report.70The criticism extended to the whole gamut of legisla-
tive, institutional, structural and administrative issues.71Despite the
criticisms, the Commission considered that ‘an important step’ hadbeen taken by entrusting the Ministry of Finance with the futureresponsibility for structural funds.
72
Political divisions within Romania in 2000–01 meant that its regional
policy was in a state of ﬂux. As noted above, the change of governmentresulted in the dissolution of the National Agency for RegionalDevelopment and the suspension of the macro-regions designed in cooperation with PHARE. These were replaced by a Ministry of
Development (with two of the ministry’s state secretaries in charge of
regional policy). Given that the Commission had recommended thecentralization of ﬁnancial controls and managing authority in other
accession states, it would have seemed incongruous not to classify
Romania’s centralization as a positive development. The new ministryqualiﬁed as ‘some progress’ in the eyes of the Commission.
73This must
have been difﬁcult for the Commission ofﬁcials who had been deeplyinvolved in the regionalization scheme of 1998 and had seen it fallvictim to nationalist paranoia about separatism.
Romania had agreed its NUTS classiﬁcation with Eurostat (42 coun-
ties (judet) similar to NUTS III, and eight ‘development regions’ similarto NUTS II), but the Report stated that the responsibilities of the min-istries and other bodies involved in the preparation of structural funds
assistance was under-deﬁned both at the national and regional level. In
a similar vein, the report makes a value-neutral reference to the Law onLocal Public Administration of 2001, which deﬁned the new respon-
sibilities for local authorities and placed coordination power with
the prefects, the local representatives of the central government. TheCommission made oblique references to the political situation in the
country. It observed that a ‘political consensus’ is the basis for efﬁcient
inter-ministerial coordination and advised that the role of regionalstructures in programme development and implementation needed to
be ‘further clariﬁed’.
74
Bulgaria made only ‘little progress’ since the last Regular Report. As
with Romania, Bulgaria had established administrative structures at the
regional level, namely six planning regions corresponding to NUTS IIlevel, but the Commission was dissatisﬁed with weak deﬁnition of theirrole and responsibilities. In particular the ‘transparent involvement of
the regions in programming, implementation and evaluation of ECMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 105

assistance’ was deemed to be too weak and thus not in step with the
‘partnership’ principle. It is clear from the report that the Commission
was thoroughly dissatisﬁed by the weak capacity and poor coordinationwithin and between central ministries. Moreover, as with Romania, thereport noted the lack of a political consensus in the domestic politics of
Bulgaria over the adoption of EU norms and regulations.
75
The 2002 Reports and the accession decision
The Regular Reports of 2002 were the ﬁnal Reports before the EU took
the decision on the scale of the enlargement at the Copenhagen
Council of December 2002. The Reports were structured as an overall
evaluation of the progress made by the candidate countries since theOpinions of 1997, and were much more concise in analysing compli-ance with the chapters of the acquis than any of the previous Reports.
Two features of the Reports stand out. Firstly, there was an attempt tominimize the differences between those candidate countries that wereconsidered to be eligible for the ﬁrst wave of enlargement. The political
logic here is evident, for how could there be signiﬁcant differentiation
in the progress if they were all to be accepted as new members.Conversely, the gap in progress between the ﬁrst-wave accession coun-
tries and Bulgaria and Romania is much accentuated in the Reports.
Again, the logic was to more fully differentiate those who were not tobe granted membership. In comparison with the previous Reports,
those of 2002 also elaborate more precise recommendations regarding
the outstanding shortcomings of all the candidates. A new feature inthe Reports is the addition of Action Plans, which are meant to provideguidance to the candidates on how to close the last remaining gaps.
Nevertheless, there are apparent contradictions and tensions in the
Reports over the need to sanction accession and the ﬁndings of littleprogress on the key questions of capacity and implementation.
In 2002 Hungary is simply mentioned to have made ‘progress’
without any further classiﬁcation of its achievements. The key ele-ments of this progress included the ﬁnal conﬁrmation to Eurostat of
the NUTS classiﬁcation in January 2002, the concentration of control
to the Ministry of Finance as the single future paying authority for theStructural and Cohesion Funds, and the introduction of a consultative
forum for the presidents of the Regional Development Councils to
meet the ‘partnership’ criteria.
76These were hardly radical changes,
even compared with the 2001 Report. The Report was contradictory.On the one hand, we are told that Hungary ‘has met the priorities ofthe Accession Partnership in the area of Regional Policy only to a very106 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

limited extent’.77On the other hand, Hungary was now applauded by
the Commission for ‘generally meeting the commitments it has made
in the accession negotiations on this chapter’, for its ‘high degree ofalignment with the acquis’ and for ‘achieving adequate administrative
capacity to implement the acquis ’.
78There is also a repetition of the for-
mulaic demands for greater attention to inter-ministerial cooperation
and partnership in programming and implementation.
Poland is deemed to have made ‘important progress’ since the last
Report. As with Hungary, this evaluation is based on fairly basicdevelopments which had not radically altered from the position in
2001, such as the agreed NUTS classiﬁcation, the designation of theFinance Ministry as the paying authority and a framework for multi-
annual programming. Whereas the 2001 Report had been less than
complimentary about regional self-government in Poland, the 2002Report emphasized the ‘important roles’ to be played by the elected
and appointed structures at the regional level.
79While the legislative
alignment with the acquis was considered ‘reasonable’ by the
Commission, it wanted the ‘current level of administrative capacity
needs to be substantially improved’. As with previous Reports nospeciﬁc recommendations are made with regard to the criteria or
measurement of the ‘level’ of administrative capacity.
80
The Report on the Czech Republic acknowledged that ‘further impor-
tant progress’ had been made. Several basic developments receive the
Commission’s approval: the ﬁnalization of the Objective 2 eligible areain the region of Prague; legislation on ﬁnancial controls in publicadministration; the establishment of all the Regional Councils and the
operationalization of the new regional governments at NUTS III level;
the restructuring of the ministries; a revised NDP; compliance with thepartnership principle; and the introduction of a pilot version of the
new monitoring system.
81The Commission was positive about the
level of ‘administrative capacity’ but called for strengthening of
ﬁnancial control, and communication and coordination channels inorder to enhance ‘project development capacity at national, regionaland local level’.
82
Slovakia’s 2002 Report is also premised on a formulaic and largely
unsubstantiated certiﬁcation of ‘progress’ made over the past year.Again the progress is hinged on agreements on the creation of fourNUTS II regions, the establishment of the managing and payingauthorities, the beginning of the programming process in January
2002, and a regulatory framework allowing for multi-annual budgeting
and internal audits. The Commission remained critical, however, aboutMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 107

‘transparency, efﬁciency and reliability in the implementation of pro-
grammes’ and administrative capacity more generally.83Obvious weak-
nesses in the readiness of Slovakia were glossed over. Thus, the overall
verdict in the 2002 Report reads: ‘Slovakia has aligned itself with theacquis in the ﬁeld of regional policy and co-ordination of structural
instruments but effective administrative structures are only in place
to a limited extent.’ A clear deﬁnition of the implementation structure
for structural funds was also considered to be ‘still missing’.
84Under
the section on the Accession Partnership, the tone is even morehesitant, indicating that even the legislative framework is only ‘almostcompleted’.
85
Whereas serious weakness had been identiﬁed with Latvia in the
2001 Report, its evaluation by the Commission in 2002 improvedimpressively. The Report recorded ‘important progress’ which as else-where hinged primarily on the designation of the Ministry of Financeas the future managing authority for structural funds, the reorganiza-
tion of this ministry and the passing of a Regional Development Law
in March 2002.
86Despite the fact that Latvia was now considered to be
among the ﬁrst wave candidates and ready for membership, the Reportstates that weak administrative capacity is ‘a matter of concern’ for theCommission, which must be addressed if Latvia is ‘to be ready formembership’.
87Similarly, Estonia is considered to have made ‘impor-
tant progress’ in preparing for the implementation of the acquis and
structural policies through developments in its legislation and adminis-trative capacity.
88At the same time, the Report notes that the accession
priorities in the area of regional policy have been only ‘partially met’,though the implementation of the Action Plan to remedy this ‘is ontrack’.
89As with the other reports, Lithuania’s ‘signiﬁcant progress’ is
overstated. The key elements noted were the agreement with Eurostaton the NUTS classiﬁcation, a new legislative framework allowing trans-fers between different budget lines for EC-funded projects, explicit pro-grammes on strengthening administrative capacity and partnership,
the submission of the NDP 2002–04 to the Commission and internal
ﬁnancial audits in all ministries and bodies involved in Structural andCohesion Funds. The Commission’s evaluation of Lithuania’s adminis-
trative capacity to implement the acquis is, however, hesitant as this
aspect is evaluated as being ‘sufﬁcient, though still rather fragile’.
90
The Report on Slovenia suggests that it is best prepared for the imple-
mentation of regional policy, as it had made ‘major progress’ since the
last reporting round. The elements identiﬁed by the Commission asmeriting this evaluation – such as designating the Economics Ministry108 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

as the future managing authority and the Finance Ministry as the
future paying authority, ongoing preparation of the Single
Development Plan, the establishment of a monitoring committee tooversee the implementation of the NDP and the partnership principleand no new developments with regard to territorial organization and
ﬁnancial control – are not measurably different from those develop-
ments in other candidate countries noted earlier but which merited aless complimentary evaluation of ‘progress’. The Report praises
Slovenia for being ‘well advanced in the ﬁeld of ﬁnancial control and
management’, while also observing that there had been ‘no signiﬁcantdevelopments’ in the area of regional policy.
91
The two candidate countries that have been relegated out of the
advanced group, Bulgaria and Romania, are treated the least generouslyin the 2002 Reports. Although Bulgaria is credited with ‘some progress’in preparing for the implementation of structural funds, a categori-zation that by comparison with other Reports suggests a tangible
improvement since 2001, the language of the Report is harsher than
before, including a reference to the ‘rather unsatisfactory managementof some of the pre-accession funds that help Bulgaria prepare for the
Structural and Cohesion Funds’. Later in the Report, the Commission
concludes that overall ‘since the Opinion Bulgaria has made littleprogress reaching a low level of readiness for the acquis in this area’.
92
The core weakness as far as the Report was concerned was the weakness
of administrative capacity in key ministries, in particular at the central
level, ‘to design strategies and to implement and evaluate projects forregional development and economic and social cohesion ﬁnanced byEC and national funds’.
93Equally, Romania is declared to have made
‘limited progress’. No substantive developments are commented upon,yet there are vague criticisms. For example: ‘Considerable additionalpreparation is needed to improve the quality of the existing NDPbefore it can serve as a basis for a future development plan’, and ‘the
capacity to discuss and clarify development priorities is very limited
both at the national and regional levels’.
94Romania is urged to focus
particular attention on ‘clarifying the role of the regional levels’ in the management and implementation of structural funds as well asinter-ministerial coordination and partnership.
These Reports were of critical importance to the ﬁnal decision on
enlargement taken at the Copenhagen Council in December 2002,when all of the CEEC group (except for Romania and Bulgaria) weregiven an accession date of 1 May 2004. The decision was legally ratiﬁed
in the Accession Treaty signed in April 2003. Equally, the Reports ofMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 109

2002 demonstrated that the Commission still acknowledged that
there were serious weaknesses in the CEECs as a whole with regard to
fulﬁlment of the accession criteria.
The Comprehensive Monitoring Reports
Arguably, once the decision on accession had been taken, the
Commission’s leverage over the candidates and the power of theReports to generate compliance was signiﬁcantly weakened. To high-
light the most important remaining gaps in the new member states and
to maintain the credibility of the monitoring process, the Commissionamended the format for the ﬁnal round of the pre-accession reports.
These reports were termed ‘Comprehensive Monitoring Reports’ (CMRs)
and were to be published for the Council and the European Parliamentsix months before the accession date, and thus after many of the acces-
sion referenda had taken place in the candidate countries. The
Thessaloniki European Council 2003 stated that ‘In the comingmonths, the ten acceding countries are encouraged to keep up their
efforts so that they are fully prepared to assume the obligations of mem-
bership by accession … With a view to making a success of enlarge-ment, the monitoring of these preparations has been intensiﬁed on thebasis of the reports submitted regularly by the Commission.’
95The
process of compiling the information and the drafting resembled that ofthe preceding Regular Reports, though they were more concisely tied totheacquis and excised altogether the section on the political conditions.
After all, the political criteria were considered ‘fulﬁlled’. Despite some
dissenting voices, there was a consensus inside the Commission that a
political section in the CMRs ‘would have been an anomaly’.
96
Before the publication of the CMRs the Commission issued a
Communication to the European Parliament and the Council ‘On theImplementation of Commitments Undertaken by the AccedingCountries in the Context of Accession Negotiations On Chapter 21 –Regional Policy and Coordination of Structural Instruments’.
97The
Commission had committed itself to this speciﬁc report together withthe CMRs at the Brussels European Council in October 2002. The factthat regional policy was singled out is a belated urgent recognition inthe reporting mechanism of its salience for the performance of an
enlarged EU. The Communication laid out the requirements and gaps
in compliance more systematically and concisely than in any of theprevious Reports or Accession Partnerships. It was as if transparency in
the reporting could be allowed only once the political decision on
enlargement had been taken. 110 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The CMRs are organized under six headings (legislative framework,
institutional framework, administrative capacity, programming capac-
ity, ﬁnancial and budgetary management, future project pipeline),which somewhat diverged from the usual sub-headings in the RegularReports but provided for a more appropriate summary of the main
tasks and problem areas. The Commission Communication of 16 July
2003 for the ﬁrst time gave the CEECs a clear and detailed schema ofthe requirements under each heading. As for the legislative framework,
the transposition of the acquis in the areas of public procurement, state
aid/competition, environment and equal opportunities is highlighted
as being essential for the implementation of the Structural and
Cohesion Funds. With regards to the institutional framework the
Commission’s key areas of concern were inter-ministerial coordination,the institutional arrangements of the implementation system, the
number and role of the intermediate bodies, the independence of the
certifying role of the paying authority, ﬁnancial control requirementsand internal audit arrangements. The section on ‘administrative capacity’ was one of the few explicit attempts by a Commission docu-
ment to detail the content of this concept. Obviously, this was a rather
late stage in the accession process to do this. The content speciﬁed staff recruitment and training plans in administrative and executive
institutions, the clariﬁcation of the responsibilities of the actors
involved in the project application ﬂow and the development of guide-lines and manuals for operational programmes. Programming capacity
here referred to the submission of the programming documents
without delays and within ‘a coherent strategic framework’, the deﬁ-nition of the monitoring indicators and a computerized system for thecollection and exchange of data. Under ‘ﬁnancial and budgetary man-
agement’, the clariﬁcation of the ﬂow of funds, veriﬁcation checks
by staff independent of the managing and paying authorities and theprovision of appropriate and separate accounting systems for the struc-
tural funds and the cohesion fund are mentioned. As for the ‘project-
pipeline’, the project preparation and national co-ﬁnancing remain theCommission’s primary concern.
98
Each country CMR is structured around the chapters of the acquis. For
each chapter the CMR identiﬁes the areas in which a country ‘is essen-tially meeting the commitments and requirements arising from theaccession negotiations’. It is noteworthy that accession conditionality isdeﬁned purely in terms of the acquis and without reference to the
Copenhagen criteria. The Commission’s wording seems to reﬂect a real-ization that conditionality has been an evolutionary process and by 2003Monitoring Conditionality and Compliance 111

is very different from that formulated in 1994. Each CMR then moves on
to the areas where important further action is necessary to meet the 1
May 2004 deadline. In the overall conclusion, the CMR systematicallygroups the chapters or sub-areas within chapters in which a high level ofalignment has occurred, areas where ‘enhanced efforts’ are needed to
complete preparations for accession and ‘issues of serious concern’ which
could persist until after accession unless immediate action is taken.These summaries are, in essence, an audit for enlargement that provide
balance sheets of strengths and weaknesses.
Each CMR’s review of Chapter 21 began with an important
clariﬁcation, which is given to the candidates for the ﬁrst time:
Theacquis under this chapter consists mostly of regulations, which
do not require transposition into national legislation. They deﬁnethe rules for drawing up, approving and implementing Structural
Funds programmes and Cohesion Fund actions. These programmesare negotiated and agreed with the Commission, but implementa-
tion is the responsibility of the Member States. It is essential that
Member States respect Community legislation in general, forexample in the areas of public procurement, competition and envi-ronment, when selecting and implementing projects, and have the
necessary institutional structures in place to ensure implementation
in a sound and cost-effective manner from the point of view of bothmanagement and ﬁnancial control.
99
Ironically, the post-enlargement evaluation reporting in the CMR is
much clearer on the essential elements of regional policy than theRegular Reports had been. Progress was determined under ﬁve keyheadings: territorial organization, legislative framework, institutionalstructures, programming and ﬁnancial management and control. The
NUTS classiﬁcation had always been clearly marked as a priority under
‘territorial organization’, but the ability to ensure multi-annual budgetplanning had not previously been singled out yet now it was declared
to be ‘ the essential feature of the legislative framework ’ (authors italics).
100
Under ‘institutional structures’, the report emphasizes the need for ahuman resource strategy, and speciﬁc ﬁnancial control provisions,
internal audit units and inter-ministerial coordination. The ‘program-ming’ requirement includes the submission of a range of documents,such as the Development Plan, the Operational Programmes and the
Single Programming Documents, a monitoring system and a mecha-
nism ensuring the application of the ‘partnership’ principle. The CMRs112 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

also pay more attention to consequential cross-referencing under
related chapters, thereby underlining the concrete links between differ-
ent areas of policy-making.101
The vast majority of countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,
Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia) were deemed to be essentially com-plying with the requirements concerning territorial organization andprogramming, whereas the requirements in relation to the legislativeframework, institutional structures and ﬁnancial management and
control were only partially met. Only in the case of Lithuania was the
legislative framework considered to be satisfactory. Moreover, theimprovement of project pipelines, implementation structures, stafﬁng
and training as well as the alignment with the public procurement
norms and rules are common themes running through all the conclu-sions to the CMR’s evaluation of compliance with Chapter 21.
The importance of administrative and judicial capacity for the imple-
mentation and enforcement of the acquis was highlighted and
addressed in a separate section at the beginning of each CMR. In the
introductory section on ‘public administration’ each CMR conveyed
additional information on local and regional governance in theCEECs.
102The CMR on the Czech Republic included a reference to ‘the
decentralization to the regional and local level’, which was nearingcompletion with the abolition of the old districts on 1 January 2003.The 14 regions were seen to have received ‘considerable powers’,including in the area of territorial planning and directly elected
regional assemblies provide for regional self-government. The
Commission remained concerned, however, about the need to clarifythe division of competences.
103Hungary’s section included a reference
to the ongoing debates in Hungary about regionalization, with a newreform proposal of August 2003 to reorganize the counties into eco-nomic and geographical regions, with elected regional governmentsand regional public administration ofﬁces. The current statistical-
planning regions, which, as the CMR noted, were set up for structural
fund purposes, would serve as a basis for regional public administra-tion. Parts of the reform require a two-third majority in parliament,
but the Hungarian plan was to ﬁnalize the reforms by the time of the
next general elections in 2006.
104The Commission restricted itself to
summing up the reform proposal without passing judgement on it,though its non-disapproval, given the broad context of the reportinginstrument, could reasonably be seen as approval.
The CMR on Poland brieﬂy described the existing three-tier gov-
ernance structure introduced in 1999, complemented by the ratherMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 113

opaque criticism that it lacks ‘a clearly oriented, long-term programme
for local and regional self-government’ which ‘could complicate the
further implementation of the decentralization process’.105In the case
of Slovakia reference was made to the constitutional amendment of2001 which introduced eight self-governing regions with electedassemblies. The CMR stressed that the implementation of the regionalreform was incomplete, in particular concerning ﬁscal decentralization
which is due to be in place by 2005. In this case the Commission
added a more detailed reminder: ‘It is important that the transfer offunctions and ﬁscal decentralization go hand in hand, ensuring a
timely and proper functioning of a democratic, efﬁcient and sustain-
able self-administration.’
106In the case of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
the CMRs stressed the limited outcomes of the reform of local govern-ment which had aimed to reduce the high number of municipalities.The failure was seen as posing difﬁculties for the ﬁnancing and imple-mentation of structural funds.
107
The 2003 Reports on Bulgaria and Romania
For the second-wave countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the
Commission continued the practice of issuing Regular Reports.Although they followed the structure of the preceding Reports, they
showed some inﬂuence from the CMRs and a more acute awareness of
the need to differentiate between the ﬁrst- and second-wave countries.Compared to previous Regular Reports, the 2003 Reports on Bulgaria
and Romania were more explicit in their description of the require-
ments and contained somewhat more focused guidance on themethods for compliance. In terms of the legislative framework for
multi-annual programming and ﬁnancial control and central-level
institutional decisions like the designation of units within the FinanceMinistry as managing and paying authorities, the 2003 Report on
Bulgaria noted ‘some progress’. As regards ‘administrative capacity’
the report clariﬁed that this would hinge on ‘credible humanresources and career development strategies’ and ‘qualiﬁed and experi-
enced staff’. Particular emphasis was put on the need for ‘effective co-
operation and communication between central and regional levelimplementing structures and to a substantial strengthening of thecapacity of potential ﬁnal beneﬁciaries at the regional and local level’.
The conclusion included a strong rebuke of the political intent in
Bulgaria: ‘Greater appreciation of the scale of the task ahead is neces-sary, as well as a ﬁrm commitment to draw on the lessons to be
learned from implementing the pre-accession instruments.’
108114 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The 2003 Report on Romania reﬂected the fact that Romania’s basic
political institutions were still in ﬂux. In particular there was instability
on the arrangements for structural funds because of the merger of min-istries and a reallocation of competences, speciﬁcally the dissolution ofthe Ministry of Regional Development and Prognosis and the transfer
of regional development responsibilities to the Ministry of European
Integration. The Commission remained sceptical about a governmentdecision to set up partnership structures at national and regional level.
In each area of regional policy Romania was urged to improve, but the
overarching institutional ‘uncertainty’ was identiﬁed as the most fun-damental problem the country needed to resolve. As with Bulgaria, the
report implicitly concluded that there was a lack of political will for
accession.
109
As a follow-up to the Regular Reports of 2003, the Commission
issued a ‘Strategy Paper and Report of the European Commission onthe Progress towards Accession by Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey’ inNovember 2003.
110It was an attempt to reassure these three countries
that negotiations ‘will continue on the basis of the same principlesthat guided the negotiations with the ten acceding countries, withoutcalling into question the results achieved’ and conﬁrms that 2007 asthe accession date for Bulgaria and Romania ‘has now become a
common objective of the Union’.
111The striking aspect of this report is
that it reverted to the format of the Opinions and early Reports by
structuring the evaluation under the three Copenhagen criteria. Withregard to the third criterion – the adoption of the acquis – regional
policy was one of the areas Bulgaria was asked to concentrate on,
alongside the reminder to build up the administrative capacity for fund
management. In the case of Romania, the overall weak capacity of thepublic administration to implement adopted legislation was high-
lighted as an even more profound problem which, in the eyes of the
Commission, would require ‘a comprehensive, structural reform ofboth public administration and the judicial system’. The Commission
emphasized that ‘these concerns extend beyond adoption of the acquis
and also apply to the management of EU ﬁnancial assistance’.
112
Conclusion
By systematically analysing the Commission’s monitoring mechanism,in particular the Reports, we have attempted to demonstrate how neb-
ulous and oscillating it was in many of its fundamental aspects. In theabsence of a detailed acquis on regional policy, the Structural FundsMonitoring Conditionality and Compliance 115

regulations provided the only regulatory basis for the Commission to
measure progress by the candidates. The problem for the Commission
was that these regulations provided normative guidelines rather thanexplicit legal and institutional benchmarks. The Commission, never-theless, examined speciﬁc laws on territorial-administrative reform,
regional development, and ministerial organization to evaluate
progress. Both conditionality and compliance, however, escaped cleardeﬁnitions and consistency in the process. Ironically, after the acces-
sion negotiations had been completed the Commission provided much
more precise recommendations for the successful candidates. In partic-ular the Commission’s Communication of July 2003 and the
Comprehensive Monitoring Reports, but also the 2003 Reports for
Bulgaria and Romania (and Turkey) and the Commission’s StrategyPaper on these three countries deﬁned the essence of ‘administrative
capacity’ in the ﬁeld of regional policy much more systematically than
all the preceding Reports.
The Opinions and Reports also map a gradual shift in the
Commission’s focus from the norms of the Copenhagen criteria, and
especially the political criteria, to a technocratic emphasis on the
formal adoption of the acquis , and then to an emphasis on managerial-
ism (the administrative capacity to effectively ‘absorb’ funds). The
Reports also provide further evidence of the Commission’s ambiguous
signals regarding the form of institutionalization of sub-national gover-nance discussed in Chapter 3. While the Opinions and the 1998
Reports contained some encouragement for decentralization and
regional government, from 1999/2000 onwards, the Commissionstressed the need for central control over regional policy.
This analysis suggests that there was a learning curve during acces-
sion, which generated a higher level of professionalization in the inter-action between the Commission and the candidates over time. Equally,the greater clarity of the Commission’s monitoring in the period after
the political decision to enlarge had been taken is indicative of the
extent to which the enlargement monitoring process was constrainedby political factors. The poor clarity and ﬂexible interpretations that
characterized the Commission’s monitoring during the enlargement
process allowed for a wide latitude of political manoeuvrability overthe application of conditionality and the evaluation of compliance.
The absence of clear benchmarks blurred substantive cross-country
comparisons. As we have discussed, the Commission qualiﬁed thedegree of ‘progress’ in each case in a remarkably imprecise manner, but
this progress was sometimes relative to that achieved at the last round116 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

of monitoring, and sometimes relative to some new non-transparent
measure. Consequently, whether it was concerned with new legislation
adopted or institutional change initiated, the monitoring did not allowfor a consistent and cumulative evaluation and ranking of the can-didate countries. For all the ambiguities of the process, however, there
remains the question of how effective the Reports were in securing
compliance with EU regional policy requirements by the candidatecountries, and it is to this issue that we turn in Chapter 5. Monitoring Conditionality and Compliance 117

5
Transition, Enlargement and
Regionalization: a Comparison ofHungary and Poland
During the initial post-communist transition years in most CEECs the
issue of local government reform was high on the political agenda as a
central theme of democratic state-building. As discussed in Chapter 2
most countries introduced democratizing and decentralizing changesto the structure of local government (see Table 2.1). In formulating
these reforms domestic policy-makers looked to their historical lega-
cies of pre-communist experiences, to the transferability of systems of
local government in Western Europe and beyond, as well as to the
‘model(s)’ promoted by the Commission and its actors. The framing of
regional reform had normative and functional dimensions. As
discussed in Chapter 2 some of the CEECs were formerly part of theAustro-Hungarian empire and thus had experience of a system of self-
government and autonomy dating from the mid-nineteenth century
and enduring in some cases until the 1930s. The functional legacy of
communist-era planning regions provided a geographic template for
the NUTS regionalization. The policy issue of whether to opt for polit-
ical or statistical regionalization was also subject to an important terri-
torial and functional constraint in that the former was most obviously
relevant to big countries rather than to smaller countries such as
Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In these countries debatesabout regionalization were primarily spurred on by the exogenous
pressures of EU accession. In Poland, the Czech Republic and, to some
extent, Slovakia regional reform had been a salient and controversialissue in the early years of post-communist transition during the
constitution-making process, and even in these cases the implementa-
tion of regional self-government was postponed. Thus, while regional-ization became a key issue in most CEECs during the enlargement
process, the temporal correlation should not deﬂect us from the
118

domestic factors in the debates in countries like Poland or Hungary,
and key structural determinants such as size of country.
This chapter investigates the extent to which the developments in
regional policy that emerged in the CEEC states from the second half
of the 1990s, and which were temporally correlated with EU accession,
were also driven by EU conditionality. The Commission’s Opinions of
1997 identiﬁed ‘regional administrative capacity’ as a core requirementfor accession and thereby galvanized latent debates over regionaliza-
tion. As we have discussed in previous chapters, the formal EU condi-
tionality for regional policy as embodied in Chapter 21 (regional policyand coordination of structural instruments) of the accession negotia-
tions was weak on regulatory content. As we discussed in Chapter 3,
some sections of the Commission attempted to apply an informal con-ditionality in the form of a preference for a regionalization that
involved not only compliance with NUTS II standards but also
included a form of regional self-government. Our concern here is withtwo main questions. First, was there a causal linkage between EU con-ditionality and policy and institutional outcomes in the CEECs in the
regional policy domain? Second, to what extent was regionalization
shaped by path-dependent factors located in domestic political settingsrather than external pressures for compliance? In particular, we
examine the impact of post-communist transition on regional reform.
We present a comparative case study of developments in Poland andHungary to analyse these questions.
These countries have been selected because they have been among
the most important candidates for EU membership from several view-points. They are two of the most powerful economies of the CEECs, aregenerally regarded as having the most successful transition records,
were the main beneﬁciaries of the EU’s technical transition assistance
programmes delivered by PHARE (and also of EBRD funds), and werethe politically most important states of the CEECs during the enlarge-
ment process.
1They share certain additional key features that we
might expect to inﬂuence regional reform. On the one hand, they both
have a tradition of regional identities, while exhibiting a low salienceof politically signiﬁcant ethno-territorial cleavages that might compli-cate or deter regional reform. On the other hand, they have both expe-
rienced repeated changes of government across the left and right of the
political spectrum during their transitions in the 1990s which havehelped to delay reforms in this area.
Against this background of similarities, the institutional choices for
managing regional policy have been very different in Poland andA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 119

Hungary. They illustrate well the two ends of the spectrum of institu-
tional change that has occurred in the CEECs: democratic regionalization
in Poland, and administrative-statistical regionalization in Hungary.Against a comparable structural background Hungary and Poland havechosen highly divergent approaches to the issue of building ‘regional
administrative capacity’, and thereby generated very different institu-
tional settings for regional policy-making. The following analysis tracesthe reform process in both countries. We examine the actions of the key
actors and evaluate the relative importance of the EU’s external incen-
tives and pressures compared with the domestic political structures,conditions and preferences. This comparison will help to ‘bring transition
back in’ to the discussion about EU enlargement and conditionality by
demonstrating their overlaps and interaction.
Hungary: administrative-statistical regionalization
In 1990 Hungary took a lead on its transitioning neighbours by
becoming the ﬁrst post-communist country to introduce local self-
government reforms, the provisions for which were among the mostliberal in the region.
2The plans for reforming the hierarchical cen-
tralized socialist system had been discussed among reformistmembers of the Communist Party, the leaders of the pro-democracymovements, and academics, since the mid-1980s.
3The Hungarian
Democratic Forum coalition government (1990–94) held only 54 percent of the seats in parliament, and given that a two-thirds majorityof the parliament was needed to ensure the passage of the new localself-government legislation, the government was compelled to com-
promise with the opposition of both the former communists and the
liberals. The government wanted to replicate the democratic localself-government of Western Europe, but also structured the new insti-
tutional architecture around Hungary’s historically rooted megyek
(county) level sub-national governance.
4There was a widespread
political consensus about the necessity for decentralization to the
local level as a fundamental part of post-communist transition.
In theory, local governments at the commune and county level were
to coexist in a non-hierarchical relationship to each other, however,
the essence of the compromise of 1990 was that county-level govern-
ments would be indirectly elected by lower-level local councils, therebyweakening the authority of the counties vis-à-vis the directly elected
local (municipal) governments. Broad criteria were drawn up, allowing
almost any village or rural settlement to establish its own elected self-120 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

governing institutions and granting them a wide range of functions. As
we noted in Chapter 2, the reform of 1990 created an incentive struc-
ture for a mushrooming of small governing units (to some 3200 units)which often lacked the experience and ﬁnancial basis to fulﬁl basicgoverning tasks. Consequently in the period 1991–94 some of the
lowest level units were amalgamated and there was some recentraliza-
tion of powers. A key change was the creation of eight developmentregions, each of which was composed of two to three counties.
5A new
tier of central government-appointed bureaucrats, the Commissionersof the Republic, was also established at the new regional level. Theliberal opposition, the Alliance of Free Democrats and Fidesz, hadpushed for the creation of these quasi-prefects who were appointed
directly by the prime minister and whose main responsibility was to
supervise the legality of the work of local governments.
6
Since PHARE had been established in 1989 with the speciﬁc aim of
prioritizing international assistance to Poland and Hungary, Hungarywas one of the ﬁrst transition countries of Eastern Europe to beneﬁtfrom aid ﬂows. In 1992, two years after the 1990 reform of localgovernment, Hungary was awarded PHARE money to assist in the
country’s regional policy, an integral part of which was the develop-
ment of institutional structures to enable the government to decentral-ize the formulation and implementation of regional development
policy.
7By this time Hungary had already applied for membership of
the EU and had concluded a Europe Agreement in December 1991. The
ﬁrst resolution on regional development, passed by parliament in1993, displayed some inﬂuence of PHARE and was framed in a mannerthat demonstrated Hungary’s commitment to ‘Europeanization’ by
recommending that institutions should correspond to EU systems and
practice.
8Regional reform was politically controversial in Hungary’s
transition politics and was subject to much bargaining over the bound-aries of the regions and their competences. In particular, there was nopolitical consensus over whether the regions should be elected bodiesor merely NUTS II compliant statistical regions devoid of political
content.
During the communist period, the county-level governments had
been a key lever of vertical control for the Communist Party andregional development was often determined by patronage networks
within the party rather than on objective need. During the transition,views on regional and local governance reform cut across the left-right
spectrum of ideological cleavages. The centrist Hungarian Democratic
Forum, and the rightists of the Hungarian Christian Democratic PartyA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 121

and the Smallholders’ Party supported the revival of strong county
government and argued that both self-government and state super-
vision ofﬁces should be concentrated at this level. This position wasopposed by the liberals of the Alliance of Free Democrats, and Fidesz,and by the left in the form of the Hungarian Socialist Party, who feared
that the central government and bureaucracy would continue to domi-
nate the localities through the state administrative ofﬁces.
9The party
alignment also differed over the proposal to establish regional develop-ment bodies. In their 1994 election manifestos the Hungarian SocialistParty, the Alliance of Free Democrats and the Hungarian DemocraticForum had all supported the establishment of regional development
bodies, although opinions differed about their composition and func-
tions and the place of the counties within this structure. While theHungarian Socialist Party, the Alliance of Free Democrats and Fidesz
supported the maintenance of strong county-level governments, Fidesz
in particular saw the regional bodies as a threat to the power of localself-governments.
10They also opposed giving the county councils any
signiﬁcant independent status from the municipal and local level.
Confusion and authority leakage resulted from the proliferation in
the number of local government units. They became characterized bycronyism and corruption and were reluctant to cooperate or merge for
the sake of efﬁciency.
11Local leaders often acted, as one interviewee
explained, like ‘ kis kiraly ’ (little kings).12Their ineffectiveness was per-
sistently criticized by the Commissioners of the Republic. The weak
capacity and poor performance of the local governments led torenewed centralization. Competences were taken or eroded away fromthe local governments by the deconcentration of some forty state
administrative departments to the sub-national level, including in key
areas such as policing, taxation, education and public health. This gavethe central government a tier of administrative control at the local
level. These administrative reforms created a highly conﬂictual situa-
tion at the local level which was exacerbated by the alternance ofparties in power at the centre and localities, and by the political cycles
of transition. There was a political polarization between the centre-
right Hungarian Democratic Forum coalition government and thecounty and local governments, many of which were dominated by
members of the centre-right and liberal opposition parties Fidesz and
the Alliance of Free Democrats.
13
Following the elections of 1994 a governing coalition of the
Hungarian Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats had a 72per cent parliamentary majority. This was a decisive moment for further122 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

regional reform since the government controlled the two-thirds majority
required for constitutional amendments and thus was in a position to
advance or block reform for a regional tier of self-government. The coali-tion blocked regional self-government and shifted power to the countyand municipality levels in a new local government act of 1994 which
abolished the Commissioners of the Republic and the eight regions.
At the same time, the authority of the county-level governments wasenhanced by making them directly elected bodies, and transferring to
them key responsibilities for major public services. A new system of
centrally appointed Public Administrative Ofﬁces (PAOs) was establishedand located at the county level, though with similar responsibilities to
the Commissioners.
14The PAOs, as one of our interviewees put it, saw
themselves as ‘a kind of Prefect as in France’.15This institutional archi-
tecture of two elected tiers of non-hierarchical bodies at the sub-national
level (county and local governments), and a system of quasi-prefects,has remained in place, notwithstanding further amendments to the lawin 1996 and 1999.
Consequently, there was an extensive political debate and the main
parameters of the structure of Hungary’s sub-national governmentarrangements had been largely settled by the time the process of
EU accession began to accelerate after 1994. Nevertheless the ques-
tion of how best to secure and manage structural funds, together with EU pressures via PHARE, continued to keep the issue of
centre–regional–local relations on the political agenda in Hungary. The
main political parties, however, remained deeply divided over thebeneﬁts of establishing a regional tier of governance. The inﬂuence of
the EU on the development of Hungary’s regional policy steadily
became more pervasive through the PHARE pipeline of delivering tech-nical assistance. PHARE was instrumental in the preparation of the1996 Act on Regional Policy and Physical Planning which imple-
mented an administrative-statistical regionalization to make Hungary
compliant with NUTS standards. The act laid down guidelines for aNational Regional Development Concept which conformed to the pre-
cepts of EU regional development policy. The functional logic for the
particular conﬁguration of the regions came from the HungarianAcademy of Sciences’ Regional Research Centre, which was responsible
for drafting the National Regional Development Concept, and recom-
mended the establishment of six NUTS II type regions correspondingto the six economic planning regions of 1971. The regionalization was
ﬁnalized in a slightly different form, with a seventh region being
demarcated in western Hungary, in consultation with Eurostat.
16TheA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 123

act provided for the establishment on a voluntary basis of Regional
Development Councils (RDCs) to assist the government with the man-
agement of regional policy. They were composed of representatives ofcounty councils, local government associations, social and civic organi-zations as well as ofﬁcials from the Ministry of Environment and
Regional Policy. There was no agreement among the main political
parties, however, on the exact territorial conﬁguration of the ‘develop-ment’ regions and allocation of powers to the RDCs as most did not
want to dilute the power of the counties and municipalities. The gov-
erning coalition was itself split over the issue. Whereas some membersof the Hungarian Socialist Party favoured large regions, many deputies
of the Alliance of Free Democrats favoured bottom-up ‘voluntary’
regionalization based on groups of counties or local units.
17The differ-
ent preferences had informed the decision to establish two differenttypes of regions – statistical planning regions corresponding to NUTS IIunits and ‘development regions’, which were a proto-regional adminis-trative structure. Ideally, it was intended that the RDCs would overlap
with the statistical regions, though this was not a legal requirement
and initially did not happen in practice. As noted in Chapter 4, theCommission applauded Hungary’s approach in its 1997 Opinion on
Hungary’s Application for Membership, stating: ‘Hungary is the ﬁrst
among Central European countries which adopted a legal frameworkclosely in line with EU structural policy. Many sections of the new law
have been drafted in perspective of taking over the acquis .’
18
Apparently in response to perceived pressures from the Commission,
the government rushed through parliament the act on the National
Regional Development Concept in March 1998, just prior to the elec-tions. The Regional Development Concept reconﬁgured the statisticalregions and increased their number from six to seven (see Map 3).
19
Since the ‘development regions’ remained voluntary and lacked
resources and powers, the county governments continued to be the
dominant players in the preparation of development plans and the dis-tribution of state and EU funding.
20By late 1999 only ﬁve RDCs were
established and functioning. Their administrative apparatuses,however, remained skeletal and lacked ‘capacity’, with few employeesand limited ﬁnancial resources. One county – the Zala county – evenopted to join two RDCs simultaneously.
21Although the Commission’s
Opinions had clearly welcomed the establishment of the NUTS II com-pliant statistical regionalization and the RDCs, Hungary was criticizedby the EU in the 1998 and 1999 Regular Reports (as we discussed inChapter 4) for the slow pace at which the RDCs were established, the124 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

fact that the councils at regional and county level were not fully opera-
tional and a general lag in implementation regarding regional policy
objectives.
The opportunity for further reform was presented by the election of
a new governing centre-right coalition of Fidesz and the Smallholders’
Party in May 1998. Fidesz had been the strongest supporter of local
government among Hungary’s political parties, yet once in power itbegan to reverse its position. In general, Fidesz justiﬁed its policy shiftA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 125
HU05
HU06
HU07HU01
HU02
HU03
HU04
HU01 Central Hungary HU05 North Hungary
HU02 Central Transdanubia HU06 North Great Plain
HU03 West Hungary HU07 South Great Plain
HU04 South TransdanubiaPOLANDGERMANY
UKRAINE
ROMANIASLOVAKIA
AUSTRIA
SLOVENIA
CROATIA
B.-H.YUGCZECH
REPUBLIC0 125 Km
Map 3 Regionalization in Hungary (NUTS II regions)

on local government reform by pointing to pressures from the
Commission on Hungary to comply with the demands of the EU acces-
sion process.22The EU simpliﬁed and devolved power over PHARE and
other aid programmes to the Hungarian government in July 1999,despite charges of cronyism and corruption against the Fidesz govern-ment. Aside from EU funding, the RDCs had a very weak resource baseand, as unelected quangos dominated by the central government, had
difﬁculties in establishing themselves as effective and authoritative
organizations. The 1999 Regular Report criticized Hungary again fornot sufﬁciently addressing the short-term Accession Partnership prior-
ity for regional ‘capacity’.
23By instrumentalizing the EU accession pres-
sures as a two-level game playing off external and domestic pressures
against each other, the Fidesz-dominated government amended theLaw on Regional Development and Physical Planning in October 1999.The central government’s control of the RDCs was strengthened, and
their status and role was transformed. The government realigned the
RDCs to overlap fully with the seven NUTS II level statistical planningregions that had been created in 1998. Now that they were on a statu-
tory footing, the government guaranteed them state funding, and
deﬁned more clearly their role in programming and implementingregional development programmes. Though the amendments served to
consolidate the legal basis of the new regional institutions, RDC mem-
bership was now weighted in favour of central government appointeesat the expense of sub-national representatives and civil society, such
as the Labour Councils established under the 1991 Employment Act,
and chambers of commerce.
24Consequently, the independence of the
RDCs and the government’s commitment to the EU principles of ‘part-nership’ and ‘subsidiarity’ appeared increasingly dubious. Indeed, thewhole system of public sector contracting was increasingly seen as apatronage-dispensing mechanism for Fidesz.
The strengthening of the RDCs and the increased importance of
the NUTS II regions was welcomed by the EU in the November 2000Regular Report, although concerns were raised regarding efﬁcient
decision-making and programming at the regional level. By late
2000/early 2001, as we discussed in Chapter 4, the Commission’srecommendations shifted ﬁrmly towards greater central govern-
ment control and management of regional policy.
25At the same
time, there was increasing domestic political concern about Fidesz’s
overly-centralized approach and corruption which generateddemands from across the political spectrum (including both theHungarian Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats) for the126 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

introduction of elected regional self-government. Despite these criti-
cisms Fidesz claimed to pursue a long-term policy of ‘double decen-
tralization’, which would eliminate the counties and replace themby super-regions that would initially be controlled by the centralgovernment but ultimately would have elected assemblies, and so-
called ‘small areas’ at the level between the current county and local
levels.
26Interviews conducted with local elites in 1999 in Pécs, one
of Hungary’s most important self-governing municipalities (whichalso dominates the county of Baranya), revealed that the elites atthis level were overwhelmingly supportive of further change toregional and local boundaries in Hungary as a way of maximizing
the receipt of structural funds (see Figure 5.1).
This suggests that even the institutional interests embedded at the
county level in Hungary are pragmatically oriented to enlargement andopen to further change. The key obstacle remains, however, the consti-A Comparison of Hungary and Poland 127
100
80
60
40
20
0
yes no in some placesPercentageN = 72
Respondents were asked: Do you agree with the proposition that traditional
administrative boundaries should be redrawn, if necessary, to comply with EUfunding criteria?
Figure 5.1 Openness to EU inﬂuence on sub-national reforms (Pécs 1999)

tutional threshold of a two-thirds majority to enact a new tier of
regional self-government. A new reform plan introduced by the social-
ist government in August 2003 centres on the reorganization of localgovernments into economic and geographical regions and the regroup-ing of counties into larger regions. The reform plan even envisages
setting up elected regional governments and regional public adminis-
tration ofﬁces. The current statistical-planning regions, which were setup for structural fund purposes, would serve as a basis for regional gov-
ernments and public administration. These parts of the reform require
a two-thirds majority in parliament, which is unlikely to be achieved.The government aims to ﬁnalize the reforms by the time of the next
general elections in 2006.
27
The experience of Hungary reveals two trends in its regionaliza-
tion. In the ﬁrst half of the 1990s regionalization was overwhelm-
ingly determined by its internal transition politics. Institutionalstructures were installed and interests were embedded in the period1990–94, which thereafter greatly complicated additional reforms
that threatened these structures. The reforms to regional policy in
the second half of the 1990s were shaped by the EU enlargementprocess. The latter reforms, however, have been inﬂuenced less by
the vague regulations for structural fund management in the acquis
and more by the perceptions of pressure from the Commission for
certain institutional reforms to enhance regional ‘capacity’. Through
PHARE the EU inﬂuenced the number and shape of the development
regions and their organizational structure. Moreover, the EU pres-sures have not been fed into a vacuum. The institutional architec-
ture and interests that have been embedded by the early transition
period are difﬁcult to unpick. Furthermore, Hungary’s constitutionalamendment threshold is a signiﬁcant structural hurdle for institu-tional reform of this kind. The EU pressures for change have also
been opportunistically instrumentalized in two-level games by
domestic political parties to promote their visions of further regionalreforms and defend their local interests. Despite the consensus
among the main political parties about securing the country’s
membership in the EU as quickly as possible, the process of regional-ization has been a cross-cutting issue. In the case of Hungary, the
enlargement process has sustained the domestic debate on regional
governance but it has not surmounted the considerable structuralconstraints to further institutional reform that were put in place as
part of the transition politics of the early 1990s and which predate
the EU accession negotiations. 128 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Poland: democratized regionalization
Poland was the ﬁrst country in Eastern Europe to enact a democratiz-
ing reform of regional government. Local democracy and local govern-
ment reform were crucial components of the round-table talks betweenSolidarity and the communist government in the late 1980s.
Consequently, the issue of state decentralization was high on the polit-
ical agenda during the immediate post-communist transition period.The debate over centre–local relations in Poland also involved the
question of the establishment of a regional tier of government. In con-
trast to the Hungarian case, where there was a broad political consen-sus against the formation of a tier of regional government, in Polandthere was a consensus about the principle but debate raged as to the
shape of the reform. The key cleavage on the issue in the late 1980s
was between the old Communist Party elite and the emergent democ-ratic elites around Solidarity. The Communist Party supported the
retention of the existing 49 regions as part of a more centralized state
structure, whereas Solidarity favoured the establishment of a strongdecentralized government tier which would serve as a counterbalance
to the centre and the decades of communist centralism.
28
There were important structural constraints on the potential for
regional reform in Poland. Poland was distinctive among the CEECs
and many European states in having a polycentric city structure that ischaracterized by the moderate size of the capital, Warsaw, the indus-
trial dominance of the region of Upper Silesia, and the spread of cities
with quite large populations of over half a million inhabitants (forexample, Poznan ´ , Wroclaw, Lódz). Moreover, for historical reasons
concerned with the construction of modern Poland, there is a rela-tively weak orientation of transport and communications infrastruc-ture towards Warsaw. This is in sharp contrast to a capital city such asBudapest, which is the hub of transport and communications and the
economy for Hungary. One of the goals of Poland’s 1975 administra-
tive reform (discussed in Chapter 2) which led to the creation of the 49województwa was to strengthen central power, minimize the impor-
tance of historically grown regions and promote the layer of largercities with below half a million inhabitants. Moreover the transitionafter 1989 saw an increasing east-west divide in Poland, as the more
polyfunctional cities located in territories contiguous or networked
with the EU were in a position to adjust better to the economic crashof the early 1990s. These factors made the attempt to reform regional
government in the 1990s highly contentious.
29A Comparison of Hungary and Poland 129

The lack of a consensus among the political parties about the design
of the reform, in particular the number and functions of the new
regions, together with a crowded transition agenda in the initial post-communist years, were among the key factors contributing to analmost ten-year gap between the introduction of local self-government
at the municipal level in 1990 and the institutionalization of regional
government structures in 1999. The 1990 local government reform pre-served the 49 communist-era regions as an unelected level of govern-
ment, where heads were appointed by the government and some
competences were deconcentrated from central ministries. At theformer powiat (district) level a new tier of state administrative districts
was established. The main democratizing element lay in the creation ofself-governing communes ( gminy ) at the municipal and local levels. As
in Hungary, the rapid multiplication in the number of units occupying
the lowest level of self-government revealed immense inefﬁciencies of
administration and a lack of adequate funding. The 1990 legislationwas intended to be a temporary solution and there was a general polit-ical consensus about the need for further decentralization and the
introduction of an intermediary tier of self-government.
30
Throughout the 1990–97 period the national elite in Poland was
absorbed by national and international policy issues, and relations
with the EU in particular. Public administration was extremely central-ized, and also sectoralized, due to the inherited communist legacy ofstate and economic organization. The centralized administrative struc-
ture marginalized the regional elites. It also limited the central elite’s
capacity effectively to coordinate and manage the regional and locallevels. If in the early 1990s the public debate over the regional govern-
ment reform was dominated by ideological issues concerned with the
transition from communist patterns of rule, by the middle of the 1990sfunctional arguments came to the fore with a growing recognition of
the costs and inefﬁciency of a centralized system that was character-
ized by large numbers of poorly coordinated state administrativeofﬁces, deﬁcient public ﬁnances, a lack of transparency and corruption.
The reform of 1999 came as the end point of many years of political
debate in Poland. Equally, the reform was implemented at this timebecause of the pressures arising from EU accession. As we discussed in
Chapter 3 the pressure from the EU in the early accession period of
1997–98 was to some extent underpinned by a normative push fromelements of the Commission for democratized regionalization, though
this shifted to a concentration on central control and management in
2000. Both the endogenous long-term and exogenous short-term130 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

pressures to institutionalize at the regional level were driven by similar
normative and economic logics to promote democracy and participa-
tion, while also making for effective integrated regional development.The ﬁrst serious proposals for regional administrative reform had comefrom the regional level. For example, the regional elite in Silesia
became increasingly frustrated with the failure of the centre to imple-
ment urgently needed regional economic restructuring, while Poznan ´
województwo even pre-empted national reforms by launching its own
regional economic development programme.
31
The regional government reform was stalled by the leftist governing
coalition of the Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish Peasants Party(SLD-PSL) which was in power from 1993 to 1997. The organizationaland legislative preparations for a regional reform had been ﬁnalized bythe short-lived coalition government of seven post-Solidarity and
centre-right parties under Hanna Suchocka, which was in power from
July 1992 to May 1993. The new PSL Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlakfavoured a strong central government and opposed regionalization and
the dismantling of the existing 49 regional structures, since his party’s
political hold was strong in many of these regions. In the 1993 parlia-mentary elections, the PSL had won in a considerable number of the
województwa and it was intent on deﬂecting any threats to these gains
by blocking any reform of the intermediary level of government.
32The
PSL proposed the retention of the existing regions but with elected
assemblies and a centrally appointed governor ( wojewoda). Its coalition
partner, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), supported the establish-ment of twelve to fourteen large development regions but with self-
government concentrated at the district ( powiat) level. The issue of
regional governance reform was a cross-cutting cleavage that divided
parties and the left-right ideological spectrum, though to a much lesser
degree than was the case in Hungary. Most importantly, the governing
coalition was itself split over the issue and it decided to prioritize otherreforms in the transition.
33
The debates re-emerged with vigour only upon the accession to
power of the Solidarity Electoral Alliance-Freedom Union (AWS-UW)coalition after the elections in September 1997. Numerous proposalsfor the administrative subdivision of the country had been circulatedamong government specialists and academics in the early 1990s with
the proposed number of regions varying from six to over forty. There
was also an ongoing debate about the functions of the proposedregions and in particular the relationship between self-governing
organs and state administrative ofﬁces located within the same territo-A Comparison of Hungary and Poland 131

ries. The three main options which were put forward were: ﬁrst, to
create functional regions that would be dominated by the central gov-
ernment, second, to create self-governing regions within a unitarystate, and third, to establish a federal structure along the lines ofGermany. The latter was the most controversial idea. Poland, after all,
was a territorial construct of the Yalta Agreement of February 1945 and
much of western Poland had been annexed from Germany. The issueof federalism, consequently, stoked fears about the danger of sover-
eignty challenges and the disintegration of the country and enjoyed
little support.
34
As the new centre-right AWS-UW coalition moved to pass the new
law on regional government in 1998, an intense party political battleraged over the consequences for party political interests at the regionaland local levels rather than a genuine debate on the merits of regionalgovernance and its implications for regional development. The reform
was passed as part of a large package of structural reforms of the health
care, pension and education systems and the judiciary. Though thereforms were all interconnected, as a package they were overly ambi-
tious and rushed, leaving in their wake a host of unresolved prob-
lems.
35Given that the Solidarity Electoral Alliance was itself not a
single political party but an alliance of some thirty political organiza-tions and parties, it is not surprising that differences emerged withinthe government over the detail of the reform. The majority of main-stream Solidarity parties favoured the division of the country into
twelve or thirteen regions that would have both self-governing and
state administrative structures. This division was based on the assump-tion that a region can only function when it has the institutions, intel-
lectual and professional capacity to operate and interact at the
domestic and international (especially EU) levels. Nine cities wereidentiﬁed as meeting the necessary criteria to be strong regional
centres. Three cities in the poorer eastern part of the country were
added to this list in order to achieve a balanced conﬁguration ofregions across the whole country. The Regional League, based in
Poznan ´ , maintained that there were only eight economically viable
regions.
36At the other end of the spectrum, the more Eurosceptical
national-Catholic wing of the AWS (like the old communists) opposed
the decentralizing reform altogether, seeing it as a threat to the unityof the state and an unnecessary response to EU pressures.
37The
members of the governing coalition compromised by agreeing torestrict the competences of the new self-governing regional govern-ments, while increasing the supervisory powers of the wojewoda , the132 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

prefect-like representative of the central government. On the oppo-
sition side, the Democratic Left Alliance favoured a return to the
pre-1975 division into seventeen regions. At the time of the debateover the reform package, the SLD proposed an assistance programmefor those cities faced with the loss of their ‘regional status’.
The combined opposition of the PSL and the SLD managed, with
the aid of a veto by president Kwasniewski (a leading ﬁgure in theSLD), to secure a concession from the government that increased the
number of regions to sixteen. These ‘extra’ regions came out strongly
in support of Kwasniewski’s re-election in October 2000. The PolishPeasants Party continued to oppose the reform both at the wojew-
ództwa and powiat levels, fearing a loss of power in their traditional
heartlands in the rural communities and existing regions. It argued infavour of a two-tier system based on the existing 49 regions, with the
current regions being transformed into self-governing entities.
38There
was also a certain amount of opposition from employees of central
ministries and the local administrations in those cities that would losetheir regional status. The outcome was a government and oppositioncompromise on a 16-region conﬁguration that approximated to the
pre-1975 communist system.
The two main reform proposals had signiﬁcant implications for
regional development in Poland. A conﬁguration of ‘big’ regions, forexample, the proposal for 10–12 regions centred around regional capi-
tals and similar to the historical provinces would intensify a functionaldynamic for growth to be concentrated in the bigger cities and would
consequently be more likely to accelerate regional polarization and
internal migration, for example, through skilled labour moving tobigger cities. The proposal for a more diffused regionalization to about
25województwa would retain more of the polycentric structure and
would assist better with the development of weaker, second-order cities
especially in the eastern part of the country.
39
As a result of the 1998 reform, Poland had a three-tier self-governing
system at the sub-national level.40The basic units are the 2489 areas
and municipalities (gminy) at the local level, 308 districts (powiaty) and
65 urban municipalities which have been granted powiat status, and
the 16 województwa at the regional level (see Map 4). All three levels of
government have a democratically elected council to run the adminis-
tration in their jurisdictions. The regional level is characterized by a
dual administrative structure which one interviewee described as a‘split personality’.
41A regional governor, the wojewoda, is appointed by
the prime minister upon the recommendation of the interior minister,A Comparison of Hungary and Poland 133

134 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
Kurskiy
ZalivBaltic Sea
Pomeranian
BayGulf of
GdanskBornhom
(Denmark)SWEDEN
PL0G
PL04 PL0FPL02PL0B
PL0E
PL07PL0A
PL03
PL0D
PL0CPL08PL05
PL01
PL09
PL06
`
`PL01 Dolnoslaskie
PL02 Kujawsko-Pomorskie PL03 Lubelskie PL04 Lubuskie
PL05 Lódskie
„GERMANYRUSSIALITHUANIA
BELARUS
UKRAINE
ROMANIAHUNGARYSLOVAKIA
AUSTRIACZECH
REPUBLIC
PL06 Malopolskie PL0B Pomorskie
PL07 Mazowieckie PL0C Slaskie
PL08 Opolskie PL0D Swietokrzyskie
PL09 Podkarpackie PL0E Warminsko-Mazurskie
PL0A Podlaskie PL0F Wielkopolskie
PL0G Zachodniopomorskie0 50 100 Km
Map 4 Regionalization in Poland (NUTS II regions)

to protect the interests of the state and to coordinate the work of
the government administration with the regional government. The
elected council in each województwo elects a chief ofﬁcer, the Marshal
(marszalek ), who is responsible for regional development under the
overarching management of the Polish Agency for Regional
Development. The funding base for the new institutions of local and
regional governance was also partially reformed. The key weakness ofthe reform lay in its failure to immediately devolve sufﬁcient fund-
raising powers to the regional level to enable the new governments to
function effectively. Critics talk of a decentralization of competenceswithout a corresponding decentralisation of ﬁnances since the regional
governments are highly dependent on central government funding.
42
One Katowice elite member described the reform as ‘the action of
dilettantes, amateurs and improvisation, with a lack of recognition of
historic regions and economic, spatial and ecological factors’.43There
is no doubt that, as in Hungary, the debates in Poland were framed by the political power calculus of the main political parties, whetherthe aim was to protect whatever stranglehold they had on local andregional levels, or to expand their power at these levels. The per-
ceived preferences of the Commission for a form of devolved regional
self-government that was linked to regional development andregional administrative capacity were also temporally correlated with
the renewed debates in Poland in 1997–98. Moreover, the 1998
reform was also a response to the criticisms of regional policy andcapacity made by the Commission in the 1997 Opinions and in the
1998 progress report. These evaluations asserted that Poland’s
regional administrative reform was ‘incomplete’, and complainedabout the lack of legal basis for the implementation of regional
policy and the absence of a mechanism of coordination of regionalpolicy at the national level.
44Consequently, the impetus for Poland’s
democratized regionalization was largely an endogenous develop-
ment that was driven by its transition politics, but the normative andfunctional design of the reform was also shaped by the accessionprocess.
The reform debate in Poland was framed by this perception of EU
accession requirements. During the Sejm debate on the 1998 law, sup-porters of regional reform stressed its importance for Poland’s inte-
gration into the EU, maintaining that strong, large regions were
important to maximize the beneﬁts from structural funds.
45This was
yet another example of how the enlargement process generated two-level games, as the accession to the EU was instrumentally employed asA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 135

a legitimating device to advance party political preferences. Our data
from local elite interviews conducted in Katowice in 2000–01 revealed
that just over 37 per cent of respondents thought that the outcome ofthe regional reform had been on the whole a product of Polish priori-ties, 12 per cent thought it was driven by EU conditionality, while 22.7
per cent considered both factors equally inﬂuenced the outcome (see
Figure 5.2).
The reform design had three main areas of compatibility with the
EU’s formal and informal conditionality: it strengthened the state’sregional administrative capacity through the devolution of power tolower levels; it established a new territorial system that met the NUTS
criteria (with the sixteen województwa corresponding to NUTS II units),
while also combining elements of self-government and administrative
deconcentration from the central government; and it advanced the136 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
40
3020
10
0
Polish priorities Both
EU conditions NeitherPercentageN = 72
Respondents were asked: Do you think that the reform of regional and district
governance structures in Poland in 1999 was on the whole the result of 1. Polishpriorities; 2. EU conditions; 3. Both; or 4. Neither?
Figure 5.2 Perceptions of the impact of the EU on sub-national reforms (Katowice
2000)

construction of democratic institutions at all levels of society.46Polish
lawmakers correctly calculated that the responsibilities of the new
regional governments, such as the promotion of economic develop-ment, regional public services, environmental protection and thedevelopment of regional infrastructure, would satisfy the EU’s demand
for enhanced ‘regional administrative capacity’. Consequently, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 4 the Regular Report of 1999 praised the reform aslikely to have ‘a signiﬁcant positive effect’ on Poland’s accession prepa-
rations in the area of regional policy. The issues of temporal correlation
and design compatibility, however, should not to be confused withdirect causal linkages. For example, in the capital of one of Poland’s
most important regions, Katowice, the question of EU enlargement was
rarely raised in the discourse on Poland’s regionalization in the early tomid-1990s despite the fact that Poland was receiving PHARE money toassist in the development of regional programmes. The establishment
of district and regional self-governing levels was overwhelmingly seen
as a progression of the transition from communism which had begunin 1990 with the reform of local government.
47Thus we can conclude
that the impetus for democratized regionalization in Poland predatedEU enlargement conditionality, but its timing and design was dove-tailed with the ongoing preparations for and perceived prerequisites ofEU membership.
The 1998 ‘National Programme of Preparation for Membership of the
EU’ drawn up jointly with the Commission assumed that the newregional level would be responsible for the management and supervi-
sion of structural funds.
48With the introduction of the new wojew-
ództwo andpowiat self-governing levels in January 1999, the passage of
a law on regional development in May 2000 and the establishment of a
Ministry of Regional Development in June 2000, Poland considereditself to be adjusting its regions to ‘EU standards’. As one study
explained: ‘In respect of size they are the counterparts of regions in the
countries of the EU, and the government and the Sejm had preciselythis in mind when they demarcated and assigned tasks to voivod-
ships.’
49By late 2000, however, the Commission had become increas-
ingly concerned at the prospect of structural funds being decentralized
in any of the new member states given that their ‘capacity’ was stillconsidered to be insufﬁcient and the division of responsibilitiesbetween the centre and the potential new regional managing authori-
ties for structural funds was still largely undeﬁned. In the case of
Poland, the lack of regional tax bases for the new voivodships was asevere constraint on their capacity to develop ‘capacity’ in this area.
50A Comparison of Hungary and Poland 137

Having formally encouraged the development of regional structures at
the województwo level, and informally promoted a democratized
regional government model, the Commission acted in early 2001 to
stress the importance of continued central management and of ensur-ing the necessary administrative capacities at the centre.
51The 2001
Regular Report on Poland illustrates this change by stating that despiteprevious progress Poland’s preparations for the implementation ofstructural funds had stalled, particularly as regards developments at thenational level. Poland was reminded that ‘a clear division of responsi-
bilities must be established at the central level, between central and
regional levels and at the regional level between the Voivods andMarshals’. Having previously encouraged Poland’s regionalization, the
Commission now argued that ‘the role of the regions in the manage-
ment of the funds in the period up to end 2006 requires careful consid-eration’. The Commission blocked attempts to decentralize operational
programmes to the regions.
52The Regular Reports of 2002 continued to
record the Commission’s concern about administrative capacity and
the problem of weak ‘implementation’ at different levels of govern-ment despite the fact that the negotiations on Chapter 21 had beenclosed by all the accession countries.
53Not surprisingly, the conﬂicting
signals transmitted by the Commission gave rise to a great deal ofresentment in Poland.
Conclusion
While the causal link between EU enlargement and the establish-
ment of speciﬁc institutions for EU structural policy as required by
the Structural Funds Regulations was straightforward and primarily amatter of timing, prioritization and government capacity in eachcandidate country, the design of the wider institutional environ-
ment of sub-national government makes for a more interesting
and complex testing ground in the search for the EU’s impact ondomestic structures.
The institutional architecture of regional government in the CEECs is
best understood as a development inﬂuenced by the interaction of thedomestic politics of transition (including historical legacies shaping the
debates) and EU conditionality, whether it be formal or informal pres-
sures emanating from the Commission. This dynamic interaction hasresulted in a diversity of policy responses and institutional design in the
CEECs. While domestic pressures for regionalization might have varied
depending on the trajectory of transition, the process of EU enlargement138 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

has had a clear temporal correlation with such reforms. The EU acted as
a catalyst for change, as debates about local and regional government
were galvanized by the Commission’s Opinions of 1997, the 1998Accession Partnerships and the Regular Reports thereafter, and in partic-ular by the Commission’s stress on the ‘administrative capacity’ issue.
This comparative study of regionalization in Hungary and Poland
demonstrates that the reform of sub-national self-government was onthe whole an endogenous development, engineered by a fairly broad
political consensus on the merits of democratization at the sub-
national level as part of the post-communist transition. In both casesdemocratizing reforms of local self-government were introduced
within the ﬁrst years of the transition in 1990. The domestic debates
differed, however, in that there was no elite consensus in Hungary overregional self-government, and moreover a structural impediment intro-
duced at the onset of the transition, namely the two-thirds parliamen-
tary majority required for constitutional change, makes such a reformvery difﬁcult to achieve. In Poland in contrast the principle of regionalself-government was widely accepted but the conﬁguration and power
of the new tier was hotly disputed. The institutional design of regional
governance in the CEECs can be broadly placed along a spectrum illus-trated by the Polish and Hungarian examples respectively: democratic
regionalization, where regional institutions are elected and have
signiﬁcant devolved powers, and administrative-statistical regionaliza-tion, where regional institutions are quangos with largely advisory
status. Most of the CEEC states, with the exception of Poland, the
Czech Republic and Slovakia, have opted for a Hungarian type ofcentrally-controlled administrative-statistical regionalization withRegional Development Agencies (see Table 2.1).
The most obvious relationship between conditionality and regional-
ization is in the temporal correlation. With the exceptions of Poland,where regional reform was discussed as a fundamental part of the tran-
sition process from its outset in 1989–90, and the Czech Republic,
where there was a constitutional commitment to regionalization estab-lished in 1992, regionalization only became a salient issue in most of
the CEECs within the context of an accelerated EU accession process
from 1996. It could be argued that the Polish and Czech cases suggestthat domestic pressures for regionalization might have accumulated in
the other CEECs without EU pressures, as a natural part of their transi-
tion politics. The Commission’s monitoring and evaluating instru-ments from 1997–2002 (the Opinions, Regular Reports, CMRs)
emphasized the importance of regional administrative capacity forA Comparison of Hungary and Poland 139

delivering regional policy and thereby created and maintained a
momentum for reform and inﬂuenced the form and timing of institu-
tional change, but primarily to reinforce existing domestic trendsrather than triggering radically different approaches.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the notion of ‘Europeanization’ suggests
that European integration is generating converging institutional orpolicy outcomes. We should expect this convergence pressure to beeven more strongly felt in the case of enlargement countries, given the
considerable power asymmetry in favour of the Commission and the
context of post-communist transition. This comparative study of a keypolicy area in two CEEC countries, Poland and Hungary, demonstrates
that there has not been a uniform ‘Europeanizing’ effect. As in the EU
member states, the domestic institutional changes in response to theEU’s adaptational pressures vary across countries, with considerable
room for manoeuvre for domestic actors and institutions as theory pre-
dicts. These ﬁndings conﬁrm the tentative conclusions drawn from theEuropeanization literature, according to which political structures tendto be less ‘Europeanized’ and exhibit less convergence compared to
policy-level studies. 140 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

6
Elites and the Normative Capacity
for Europeanization
During the EU’s eastward enlargement the notion of ‘capacity’ has
been of paramount importance for the Commission and the EU’s gov-
erning institutions more broadly. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the
Commission employed the term as a generic label for the parts of theacquis that required new institutional structures, management and
organizational arrangements and stafﬁng levels, all of which were
often seen as being deﬁcient in the CEECs. ‘Capacity’ became a catch-
all phrase in the accession process, derived from a bureaucratic and
technocratic understanding of the concept and, indeed was increas-
ingly over time interpreted in managerialist terms by the Commission.
This was, in fact, a narrow understanding of the shortcomings in theCEECs’ preparations for EU membership. Getting the appropriate
administrative and organizational structures in place is an important
but partial step towards the implementation of the acquis. The capacity
to adopt or implement the acquis requires not simply transposition
through a domestic legislative gallop, but also a cognitive adjustment
by elites who must not only learn to ‘speak European’, but also become
acculturated and assimilated into European norms and ‘ways of doing
things’. The understanding of ‘capacity’ that is generally employed in
the study of enlargement, consequently, has shorn the notion of itsnormative content.
To theorize about the institutional, policy and normative conver-
gence entailed in ‘Europeanization’ requires not only proofs of connec-tivity to the EU integration process but also of cognitive adaptation to
common ‘European’ values, a collective understanding of how policies
are to be framed, and the deployment of both in policy-making andimplementation. It presupposes two key conditions: ﬁrst, it requires
that elites in a particular country have some level of connectedness to
141

EU policy processes; and second, it requires that elites in a country are
captured by EU norms and a European identity. Both conditions are
usually seen as being facilitated by ‘social learning’ or ‘socialization’ ofelites from within the EU’s institutional environment.
1Thus, institu-
tional interaction over time fosters institutional and policy conver-gence. Theories of European integration, Europeanization, and indeedpost-communist transition, attach great importance to the role of elitesand, in particular, to the process by which elites acquire new attitudi-
nal and behavioural norms and practices which may progress the
desired outcome, namely integration and transition. Previous studiesof Europeanization in the CEECs infer that the policy push for acces-
sion itself indicates a high degree of national elite positive responsive-
ness but say little about other levels of the elite.
The enlargement process was pervaded by mechanisms of
Europeanization which aimed to secure institutional convergence, nor-mative assimilation, communicative symmetry, and network fusionwith the elites of the CEECs. Only a few EU instruments, however,
were concerned explicitly with the normative conversion of the CEEC
elites and knowledge transfer about the EU (see Box 6.1). The ‘struc-tured dialogue’ of the early 1990s and the accession negotiations them-selves, for example, helped to acculturate the post-communist CEEC
national elites into ‘European’ elite discourse, accelerating in the ﬁrst
instance their presentational capacity to ‘speak European’. The rapidincrease in elite interactions between the EU and the CEECs whether
channelled through the inclusion of the CEEC national elites in EU
fora and activities or through more penetrative EU instruments thatinvolved sub-national elites, such as PHARE, SAPARD, ISPA and
scientiﬁc and educational exchanges, were attempts to promote
‘Europeanized’ thinking in the CEECs. The ‘twinning’ instrumentdeveloped from 1999, whereby EU advisers and practitioners were sec-
onded to ministries in the CEECs to assist with their accession negotia-
tions, was also potentially an important vehicle for normative transferfrom the EU to the CEECs. Since many of the ‘twins’ were experiencedretired or seconded career bureaucrats from member states it is not sur-
prising that the folklore about their activities suggests that it could
have subversive effects. In particular, it is suggested that they drew ontheir own experience of interactions with the Commission to infuse
the CEEC elites with advice that reinforced perceptions of the predom-
inance of ‘national interest’ in dealings with the Commission. In addi-tion, there was a spread of business and administrative networks as a
result of the opening up of the CEEC economies through the Europe142 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Agreements in the early 1990s. Whether such interactions between the
EU and the CEECs promoted ‘Europeanized’ thinking or behaviour
should be empirically tested rather than assumed. While our ownresearch is concerned with the overall degree of connectedness of sub-national elites with the European project resulting from the sum of
these interactions, ideally the aims and instruments of Europeanization
should be differentiated.
Among the main criticisms of the EU throughout the 1990s has been
that it has failed to communicate effectively the beneﬁts of the EU to thepeoples of member states, and has been reluctant to address its ownlegitimacy problem in the ‘democratic deﬁcit’ in EU institutions.
2The
legitimacy problem of the democratic deﬁcit has been replicated in theCEECs. Generally, the enlargement process has further eroded democra-tic accountability by narrowing the scope for political contestationamong parties and national-level actors over key issues.
3Moreover,
despite the ﬁnancial implications and thus pivotal importance of sub-national elites in the CEECs for the EU, and despite the Commission’suse of language about institutionally embedding ‘partnership’ inregional policy and demanding greater regional ‘capacity’, the participa-
tion of the regional elites and institutions of the CEECs in the enlarge-
ment process was minimal. Enlargement has been structurally ﬂawed inthat it has been organized as an exclusive competence for the member
states, the Commission and the governing national elites in the candi-
date countries to negotiate. Consequently, while the Commission andthe CEEC governments had a strong interest in the particular institu-
tional territorial-administrative arrangements established for managing
regional policy, and in the ‘capacity’ of these institutions to access andElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 143
Box 6.1 Mechanisms of Europeanization
Functional & Normative Goals Key Instruments
șEurope Agreements
șInstitutional convergence șStructured dialogue
șNormative assimilation șAid/PHARE pipeline
șCommunicative symmetry șDelegations
șNetwork fusion șAccession partnerships
șNegotiations
șEU monitoring
șTwinning
șHorizontal interactions
șEU fora
șConvention

manage the EU funds efﬁciently, a key layer of the delivery mechanism,
namely, the elites and actors who will be involved in the programming
and implementation of this policy at the sub-national level, had novoice in the accession process. Simultaneously, as we discussed inChapter 5, the sub-national elites were powerful players when it came to
national-level debates over the design of the sub-national administrative-
territorial structures, whether in the case of democratic regionalization,most notably in Poland, or in the blocking of regional self-government
by local elites as in the case of Hungary.
The attitudes and behaviour of the sub-national elites in the CEECs
are important for policy outcomes in three key respects. First, transi-tion produced an enormous attrition on the institutional fabric of the
state in the CEECs. The fall of the one-party state was followed by aperiod of instability that was characterized by institutional weakness.
While in most cases the constitution-making process was completed
quickly it takes time for new institutions to become embedded in anysociety, never mind one undergoing the trauma of multiple transi-tions.
4One of the characteristics of democratizing transition in the
CEECs was a fragile structure of political party competition. Politicalparties are the key mechanism of political communication, mobiliza-tion and representation in democracies, yet in the CEECs they arecharacterized by organizational weakness.
5When political parties are
weak, political actors become dominant. The organizational andmobilizational weakness of CEEC parties is most exacerbated at thesub-national levels. Consequently, in addition to the prominent roleof individual national-level politicians, the importance of regional
and local elites as gatekeepers and mediators astride the institutional
space between national elites and grassroots public opinion wasenhanced by transition. Second, sub-national elites occupy a posi-
tional centrality not only for implementing transition choices but
also for the successful implementation of key aspects of the acquis . In
particular, their role is critical for delivering successful outcomes in
the implementation of key policies, such as regional policy, in the
post-enlargement era. Third, the regional and local elites haveincreasingly been of normative political importance for the EU’s
project of democratic self-legitimation.
As we discussed in previous chapters, during enlargement, however,
the Commission’s views on what constituted best practice in institution-building at this level for the CEECs was contradictory and shifted over
time, alternating between decentralized and centralized approaches toregional policy. Nevertheless, the White Paper on European Governance144 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

(2001) expounded rhetoric about the need for a ‘multi-level partnership’
to involve the regional and local level of governance more fully in EU
decision-making.6This normative commitment was seriously diluted in
the Draft Constitutional Treaty drawn up by the European Conventionin 2003 which refers to but fails to clarify or substantiate the even morenebulous notion of ‘subsidiarity’.
7
In this chapter we present a comparative analysis of data from local
and regional elite interviews in four CEEC states to evaluate their levelof normative Europeanization and their connectedness to the EU inte-gration project. The extent to which the elites in the CEECs havebecome ‘Europeanized’ during enlargement has important theoretical
and policy implications beyond the ideological aspirational issue of
whether this promotes or hinders EU integration. On the one hand,the study of the CEEC elites may conﬁrm or challenge the assump-
tions about ‘Europeanization’. The assumption of ‘differential empow-
erment’, in particular, makes signiﬁcant claims about the impact ofEuropeanization on the outcome of power games at the domestic
level. Furthermore, a key issue for the notion of capacity in an
enlarged EU is the extent to which there is a variation in the respon-siveness to Europeanization. For example, do sub-national elite values
concur with those of the national elite or is there a ﬁssure between the
two levels? We can infer that levels of Europeanization will have asigniﬁcant effect on the operationalization of capacity. The moreEuropeanized and homogenized the elite values are, the more likely it
is that they will adjust well to the performance requirements of post-
enlargement, and vice-versa the more fractured the elite structures are,the less effective EU policy implementation will be.
Theory suggests that the articulation of elite preferences will be
determined by the elite cleavage structures. The classic elite segmenta-tion includes sub-groups deﬁned according to ideological position (on
left/right and pro-EU/anti-EU scales), sociological criteria (age, sex,
class or ethnic background, education, career), the interests that theyrepresent, and their networks (local, national and international).
Consequently, given the centrality of elites to successful policy out-
comes generally, and the crucial importance of sub-national elites for asuccessful outcome in regional policy speciﬁcally, we can infer that the
extent and manner by which Europeanization undulates between elite
segments will have a signiﬁcant bearing on their capacity to deliverregional policy. Our data allow us to map the contours of sub-nationalelite normative Europeanization and to assess the effects on different
segments of the elite. Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 145

The bifurcated Europeanization of elites
Elite theory suggests that the following groups of factors should be
important in shaping the attitudes and behaviour of elites: sociological
and socialization factors, elite position, identity and networks. In par-ticular, factors such as age, education and involvement in networks
tend to be signiﬁcantly correlated with attitudes to change. Positive
attitudes to change, of course, may not only be a reﬂection of previoussocialization, but also be driven by a structured rational self-interest
from those who have most to beneﬁt from the change. From elite
theory we can infer that the younger and more educated and more net-worked internationally an elite member is, the more likely he/she is tohave liberal attitudes and adaptive behaviour, and thus be predisposed
to Europeanization.
8We can also infer that the older elites whose
careers were rooted in the communist era and who lack the social
capital to beneﬁt from Europeanization will be most resistant to it. Arobust model of ‘Europeanization’ in the CEECs would also infer that
Europeanized elites exhibit three essential characteristics: ﬁrst, they
would have good knowledge about the activities of the EU and its rele-
vance to their own spatial or functional domain; second, they would
demonstrate a good understanding of what the EU stands for; and third,
they would strongly identify with the EU and its activities.
9
Our analysis is based on a large-scale cross-national comparative
study of sub-national elites in key regional cities in the CEECs con-
ducted in 1999–2002. The results presented here are based on an analy-sis of elite interviews (N = 287) conducted using a standardized
questionnaire in the following CEEC cities: Pécs in Hungary (N = 74),
Maribor in Slovenia (N = 72), Tartu in Estonia (N = 66) and Katowice inPoland (N = 75). We sought equivalence in our cases by using two
main criteria in the selection. First, we chose key regional ‘second’cities in each country case. By opting for the category ‘second’ cities we
aimed to minimize the effect of variation in terms of the size and
importance of the cities relative to the hierarchy of cities within each
country. In countries where there was more than one potential optionfor ‘second’ city we selected cities that we considered were most geo-graphically oriented to the EU and/or had a reputation for being
‘Europeanized’ (culturally, economically, politically, historically). Elite
members in each city were selected as follows. First, we used positionalcriteria to identify an initial selection of 20–25 individuals for inter-
viewing who were drawn from senior elected and appointed ofﬁcials in
the executive and legislative bodies of each city. After this initial146 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

selection, we snowballed out to other elite members using reputational
criteria, by asking our initial selection of elites to identify other leading
individuals. Using this method we interviewed as many as possible ofthe elite members identiﬁed, most of whom came from regional andlocal government, business, the mass media and, to a lesser extent, the
cultural intelligentsia, up to a maximum of 75 in each city.
The interviews in Pécs, Maribor and Tartu were conducted in the
summer of 1999. The interviews in Katowice were conducted in late2001 and early 2002 at a more advanced stage of the enlargement
process. We recognize that this temporal difference in the ﬁeldworkmay affect the comparability of the data but on the whole we do not
believe that it has a signiﬁcant impact on most of the questions that
we asked. We have attempted to take account of timing and contextualdifferences by adjusting questions in a manner that allowed compari-
son. In addition to collecting key sociological information about the
elite members, their activities and networks, the interviews alsoincluded a range of questions to test elite opinions on a range of issuesincluding economic and political transition at the national, regional
and local level, their attitudes to the EU and the enlargement process.
The data are described in the statistical appendix. Most of the elites
that were interviewed came from the administrative segment (64.1 percent), though many of these were also involved in politics and busi-
ness or other activities (see Statistical Appendix, A.1). The distributionof the elite segments varied signiﬁcantly across the cities. In Katowice,
Maribor and Tartu signiﬁcantly more of the administrative elites were
among the interviewees, whereas in Pécs there was a signiﬁcantlyhigher number of economic and private sector elites (see A.2). The bulk(70 per cent) of the elites interviewed fell within the cohorts aged
between 40–59 (A.3). The elites were also highly educated, as the over-
whelming majority (67 per cent) had university degrees and postgradu-ate qualiﬁcations, and most of the others had professional and other
higher qualiﬁcations. Only 1.7 per cent had no further education (A.4).
The vast majority of our interviewees (83.3 per cent) were male (A.5).
In the case of attitudes to the EU we found that only a range of
network contact variables (travel and visitors from abroad) and agepredict or are at least associated with positive attitudes, and moreoverare more signiﬁcant for positive attitudes than other more direct
involvement with the EU such as, for example, participation in EU pro-
jects (A.6).
10Thus the ‘middle aged’ and those who travel abroad more
and receive visitors more tend to have a more positive view about theEU and the beneﬁts of their country’s relationship with the EU. TheseElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 147

ﬁndings reinforced the ﬁndings about the potential contradictions
between the vertical top-down Commission approach to enlargement
which seems to rely on the trickle-down effect in its communicationstrategy, and the crucial role of horizontal engagement and interactionworking from the bottom-up in diffusing European norms.
Interestingly, those respondents who were dissatisﬁed with the transi-
tion to democracy in their country also tended to have positive viewsabout the beneﬁts of their country’s relationship with the EU, suggest-
ing that these interviewees expect that EU membership will have posi-
tive effects on the state of democracy at home.
Elite participation in EU enlargement
The EU investment in the accession countries since the early 1990s,
both in terms of economic aid (the total sum of PHARE aid amounted
to 5589.10 million euros between 1990 and 1998) and organizationaltime, has been signiﬁcant (see Table 1.1). The level of elite participa-tion in EU projects has been fairly similar across the respondents in our
cases: 48.6 per cent in Maribor, 56.8 per cent in Pécs, 56.9 per cent in
Tartu, 58.7 per cent in Katowice. Moreover, when asked ‘Generally,what is your opinion of the aims and activities of the EU?’, pro-EU
views were strongest in Katowice, where 91.9 per cent of respondents
held a positive view, none were negative and only 8.1 per cent wereneutral. In Pécs, 83.3 per cent of elite members had a positive opinion
of the EU, only 1.4 per cent held a negative opinion and 14.9 per cent
were neutral; in Maribor, 75 per cent were positive, 8.3 per cent nega-tive and 16.7 per cent were neutral; and in the case of Tartu, 56.9 per
cent were positive, only 1.7 per cent negative and a considerable
41.4 per cent remained neutral (Figure 6.1). Some elite members spokeof ‘EU colonization’ and of accession as a ‘forced marriage’, but thesewere a small minority of discordant voices.
11
While the sub-national elites as a whole were overwhelmingly positive
about the EU, enlargement was not a salient issue for them. Rather, theseelites were most concerned with the immediate social and economicproblems arising from the domestic transition process. In Maribor notone of our elite interviewees cited EU enlargement as an issue of pressing
concern for the city. In the case of Pécs only 4 per cent considered it to
be an important issue, and in Tartu and Katowice less than 2.5 per centthought so. The focus on domestic socio-economic policy issues is
understandable given the trauma of transition in the CEECs after 1989.
Consistently in the interviews the elites in these cities stressed that their148 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

overwhelming concern was with the decline of traditional industries
during the transition and the perceived failure of central governments to
help. What is surprising, however, is that the overwhelmingly positive
attitude to the EU in principle was not matched by a recognition of therelevance of the enlargement process and EU membership to alleviating
the local problems of transition, in particular through PHARE or even
the potential of structural funds. The generally positive attitude to theEU, consequently, masks a deeper cognitive disconnectedness of the
elites from the EU that is reinforced by their lack of understanding of
how the EU is relevant for their level of governance.
Past or current participation in EU projects or a generally positive
opinion about the EU is not necessarily a guarantee of deeper knowl-edge about the EU’s activities even in the local area. For example, oneof our interviewees in Maribor had previously been a government
minister and had signed a PHARE cross-border project agreement with
Austria, but he could not remember the name of it. In fact, there arevery low levels of knowledge about the European Union among the
sub-national elites in CEECs in general (Figure 6.2). Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 149
100
80
60
40
20
0
Positive Negative NeutralPercentage City
Maribor (N = 72)
Pécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 65)
Katowice (N = 74)
Respondents were asked: Generally, what is your opinion of the aims and activities
of the European Union? Is it positive, neutral, or negative?
Figure 6.1 Elite opinions of the EU

We found the highest levels of knowledge about EU programmes in
Maribor (51 per cent), though even here just under half of the localelite members (49 per cent) still had poor or limited knowledge of
EU-funded projects under way in their city. The high score was also
inﬂuenced by knowledge of just one highly visible project ongoing inthe city (the modernization of a waste-water treatment plant, partly
with EU, but mainly with EBRD funds).
12In Katowice 55 per cent had
poor or limited knowledge of city-based EU programmes, in Pécs, the
equivalent ﬁgure was 63.5 per cent, and in Tartu, a striking 77 per cent
had poor or limited knowledge of EU-funded programmes currently
under way in their locale. This suggests that there has been a majorcommunication and recognition problem with the way that EU
programmes are delivered at the local level.
It is difﬁcult accurately to assess the level of correlation between the
EU ﬁnancial assistance that has gone into the cities/regions studied andthe level of elite knowledge about EU programmes in the cities/regions.
The Commission does not disperse its aid on a territorial basis and does150 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Good Poor LimitedPercentageCity
Maribor (N = 72)
Pécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 66)
Katowice (N = 74)
Respondents were asked: Can you name any EU-funded (wholly or partly) projects
in your city/region? (Answers were coded ‘good’ if respondents were able to nameany project and the source of funding; ‘poor’ if respondents were unable to nameany projects or sources of funding; ‘limited’ if respondents showed knowledge ofprojects, but were unable to identify the source of funding).
Figure 6.2 Elite knowledge of EU-funded activities in the locale

not keep records of the amount of EU aid dispersed to particular cities
or regions. One plausible reason for this low recognition of the role of
the EU lay in the design of PHARE programmes, which were organizedand funded through central ministries, associated with the spending ofnational ministers who supervise the dispersal to sectors (and indirectly
to areas) identiﬁed as programme priorities. In general such aid was
highly politicized and was often distributed as patrimony by governingparties to reward loyal constituencies. Moreover, although PHARE
usually had local ofﬁces in the cities involved in our research, our obser-
vation suggests that these were largely Potemkin-like structures with nopermanent personnel present.
The overwhelming reliance on private sector consultants for the
delivery of PHARE aid, until the PHARE reforms in 1997–98, wasinevitably seen negatively by elites in the CEECs. The private sector
‘Marriot brigade’ was despised as a siphon for large parts of aid without
providing much in the way of practical assistance, and further alien-ated elite and public enthusiasm for the EU.
13The lack of direct territo-
riality in PHARE aid must have contributed to the lack of eliteknowledge and poor connectedness to EU activities at the local level.Where EU funds were spent on infrastructural improvements thatresulted in a clearly identiﬁable local and territorialized beneﬁt the
EU’s activities registered most prominently among local elites.
Regional development agencies established as part of the enlarge-
ment process in the CEECs do not promote elite connectednessbecause they are in most cases skeletal and highly politicized and
often corrupt structures with limited administrative capacity. Weattribute the signiﬁcantly weak elite knowledge about the EU primar-
ily to the structural disengagement of sub-national actors in the
accession process combined with the failure on the part of theCommission and national political elites to prioritize the communi-
cation of knowledge of the beneﬁts of membership within the CEECs.
The higher level of elite knowledge of the EU exhibited in Katowiceseems to have been the result of institutional factors. In this case thedevolution of power to the regional level appears to have acted as an
institutional vehicle for connecting the sub-national elite to the
wider domestic political process and, by extension, to the EU.Katowice is also located in a region (Silesia) with a strong historical
regional identity and connectedness with Germany, and is among
the best EU networked cities of western Poland. This combination ofinstitutional development, regional identity and external connected-
ness through networks has been the driving force of the process of
European integration there.Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 151

Meanwhile the lack of familiarity with EU institutions and policies
stands in sharp contrast to the often detailed knowledge demonstrated
during interviews by some sections of the local and regional elites aboutlocal government practices and administration in West European coun-tries. This experience and exposure is the result of socialization in exten-
sive professional networks. For example, just under 25 per cent of the
elite respondents were members of an international association, justunder 62 per cent had travelled abroad within the previous six months
and 58 per cent had received visitors from abroad in the same period.
Such visits, the transferral of work practices and participation in differentEurope-wide networks are signs of the horizontal deepening of the
European integration process and the growth of pan-European networks
among elites at all levels. However, such horizontal linkages may transferEuroscepticism as much as they may serve to promote values and behav-
iour in favour of European integration.
14Nonetheless, the globalizing
effect of increased travel and horizontal contacts among local elites in
candidate countries and EU member states would appear to serve as acountervailing force balancing the tendency towards pragmatic cautionand limiting the appeal of Euroscepticism.
Understanding the meaning of EU membership
An elite that is cognitively connected to the EU is one that should have
a good understanding of what the EU stands for, what its main policy
functions are, and what policies to expect once their country becomesa member state. We sought to test this level of understanding amongthe CEEC sub-national elites by offering our interviewees a list of
twelve policy statements, some of which were relevant to EU activities
and some of which were not, and some of which inferred integration,and some of which did not.
15We asked them to make ﬁve preferences,
which for them best encapsulated what the EU ‘stands for’ (Figure 6.3).The responses can be grouped into four broad categories that relate todifferent dimensions of European integration:
1.Economic integration Free Trade, Economic Cohesion, EMU, Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP).
2.Political integration Europe of Nation States (ENS), Federal Europe,
Common European Home (CEH).
3.Security integration Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP),
Partnership for Peace (PFP).
4.Regional policy integration Europe of Regions, Structural and Cohesion
Funds (SCF), Subsidiarity. 152 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

The limited understanding of the EU among the elites was evident
from the difﬁculty the interviewers experienced with explaining
certain terms, such as ‘subsidiarity’ and ‘structural and cohesion funds’,
which many interviewees did not comprehend even when translated.16
The overwhelming perception among the elites was that the EU stood
for economic integration with free trade and economic cohesion
receiving especially high scores. It is striking that the elites lack anyvision of the EU as a political integration project. Where respondentsdid select statements referring to the political project of the EU they
tended to choose ‘Europe of Nation States’. This preference reﬂects the
determination of the CEEC elites to retain their recently regainedsovereignty in the face of pressures for deeper political integration in
an enlarged EU. This ﬁnding is substantiated further by the fact that
the idea of a federal Europe consistently ranked very low in terms ofthe elites’ understanding of what the EU stood for. Moreover, theElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 153
20
10
0PercentagePécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 66)
Maribor (N = 72)
Katowice (N = 74)SubsidiaritySCFEur RegionsPFPCFSPCEHFederal EuropeENSCAPEMUEconomic CohesionFree TradeCity
Respondents were asked: Which five of the following phrases best sums up the
European Union for you? (The maximum possible score is 20 per cent.)
Figure 6.3 Elite perceptions of what the EU ‘stands for’

Gorbachevian concept of a ‘Common European Home’ was signiﬁcant
only in Tartu (which had been part of the Soviet Union) albeit still a
weak preference. In some cases, particularly in Maribor and Tartu, incountries which at the time the interviews were conducted remainedoutside NATO, the elites attached high importance to the security
dimension of the EU. Even in Pécs (Hungary being in NATO) the secu-
rity dimension was signiﬁcant given its proximity to Serbia (and theinterviews were conducted in the summer of 1999 at a time of height-
ened tension over Kosovo). Once more Katowice formed an excep-
tional case in that here the elites selected regional policy dimensionreferents such as ‘subsidiarity’, ‘Europe of the Regions’, ‘Structural and
Cohesion Funds’ in an informed manner, and ranked them much
higher than in other cases. Elsewhere, as regards the regional policydimension only ‘Europe of the Regions’ received a relatively high
ranking (in Pécs and Maribor), though the term was poorly under-
stood.
While the elite preferences discussed above emphasized the potential
economic beneﬁts of entry into the EU, further exploration of the
meaning of the EU and the beneﬁts of membership revealed that the
elites in most cases saw most beneﬁts accruing to the national levelrather than the regional or local levels. The gap between the per-
ceptions of the beneﬁts of enlargement at the national versus the local
level was most pronounced in Pécs and Tartu (Figures 6.4–6.6). In Pécs93 per cent of the members of the local elite considered that Hungary
beneﬁted ‘signiﬁcantly’ or ‘moderately’ from its relationship with the
EU, whereas only just over 64 per cent believed that the city hadbeneﬁted similarly, and 36 per cent felt that Pécs had only beneﬁted‘minimally’ or ‘not at all’ from the relationship. Similarly, in Tartu 89
per cent of the local elite considered that Estonia beneﬁted
‘signiﬁcantly’ or ‘moderately’ from its relationship with the EU,whereas 52 per cent felt that Tartu had only beneﬁted ‘minimally’
or ‘not all’. This conﬁrms that the sub-national elites were poorly
informed about the potential economic beneﬁts that the EU couldbring, and about structural funds in particular.
Even the elite respondents in Katowice, who were more positive about
the beneﬁts of EU membership at the local level, felt that in general theEU beneﬁted more from its relationship with Poland rather than vice
versa. In Katowice 55 per cent of respondents felt that the EU was the
main beneﬁciary of the relationship, and only 17 per cent consideredthat both Poland and the European Union beneﬁted equally. In the
other cases clear majorities considered that their countries were the key154 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 155
60
50
40
30
20
10
0Percentage
Significantly Minimally
Moderately Not at allCity
Maribor (N = 70)
Pécs (N = 73)
Tartu (N = 65)
Katowice (N = 70)
Respondents were asked: How much do you think EU enlargement has bene-
ﬁted your city?
Figure 6.4 Elite opinions of the beneﬁt of EU enlargement to the city
beneﬁciary from the relationship with the EU (Figure 6.6). Even in Tartu,
notwithstanding the fact that Estonia has consistently been among the
most Eurosceptic of candidate countries and the local elite in Tarturemain ambivalent about the potential beneﬁts at the local level, 89 percent of our respondents were of the opinion that their country was the
key beneﬁciary in its relationship with the EU. The evidence suggests
that the sub-national elites are far from hostile to the EU or opposed totheir countries’ impending accession. Rather they have been excluded
from the enlargement process and, consequently, are poorly informed
about the process and its implications. Despite their lack of knowledge ofthe EU, and their failure to understand its relevance for their level of
governance, they are in general pragmatically and positively predisposed
to the economic beneﬁts of membership of the EU at the macro-level.
These elites are pragmatic rather than actively Eurosceptic and there-
fore are potentially open to a greater level of engagement and con-nectedness with the EU in the future. The elites generally see the futureof their country closely tied to the EU. in Tartu 71 per cent of res-
pondents saw their country’s future most closely tied to the EU (with a

156 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0Percentage
Significantly Minimally
Moderately Not at allCity
Maribor (N = 71)
Pécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 63)
Katowice (N = 73)
Respondents were asked: How much do you think your country benefits from
its relationship with the EU?
Figure 6.5 Elite opinions of the beneﬁt of EU enlargement to the country
100
80
60
40
20
0Percentage
Both Country EU NeitherCity
Maribor (N = 69)
Pécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 64)
Katowice (N = 69)
Respondents were asked: Who do you think benefits most out of the
relationship between your country and the European Union?
Figure 6.6 Elite opinions of who beneﬁts most from EU enlargement

further 22 per cent citing Scandinavia and Germany). In the cases
of Pécs, Maribor and Katowice, 82 per cent of respondents saw their
country’s future most closely tied to the EU (with a further 5, 7 and 9per cent respectively speciﬁcally highlighting Germany). This indicatesthat the sub-national elites have consolidated views about the future
external orientation of their economic and security relations.
The elites are also receptive to policy changes emanating from EU
pressures if they will promote accession, even such intrusive proposalsas the reform of internal territorial administrative boundaries (Figure
6.7). Resistance to this idea came only in those cases where it mightresult in an empowerment of territorialized ethnic minorities (as in
Tartu). In Pécs, just under 81 per cent were prepared to accept the
redrawing of administrative boundaries in compliance with EUfunding criteria and a further 5.6 per cent would accept it ‘in some
places’. In the case of Maribor, an equally high number (79 per cent)
was prepared to accept the redrawing of administrative boundaries,and a further 11 per cent were prepared to countenance such changes‘in some places’. These results indicate a receptiveness to territorial
administrative changes that will accommodate EU accession. A greaterElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 157
100
80
60
40
20
0
Yes No In some placesCity
Maribor (N = 70)
Pécs (N = 72)
Tartu (N = 59)Percentage
Respondents were asked: Do you agree with the proposition that traditional
administrative boundaries should be redrawn, if necessary, to comply with EUfunding criteria?
Figure 6.7 Elite opinions on the redrawing of administrative boundaries

resistance to this idea was apparent in the city of Tartu, which
although it does not have a large ethnic Russian population reﬂects the
general apprehension among ethnic Estonians about Russian ethnicempowerment in the country. Here only 51 per cent would agree withinternal boundary changes, while just over 20 per cent disagreed out-
right with the proposition, and 29 per cent would agree to such
changes only ‘in some places’.
Responses to this question may also have contained an implicit
aspiration on the part of the sub-national elite members for greaterinvolvement in the EU enlargement process. Such a perception isconﬁrmed by other data. A public opinion survey conducted in 2000
by CEORG revealed a signiﬁcant perception of a need for greater
involvement of the sub-national level in the enlargement process.When asked at which level of administration EU ﬁnancial resources
should be distributed in the ﬁrst instance, only 13 per cent of those
asked in the Czech Republic, 8 per cent in Poland and 26 per cent inHungary thought funds should be distributed centrally. Whereas 39per cent in the Czech Republic, 49 per cent in Poland and 44 per cent
in Hungary thought funds should be primarily distributed locally or
regionally. A further 31 per cent in the Czech Republic, 32 per cent inPoland and 19 per cent in Hungary supported a more or less equal dis-
tribution between the two levels.
17
Given that Poland’s regionalization reform had already been com-
pleted by the time of our interviews in 2000, the elite respondents in
Katowice were asked a different question in an attempt to gauge theirperceptions of the inﬂuence of the EU on the process of regionalreform. As we discussed in Chapter 5 the Polish regional reforms of
1999 were driven primarily by endogenous political dynamics, and EU
inﬂuence was subordinate to domestic pressures. Nevertheless, ourﬁndings in Katowice show that a signiﬁcant majority, 64 per cent, of
the elite in the city still felt that the ‘design’ of the reform was
inﬂuenced by EU conditionality or a least a combination of Polish pri-orities and EU conditionality. At the same time, the elites recognized
that the role of the EU was considerably less important for the
outcome of the reform, with a large number (39 per cent) concludingthat the reform overwhelmingly reﬂected Polish priorities (Figure 6.8).
Elite identity
The study of European identity is quite properly focused on the issue of
‘who belongs?’ One of the key schisms in the legal, sociological and158 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

political science debates over the construction of a European identity is
between the notion of a mass or ‘demos’ identity, and the question of
the role of the elites.18Soysal categorizes the analyses of European
identity construction as falling into three modes: the ‘cultural collec-tivity’ of a shared European cultural heritage, an ‘individual subjectiv-ity’ reﬂected in distinct ‘European sensibility of self’, and ‘institutionalunity’ which forges and communicates the bonds of the ‘we-
community’.
19Studies of Europeanization by political scientists tend to
focus on the third mode and, speciﬁcally, how the elites that dominate
public life at all levels of society are one of the most critical compo-nents for identity construction, and among the most active engineersof the process. Other studies have demonstrated the steady increase in
the time and effort invested by the EU to contrive policy discourses
and activities which confer legitimacy on ‘Europeanness’, although theEU itself has employed shifting notions of what ‘European identity’
means from the Copenhagen EC Summit in December 1973 when the
concept was ﬁrst designed at an ofﬁcial level.
20The theories of
European identity construction and of Europeanization intersect at theElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 159
40
30
20
10
0Percentage
Polish priorities Both
EU conditionality NeitherN = 72
Respondents were asked: Do you think that the reform of regional and district
governance structures in Poland in 1999 was on the whole the result of 1. Polishpriorities, 2. EU conditions, 3. both, 4. neither?
Figure 6.8 Katowice elites’ opinions on EU inﬂuence on Polish regional reform

point of the ‘compliance puzzle’. Why do actors or elites at the state
level comply with EU norms? The literature on Europeanization, as we
discussed in Chapter 1, suggests that greater transnational socialinteraction by agents (actors and elites) through institutionalized con-nectedness to EU activities promotes social learning and norm accul-
turation, and is power-enhancing, and thus shifts and consolidates
preferences. Elites also play an important role in the process of normdiffusion in the wider societal levels as they transmit European identity
to the ‘demos’. What is less clear is whether this is all merely a coinci-
dence or is there some causative effect at work. Is it that elites whichself-identify with being ‘European’ are more predisposed to assimilate
Europeanized norms and values? Or is it that those elites which engage
in EU activities become ‘Europeanized’ as an effect of participationitself?
To measure the level of identiﬁcation with Europe among the sub-
national elites in the CEECs, our elite respondents were asked to selectand rank their identity from a list of options. They were offered a rangeof options with some variations to take account of country and local
particularities. In general, all elites were offered preferences including
Europe, Central Europe, their country, the region, and the city. Theresults reveal a wide variation across countries (Figure 6.9).
The ‘European’ identity is primary, that is, had most ﬁrst preferences,
only in Pécs. It was the secondary identity, after country, in Maribor,and was tertiary in Katowice and Tartu, after country and region/city.
This 27 per cent of respondents in Pécs opted for ‘European’ as their
primary identity compared to 21 per cent in Maribor, 17.6 per cent inKatowice and a mere 9 per cent in Tartu. The results reveal a low levelof identiﬁcation of the sub-national elites with ‘Europe’. Regional and
local identities are also strong in some cases. Given the salience of the
‘thousand year history’ of the county level in Hungary in domesticdebates over reform, it is at ﬁrst sight surprising that the city identity is
much more signiﬁcant in Pécs than the county identity. Only 8 per
cent of respondents chose Baranya county as their primary identity,whereas 24.3 per cent chose the city. We should note, however, that
the city (municipality) is the bedrock of local power in the Hungarian
system and county power structures are often located in the main cityof the county. We can infer that this institutional concentration at the
city level is what accounts for the stronger city identity. Moreover, the
Pécs elite was exceptional in that it was the only case where the‘European’ identity was ranked ﬁrst (27 per cent), Central European
was the second most preferred option (21.6 per cent), and the national160 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

identity came in third place (18.9 per cent). In the other three cases the
national identity was the ﬁrst preference for the primary identity by
far. In the small centralized countries such as Slovenia and Estonia,where the capital city and the national level is so predominant, it is to be expected that the country identity scores highly. In the case of
Estonia, the city level also scored signiﬁcantly and regional identity is
nonexistent. In Katowice, where the elites are among the most posi-tively predisposed towards the EU, regional identity was the second
most preferred primary identity after the national identity. The case of
Katowice suggests that a combination of democratized regional govern-ment to some extent recaptures and reinforces ‘historic’ regional iden-
tity, and may contribute to a strengthening of positive attitudes to the
EU. Just over 27 per cent of respondents in Katowice chose the locale(primarily the region – 20.3 per cent – and to a much lesser extent also
including the city) as their primary identity. This high degree of
regional identity in Katowice was paralleled only by the equallyElites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 161
80
60
40
20
0Percentage
European Country City
Central European Region OtherCity
Maribor (N = 71)
Pécs (N = 74)
Tartu (N = 66)
Katowice (N = 74)
Respondents were asked: In your opinion, which of the following words best
describes you (in order of preference)?
Figure 6.9 Sub-national elite identity

strongly held identity in Pécs. Consequently, while three of the four
cities exhibit a strong national identity among the elites, and only one
revealed a strong European identity, there are also a range of relativelystrongly held sub-national identities (either regional or city).
Conclusion
If being bonded to a European identity-in-the-making and Euopeanization
are, in essence, about ‘ways of doing things’, the evidence reviewed here
demonstrates the fragility and shallowness of these processes in theCEECs. During the latter phase of the accession process the engineers ofthese processes, the elites, still exhibited low levels of knowledge and poor
understanding of the EU and its activities, and weakly identify with
Europeanness. Rather they are more strongly connected with domestic-level issues of transition and localized (or regional) identities. The
disconnection of the sub-national elites from the EU partly reﬂects their
structural exclusion from the accession negotiations as this was an impor-tant mechanism for the acculturation of norms and discourse, and policy
learning. Accession to the EU, consequently, is generally perceived by the
sub-national elites as a national elite or EU ‘beneﬁt’. Given that the sub-national elites are expected to play a pivotal role in the management and
implementation of key enlargement policy objectives – particularly in the
areas of regional policy and structural funds, agriculture and the environ-ment – their weak cognitive and normative connectedness to the EUproject may well undermine compliance and hinder implementation of
policy in the short term.
The evidence presented above shows that the decisional calculus of
sub-national elites in accession states has been dominated by theirfocus on managing the immediate problems of transition, and thus it
has been difﬁcult for them to connect to the strategic political vision ofEuropean integration. The ‘normative gap’ in ‘Europeanization’ at the
sub-national level identiﬁed here may well have been a signiﬁcant
factor in the low turnouts in many of he referenda on EU accessionsuch as Hungary (45.5 per cent), Slovakia (52 per cent), Czech Republic
(55 per cent), and Poland (58.8 per cent).
21Equally, it must have an
impact on the implementation of ‘deep integration’. These elites are
weakly ‘Europeanized’ but this weakness is compounded by their posi-tional and functional power in key policy areas. Consequently, sub-national elites who are disengaged from the enlargement process and
fail to see the beneﬁts for them, are the bedrock of a potential crisis of
implementation in the post-enlargement period.162 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

It is striking that the one case where the evidence for the normative
gap was consistently narrower was among the elites in Katowice. It
appears that a democratizing regionalization that involves signiﬁcantregional self-government, may inter alia foster a higher level of norm
connectedness of elites with the EU and have positive consequences in
promoting cognitive change to a higher level of commitment and
compliance with a further deepening of he process of EU integration.The institutional framework shapes the perceptions and actions of the
elites functioning within the institutional space. This suggests that the
process of European integration in CEECs should be as concerned withthe promotion of democratic governance at all levels as it is with the
‘administrative capacity’ for policy implementation.
If we assume that the accession negotiations were a powerful
‘Europeanizing’ inﬂuence on national elite norms and behaviour wecan infer that the structural exclusion of the sub-national elites from
the enlargement process contributed to their weaker levels of ‘Euro-peanization’. This exclusion reinforced a scissors effect in the normsand attitudes of the CEEC elites, with a disjuncture between the more
‘Europeanized’ values into which the national elites were assimilated
and the knowledge gap about the EU and the greater resistance levelsto the inﬁltration of EU norms among sub-national elites. A signiﬁcant
normative ﬁssure between national and sub-national elites is obviously
not conducive to policy coherence, administrative consistency andgood governance. Indeed, it may lead to dysfunctional governance,
particularly where the sub-national elites play a key role in policy
implementation. Such bifurcated ‘Europeanization’ in the domesticsetting may result in ‘differential empowerment’ in domestic politics,although, as noted earlier, this is a factor that will take time to develop.
Of more immediate concern is whether it will generate compliance and
commitment problems in the implementation of policy in the shortterm.Elites and the Normative Capacity for Europeanization 163

Conclusion
The two most widely employed concepts in the framing of the debates
about EU enlargement and European integration are ‘Europeanization’and ‘conditionality’. Yet, both concepts are employed rather nebulously
and lack coherent explanatory frameworks. The term ‘Europeanization’
has been stretched to encapsulate phenomena beyond its original locus
in the framework of EU policy-making to emphasize how European
norms, structures and policies ﬁlter into domestic politics. The evidence
with regard to the resulting systemic convergence remains, however,
inconclusive. The concept suggests that greater connectedness to EUactivities not only provides incentives and advantages in domestic level
political games by promoting ‘differential empowerment’ but also pro-
gresses normative assimilation and the collective embrace of a‘European’ identity. In the context of EU enlargement, both policy-makers and policy analysts generally view conditionality as the primary
mechanism of Europeanization. Broadly, the use of the term ‘EU condi-
tionality’ assumes that there is a power asymmetry between the actorsetting and enforcing the conditions and the actor that must comply.
The term ‘conditionality’ implies a consensus on rules and their trans-
mission mechanisms within the EU, with clear-cut benchmarks, andconsistency and continuity in the transfer of rules over time. Inherent
in the assumption that a power asymmetry characterizes EU enlarge-
ment conditionality is the implication that it drives policy change and
institution-building in the CEECs, while also facilitating greater conver-
gence than is evident in the member states. Much less is said about the
dislocating effects on the candidate states’ ‘ownership’ of such changes
and the implications that this might have for implementation. This
book has critically engaged with both of these key concepts. In particu-
lar, rather than assuming a powerful linkage between conditionality
164

and Europeanization, we have empirically tested for the ‘Europeanizing’
effects of enlargement conditionality in the CEECs by examining the
process of regionalization, the construction of the institutional architec-ture for regional policy, and the normative capacity of the elites at alevel that will be critical for the implementation of post-enlargement
policies.
Much of the discussion about Europeanization and conditionality
tends to focus on the bilateral negotiations between the Commissionand the governments of the CEECs over the adoption into national
legislation of the 80,000 plus pages of the acquis. It is important to dis-
tinguish, however, between the formal rush by candidate states to
adopt the acquis into domestic law and their ‘capacity’ to effectively
and meaningfully implement its provisions. In practice, the adoption
of the acquis by formal legislative engineering in the CEECs has to be
accompanied by a more informal process of normative adaptation andpolicy learning if the former is to be effective. One of the policy areaswhere the contrast between formal adoption, capacity, and implemen-tation issues is most evident is in regional policy (Chapter 21 of the
negotiations on the acquis). Regional policy has been one of the most
controversial issues in the accession negotiations, as evidenced by thefact that it was one of the last chapters to be closed by the candidates
before the Copenhagen Council in December 2002 took the decision
on the date for enlargement. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, itis of immense ﬁnancial signiﬁcance in the enlargement process, with
over half of the EU assistance to the new members being allocated for
‘structural actions’. Secondly, the EU’s attempt to shape the institu-tional template for the delivery of regional policy in the CEECs causedfriction with one of the most politically sensitive core issues of
sovereignty over state-territorial organization. Furthermore, the EU’s
interference occurred at a time when most of the CEECs had alreadyembarked on the process of reforming their state-territorial organiza-
tion as part of their own transition processes. Thus, in some cases, the
parameters of the debate had already been well-deﬁned, or constitu-tional constraints on outcomes had already been imposed by the early
phase of the transition process and were thus prior to accession.
EU conditionality ﬁts within a historical Western pattern of aid
conditionality. The objectives of EU conditionality are consistent withtraditional Western objectives of aid, principally, the economic and
security interests of the ‘donor’ state(s). This linkage between economicand political conditionality and ﬁnancial aid in EC and EU policy
toward Eastern Europe is critical for understanding the process ofConclusion 165

enlargement. The evidence discussed in this book suggests that the
prospect of EU membership helped to reinforce processes of democrati-
zation that were already well under way in most of the CEECs. EU con-ditionality for membership, on the other hand, was in practice sogeneric and had such diffused institutional and attitudinal impact in
the policy area analysed here during enlargement, that it ﬁts well
within the deﬁnition of international conditionality more broadly asbeing in essence ‘declaratory policy’. Certainly the EC and then EU
paid serious attention to conditionality as a rhetorical device during
enlargement but not to its substantive and credible application.
The EU’s conditionality underwent several transformations as
enlargement progressed. EU conditionality initially emphasized thevague normative statement of the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ of December1993. This normative dimension was certainly most important as a
factor in the early decisional phase about enlargement and thereby
shaped the general outlook of transition in the CEECs. This normativepoint of reference remained an important structuring device for theEU’s monitoring of the candidates during the actual accession process
from 1997 onwards. The shift to a concentration on the acquis and
‘capacity’ issues came at the Madrid Council in December 1995, was
consolidated in the Commission’s Opinions on individual candidates
in 1997, and became the main focus for the Commission’s Regular
Reports in 1998– 2002. The fundamental problem with both of thesenormative and technocratic variants of conditionality is that the
Commission has generally lacked agreed benchmarks for the CEECs to
adhere to. The domain of regional policy illustrates well many of thedifﬁculties arising from the lack of standards and benchmarks for eval-uating progress on complying with the conditionality. It also
exempliﬁes the tension within the EU’s own complex institutional
framework for regional policy-making where the Commission has alimited remit regarding the design of the wider political institutional
environment in which the policy is delivered.
When we examined how the EU has addressed the issue of regional
policy during the enlargement process we focused on the role of theCommission as the key locomotive pulling the enlargement process
along. The Commission’s approach to regionalization has been charac-terized by confusion and poor communication of policy recommenda-
tions to the candidates as regards what institutional requisites were
entailed in the conditionality for regional policy and what kind ofcapacity was necessary. The weakness of conditionality in this policy
area was largely due to the fact that there is no standard model of166 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

regionalization within the existing member states and the manage-
ment of structural funds is a matter for member states’ ‘own rules’.
Some areas of the acquis are ‘thicker’ and others are ‘thinner’ on regula-
tory content. Thus, the acquis itself is a structural impediment to a
uniform and consistent EU conditionality. Regional policy is a thin, if
not the thinnest area of the acquis despite its budgetary implications.
Consequently, the performance tasks set for the CEECs by the
Commission in this policy area have not been easily devised, evaluated
or benchmarked. The policy tracking method employed in this book
reveals the tensions within the Commission, and between it and candi-date countries over the form and institutional environment of regional
policy in the CEECs. The evidence presented here suggests that there
were two opposite trends in the Commission’s approach. During theinitial phase of the enlargement process key actors within the
Commission who were involved in accession preferred a particular
‘model’ of politically decentralized regional self-government and wereproactive in applying their power to achieve this through ‘informalconditionality’. Subsequently, conﬂicting signals and competing
visions within the Commission (and these divisions cross-cut DGs and
sections within DGs) as to what constituted the ideal institutionalarchitecture for managing regional policy became more apparent.
The Commission’s institutional preferences were initially less
shaped by ﬁscal concerns and more by the normative impetus to ﬁndan institutional reconﬁguration of the territorial dimension of gover-
nance that would further democratization and deliver ‘multi-level
governance’ and ‘partnership’ in regional policy. Over time in thepost-Agenda 2000 period, however, the Commission’s preferencesconsolidated around a particular kind of functionalist and techno-
cratic model that stressed elements such as centralized management
and control of structural funds that were more in line with the techni-cal provisions of the acquis. Thus in the period from 1996–99 through
its Regular Reports on the candidate countries and PHARE-sponsoredregional programmes as well as numerous interactions between thecandidates’ representatives and Commission ofﬁcials in Brussels and
the delegations in the candidate countries themselves, the
Commission sought directly or indirectly to shape the process ofregionalization in the candidate countries. The pressure from the
Commission created a strong perception among the negotiating elites
in the CEECs that the Commission favoured regional self-government.That perception only began to shift in 2000–01, as the deadline for
enlargement drew closer, when the Commission put more emphasisConclusion 167

on a centralized approach to regional policy and the management of
regional funds, while raising concerns about insufﬁcent capacity at
the local and regional level and the lack of coordination between thenational, regional and local level institutions.
Joining the NUTS statistical classiﬁcation system, an element of the
EU’s Structural Funds Regulations, has been an informal condition ofthe pre-accession phase but it was made a formal membership criterionfor the EU as a whole only in 2003. Within the EU the NUTS II regions
were conﬁgured by the member states and subsequently were approved
pro forma by Brussels. In contrast, the Commission (via Eurostat) hasbeen deeply involved in the designation of NUTS regions in the CEECs.
The Commission’s Regular Reports on candidates have commended
reforms that aligned new regional political or administrative structureswith NUTS II regions. Both Hungary’s administrative-statistical variant
of regional reform of 1996 and Poland’s regional self-government
variant of reform of 1999 ﬁt the NUTS II criteria and were initiallypraised by the Commission. The emphasis on technocratic criteria andstandardization, and the pressure for regionalization despite size, his-
torical tradition and political sensitivities concerning ethnic minorities
and potential territorial challenges, has caused friction between theCommission and some CEECs, such as Romania, Slovakia and Estonia.
The Commission’s push for regionalization in Romania, for example,
led to fears that it was encouraging nascent federalism and the poten-tial separatist aspirations of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania.
The enlargement process involved a learning curve for the
Commission and its key agencies in the CEECs such as PHARE. Theconfusion within the Commission reﬂected the different remits andinterests of the various actors in the Commission, in particular compet-
ing logics between normative and functional regions and the tension
between ‘partnership’ and ‘control’ in the delivery of regional policy.Furthermore, the Commission’s own monitoring and evaluation mech-
anism for its conditionality, the Regular Reports, were vague and
inconsistent. Moreover, a fully-ﬂedged elaboration of the technicalrequirements for the management of regional funds was only given by
the Commission in its communiqué of July 2003 – after the date for
enlargement to proceed had been agreed.
The power asymmetry in favour of the Commission in the negotia-
tions has meant that the CEECs have felt pressured to react even tounder-deﬁned signals emanating from the Commission. The divergingoutcomes in the CEECs in this policy area demonstrate, however, that
EU conditionality was much weaker than might have been expected168 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

given the assumptions regarding symmetric outcomes suggested by the
conditionality and Europeanization approaches. Since 1996 there have
been two main trends in regionalization in the CEECs. First, thedemocratized and decentralized variant of regional self-governmentthat included the establishment of elected regional councils with
signiﬁcant powers over regional development such as in Poland, the
Czech Republic and to a lesser extent Slovakia (in Poland these over-lapped with NUTS II regions). Second, the administrative-statistical
variant, where NUTS II regions were demarcated and regional develop-
ment councils were established as centrally appointed quangos, withlargely advisory functions (Hungary), or where most powers over
regional development and funding were retained in central ministries
(for example, Baltic states and Slovenia).
The outcome of the interactions over these policy areas appears to
have been more strongly affected by path-dependent factors in thedomestic political settings in the CEECs than the explicit/formal orimplicit/informal conditionality emanating from the Commission.Some governments, for example, have chosen to build on pre-existing
regional identities. Where such identities are weak or nonexistent, this
option is less viable. Moreover, in some countries regional identitiesare closely linked to ethnic identities and contested boundaries, a
reality that governments are reluctant to enhance through regionaliza-
tion (for example, in Romania and Slovakia where there are signiﬁcantterritorialized Hungarian minority populations). The Commission’s
initial drive for Europeanization through regionalization thus collided
with the interests of national elites who were concerned about theawakening and empowering of regional and local identities in theCEECs, some of which had been long dormant. Some countries have
looked both to their pre-1945 past and to the systems of local govern-
ment in Western Europe and the model promoted by the EU. Statesthat were formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire had the expe-
rience of a system of state administrative and self-governing territorial
administration dating from the mid-nineteenth century and enduringin most cases until 1945. Regionalization in Poland was driven by an
overarching domestic consensus to decentralize, although without
adopting full-blown federalism. In the Czech Republic, despite an earlyconstitutional commitment to regional government, the reform was
delayed by an ideological polarization in the domestic politics of tran-
sition which was territorialized in a centre-regional cleavage. While theneed to respond to EU pressures for democratization was a factor in the
regionalization of Slovakia, its form was strongly shaped by domesticConclusion 169

political pressures to minimize the role of the Hungarian minority in
regional government. In response to the functional logic underlying
the pressures emerging from the European Commission to establishadministrative capacity at the regional level, policy-makers in someCEECs have also revived communist-era planning regions as models for
new regional development agencies (for example in Hungary). Finally,
small countries such as Slovenia and the Baltic states, with weak histor-ical traditions of regional governance and little functional need for it,
and a large territorialized Russian minority in Latvia and Estonia, have
chosen to retain their centralized systems of governance. On balance,the evidence suggests that path dependency in the form of domestic
political considerations, informed by historical legacies, played a more
salient role in regionalization than a clear causative effect of ‘real’ orperceived EU conditionality.
To assess the relative importance of the domestic factors shaping
policy during the enlargement process we have provided detailed casestudies of the processes of regionalization in Poland and Hungary.Poland and Hungary illustrate the alternate variants of regionalization.
Poland carried out the ﬁrst democratizing regionalization in the
CEECs, but it would be erroneous to link this development causallywith enlargement or EU conditionality. The Polish regional reform was
initiated as part of the country’s democratic transition from commu-
nism in 1989–90. The main reason why Poland’s regional self-govern-ment structures did not become operational until 1999 was largely due
to domestic political opposition from the socialist and agrarian parties
and transitional political cycles. The replacement of the liberalSuchocka government by a socialist-agrarian coalition in 1993 scup-pered an early attempt at reform, and it only returned to the political
agenda when the new AWS coalition government came to power in
1997. The ﬁnal designation of the Polish regions dovetailed with EUrequirements, in particular the NUTS II criteria, but the reform was
driven overwhelmingly by domestic political conditions rather than
EU accession. Indeed, the Polish self-governing regions were installedat a time when the Commission had turned against this kind of devel-
opment and was instead pushing for centralization. Accordingly, sub-
sequent Regular Reports contained criticism of the reforms for notmaking sufﬁcient contributions to the required administrative capacity
and centralized management.
Hungary is the candidate country where the Commission was most
proactive in shaping regionalization. As early as 1992, PHARE spon-sored programmes in Hungary to facilitate government strategies on170 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

regional development and decentralize the formulation and implemen-
tation of regional policy. The administrative model changed repeatedly
in reaction to Commission evaluations. Praise of Hungary’s 1996reform in the Commission’s Opinions of 1997 was followed by overtcriticisms in subsequent reports. As with Poland, the issue of regional-
ization in Hungary was driven more by domestic transition politics
than the external pressures from the Commission. The issue was politi-cally divisive, though more cross-cutting of the ideological spectrum
than was the case in Poland. Most importantly, in Hungary there were
major structural constraints on regionalization which had been set inplace by the transition. A reform to introduce regional self-government
required a constitutional amendment which in turn required a two-
thirds parliamentary majority – something that was very difﬁcult toachieve given the political divisiveness of the issue. Moreover, the local
government act of 1990 had concentrated power to municipal and
local governments whose elites were reluctant to lose power to newregional self-governments.
Enlargement has involved not only the export of a menu of institu-
tional and regulatory templates to the CEECs, but also an attempt todiffuse ‘Europeanizing’ norms and practices. Despite the critical impor-tance of regional policy, the sub-national elites were structurally
disengaged from the enlargement process. Even when regionalization
began to be deliberated as part of the adoption of Chapter 21 of theacquis, the process remained in essence a bilateral exchange between
central governments and the Commission. Furthermore, the formulaic
critiques of the weak ‘capacity’ at the regional level was understood bythe Commission as meaning in the ﬁrst instance weak organizationalstructures and administrative understafﬁng that might pose serious
constraints on the future ability to extract and efﬁciently use the EU
funds. The Commission did not, however, concern itself with the nor-mative content of ‘capacity’. This structural disengagement of the sub-
national elites from the enlargement process has dislocated these elites
from a key mechanism for their normative acculturation into the EU.While there are indications of growing horizontal integration based on
Europe-wide networks, during the accession process sub-national elites
in the CEECs were poorly informed about EU activities, tended not torecognize the potential tangible beneﬁts of the EU for this level of gov-
ernment, and held at best pragmatic understandings of what the EU
stands for. For this level of the elite in the CEECs, EU membershipentails economic integration as opposed to political integration. EU
enlargement was, moreover, widely perceived to be a national projectConclusion 171

by and for national governments and elites. This gap in engagement is
likely to persist until the divergence between national and regional
elite perceptions is addressed. This requires a more active communica-tive strategy that goes beyond the Commission’s tendency to focus onfunding symbolic and decorative transmissions of Europeanness in the
new member states, as for example during the build-up to the one-off
referenda campaigns in the CEECs. Most importantly, it requires astrategy to structurally engage and promote the wider assimilation of
the sub-national elites into policy-making and norms.
It is one of the many paradoxes of enlargement that the Commission’s
concern with ‘regional capacity’ was paralleled by the exclusion of thesub-national elites. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that the
Commission’s Regular Reports record a lack of sub-national implementa-tion and enforcement of EU rules and policies that have been formally
agreed in bilateral negotiations with national governments. This diver-
gence between ‘state-level’ compliance with EU accession conditionalityand the weak implementation capacity identiﬁed by the EU reports, andthe poor normative assimilation at the sub-national level conﬁrmed in
this book, raises important questions about the commitment and compli-
ance dilemmas that an enlarged EU will face. The sub-national elites maybecome more institutionally connected and normatively secured to the
EU in the post-enlargement period by their involvement in EU policy
implementation. This assumes, however, that those EU policies that willbe pivotal for the sub-national level, such as structural funds, will be
managed in the CEECs in a manner that promotes wider cognitive and
normative change through greater sub-national elite participation. As weknow from the experience of the existing EU member states, structuralfunds are managed in a variety of ways from the highly centralized to
highly decentralized. Furthermore, the Commission has forced the adop-
tion of a centralized managerial approach to structural funds in the latterstages of the accession process precisely because the sub-national elites
and institutions are not in a position to fully utilize the ﬁnancial transfers
that will come from the EU, in particular regional funds. Thus, ultimately,the extent to which ‘Europeanization’ proceeds to close the gap between
the attitudes of national and sub-national elites in the CEECs depends
immensely on whether the institutional and organizational structures forthe management of structural funds become inclusive and deliver the
EU’s own principle of ‘partnership’. Such institution-building requires the
new member states to invest more of their sparse resources in buildingmore capacity, both organizational and normative, at the sub-national
level of governance, and given their ﬁnancial constraints, this will take172 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

time. Our data do not contradict the ‘differential empowerment’ thesis,
but rather reﬁne it to demonstrate the great variations which qualify its
effects. These effects can only evolve and be measured over time, andmay vary depending on the domestic and international inﬂuences on aparticular country.
The question of whether the wider Europe will become ‘deeper’
remains an open one. Sub-national elites are one of the key channelsfor communicating national and international values throughout
society. This kind of local power is all the more accentuated in the
CEECs given that the penetrative power of the state has been weakenedby transition. A crucial mechanism for the transmission of norms and
mobilization of voters, political parties, are still weakly institutional-
ized at the local level in the CEECs. Consequently, sub-national elitesretain a signiﬁcant impact on the mobilization of voters and on the
shaping of voter preferences. Their disengagement from the EU must
have been a factor in the low turnouts in the referenda in some of thekey accession states.
The regional developments in the CEECs are more similar to the
trends in Western Europe than the structure of the enlargementprocess might have led us to expect. In Western Europe regions havedeveloped in the main either as a product of technocratic manipula-
tion, or as a product of regionalism and mobilization ‘from below’ and
‘from within’ that acted as an anvil against which the drive for EUintegration hammered the nation-state. The asymmetrical form of
regionalization in the CEECs is, in fact, a convergence with the diver-
sity of regional government in the member states. The key difference isthat in the case of the CEECs regionalization is largely proceedingdomestically ‘from above’ in the absence of regionalist mobilization.
Thus, in contrast to Western Europe, regional institutions are being
created in most CEECs in the context of transition and EU enlarge-ment prior to regionalist mobilizations, though we may infer that
regionally-based institutions may well provide a platform for future
regionalist mobilizations.
EU enlargement conditionality is more usefully analysed as an inter-
active and dynamic process rather than one that should be examinedonly in terms of clear causative effects within a narrowly positivistframework. By investigating how EU conditionality operated in a key
policy area during enlargement we have demonstrated the dynamic
and ﬂuid nature of both the concept and its impact on the candidates.Although formal conditionality was weak due to the thinness of the
acquis in regional policy and the lack of an EU model on how toConclusion 173

‘Europeanize’ regional policy, the Commission applied informal pres-
sures to shape regionalization in the CEECs in an ad hoc and erratic
manner, initially promoting decentralization and latterly centraliza-tion. Despite the pressures, the diverse institutional outcomes in theregionalization of the CEECs have been overwhelmingly driven by
domestic political factors arising out of their transitions from commu-
nism rather than by EU conditionality pressures. This ﬁnding focusesour attention on the need to better conceptualize the relationship
between transition and enlargement.
We can conclude that the lack of detailed explicit conditionality
embedded in the acquis was only partly and inconsistently compensated
for by ‘soft’ or more informal conditionality, such as the recommenda-
tions in the Regular Reports or direct contacts with Commission ofﬁcials.The widespread notion of conditionality, which informs much of the
political and scholarly debate about EU enlargement, portrays EU enlarge-
ment conditionality as a ‘catch-all’ instrument of Europeanization in theCEECs. This ‘myth of conditionality’ is not sustainable once we takeaccount of those key policy areas where there is a ‘conditionality gap’ and
where the resistance levels to Europeanization are based on domestic
political transition constraints. The transition was an active interface withenlargement which generated preferences that often overrode external
incentives and pressures. Thus, the concept of conditionality should be
seen less as a generic instrument for applying pressures for rule adoptionon the candidates. Instead of one coherent variable it is better understood
as a process which involves a tool bag of differentiated and shifting
instruments, including prescriptive norms, institutional formats, andpreferences for delivering legislative and policy compliance. Whereformal conditionality was weak, the use of informal conditionality
reﬂected the debates and preferences of the key relevant actors in the
Commission at any given time. Consequently, the application of condi-tionality must be analysed on a case-by-case basis with regard to policy
domain and country, paying attention to the multi-level actors involved
both on the side of the EU and the candidate countries, their perceptions,the signalling of different rewards and sanctions, the interactions over
compliance, and how as a process it develops over time. 174 Europeanization and Regionalization in EU Enlargement

Notes
Introduction
1. Speech to the European Parliament, 9 October 2002: http://europa.eu.int/
comm/commissioners/verheugen/speeches_en.htm.
2. See Graham Avery (forthcoming 2004) ‘The Enlargement Negotiations’, in
Fraser Cameron (ed.), The Future of Europe: Enlargement and Integration ,
London: Routledge.
3. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in the Estonian Mission to the EU,
Brussels, 11 December 2000.
4. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/06/15/czech.euvote/index.html.
5. Within a positivist framework conditionality is best conceived of as an
intervening variable, while ‘EU norm adoption’, including elements like the ‘density of the acquis’ and ‘clarity of rules’, represents the dependentvariable. See Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier (2003), ‘TheEuropeanization of Eastern Europe: Evaluating the Conditionality Model’,European University Institute Workshop, Florence, 4–5 July. This type offramework may be apt to generate ‘tidier’ results with regard to formalizedhypotheses, but the research focus moves away from the phenomenon ofconditionality as such, which remains an a priori and under-conceptualized
category.
6. Michael Keating (1998) ‘The New Regionalism’, in Michael Keating, The
New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and PoliticalChange, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 72–111.
7. See European Council (2002) Presidency Conclusions. Annex I , Copenhagen
European Council, 12–13 December 2002: http://ue.eu.int/newsroom/councilHomePage.asp?LANG=1.
8. Alan Mayhew (1998) Recreating Europe: the European Union’s Policy towards
Central and Eastern Europe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Susan S.
Nello and Karen Smith (1998) The European Union and Central and EasternEurope: the Implications of Enlargement in Stages , Aldershot: Ashgate; Helen
Tang (ed.) (2000) Winners and Losers of EU Integration: Policy Issues for Centraland Eastern Europe, Washington, DC: World Bank.
9. For a similar approach in the ﬁeld of administrative reforms see Klaus H. Goetz
(2000) ‘European Integration and National Executives: a Cause in Search of anEffect?’, West European Politics , 23 (4), 211–31; Antoaneta Dimitrova (2002),
‘Enlargement, Institution-Building and the EU’s Administrative CapacityRequirement’, West European Politics , 25 (4), 171–90.
10. Our analysis of the role of the Commission is based on thirty-two inter-
views conducted with ofﬁcials in DG Enlargement, DG Regio, PHARE, theForward Planning Unit, and candidate country delegations in Brussels,mainly in 2000–01, with a few additional follow-up interviews at the end of2003–04. For previous studies of the impact of EU enlargement on the atti-tudes and norms of elites at the sub-national level in the CEECs see James
175

Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon (2001) ‘The Regional Deﬁcit
in Eastward Enlargement of the European Union: Top Down Policies andBottom Up Reactions’, ESRC ‘One Europe or Several?’ Working Paper 29/01,Brighton: Sussex University; James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and ClaireGordon (2002) ‘Saying “Maybe” to the “Return to Europe”: Elites and thePolitical Space for Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe’, European
Union Politics , 3 (3), 327–55.
11. For classic works on transition see Adam Przeworski (1991) Democracy and
the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America ,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan(1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe,
South America and Post-Communist Europe , London: Johns Hopkins
University Press; Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986)Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about UncertainDemocracies , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. For an excellent
overview of the enlargement process in the 1990s see Helen Wallace andUlrich Sedelmeier (2000) ‘Eastern Enlargement’, in Helen Wallace andWilliam Wallace (eds), Policy-making in the European Union , 4th edition,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1. The logic of enlargement conditionality and
Europeanization
1. Heather Grabbe (2001) ‘How Does Europeanisation Affect CEE Governance?
Conditionality, Diffusion and Diversity’, Journal of European Public Policy , 8
(6), 1013–31 and Heather Grabbe (2002) ‘European Union Conditionalityand the Acquis Communautaire ’,International Political Science Review , 23 (3),
252.
2. Karen Smith (1998) The Making of EU Foreign Policy: the Case of Eastern
Europe , New York: St Martin’s Press.
3. Grabbe (2002: 262). She identiﬁes ﬁve levers of EU conditionality: 1. access
to negotiations and further stages in the accession process, 2. provision oflegislative and institutional templates, 3. aid and technical assistance, 4.policy advice and twinning projects, 5. monitoring, demarches , and public
criticism.
4. Grabbe (2002: 264). 5. Frank Schimmelfennig, Stefan Egert and Heiko Knobel (2001), ‘Costs,
Commitment and Compliance: the Impact of EU Democratic Conditionalityon Latvia, Slovakia and Turkey’, Journal of Common Market Studies , 41 (3),
495–518.
6. For a study of the use of conditionality in the adoption of the acquis by the
CEECs see Grabbe (2001). For the role of EU conditionality in ‘democracypromotion’ see Smith (1998); Karen E. Smith (2001a) ‘Western Actors andthe Promotion of Democracy’, in Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda (eds),Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe , vol. 2, International and
Transnational Factors , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 31; Karen E. Smith
(2001b) ‘The EU, Human Rights and Relations with Third Countries:“Foreign Policy” with an Ethical Dimension?’, in Karen E. Smith and176 Notes

Margot Light (2001) Ethics and Foreign Policy, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 185–204; Jan Zielonka (2001) ‘Conclusions: Foreign MadeDemocracy’, in Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda (eds), Democratic Consolidationin Eastern Europe, Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 511.
7. For more recent work in this area, see the papers presented at the ECPR Joint
Sessions, Turin, 2002, Workshop: Enlargement and European Governance:(http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/turin.asp?section=4) and at the RSCAS Workshop ‘The Europeanization of EasternEurope: Evaluating the Conditionality Model’, EUI Florence, 4–5 July 2003.
8. Phillippe E. Schmitter (1996) ‘The Inﬂuence of the International Context
upon the Choice of National Institutions and Policies’, in LawrenceWhitehead (ed.), The International Dimensions of Democratization , Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 30.
9. President of the Commission Romano Prodi has consistently used the
enlargement process as a rationale for increasing the EU budget and reject-ing budgetary tightening. As he put it in a speech at LSE on 19 January2004: ‘the eve of the biggest enlargement in the EU’s history … is an oddmoment to propose lowering the ceiling on resources’. In the debate on theEU budget ceiling in 2003–04 the Commission favours a cap on spending of1.24 per cent of GDP while member states such as Britain and Germanyfavour a cap of 1 per cent. The difference amounts to some £30 billion peryear.
10. For a critique of the role of Western policy advisers and consultants in the
CEEC transitions see Janine Wedel (1998) Collision and Collusion: the Strange
Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1998 , New York: St Martin’s
Press.
11. For studies of PHARE see Alan Mayhew (1998) Recreating Europe: the
European Union’s Policy towards Central and Eastern Europe , Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press; Peter Heil (2000) PHARE in Hungary: the
Anatomy of a Pre-accession Aid Programme, 1990–1999, Unpublished PhDThesis, Budapest. PHARE was tasked to the Commission apparently at thesuggestion of US President George Bush, see Helen Wallace and UlrichSedelmeier (2000) ‘Eastern Enlargement’, in Helen Wallace and WilliamWallace (eds), Policy-making in the European Union, 4th edition, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 427–60 (433).
12. This argument is developed by Frank Schimmelfennig (2001) ‘The
Community Trap: Liberal Norms, Rhetorical Action, and the EasternEnlargement of the European Union’, International Organization, 55 (1),
47–80.
13. See Andrew Moravcik and Milada Vachudova (2003), ‘National Interests,
State Power and EU Enlargement’, East European Politics and Societies, 17 (1),42–57.
14. For studies of aid conditionality generally see: Olav Stokke (1995), Aid and
Political Conditionality , London: Frank Cass; Tony Killick (1998), Aid and the
Political Economy of Policy Change, London: Routledge; Gordon Crawford(2001), Foreign Aid and Political Reform: a Comparative Analysis of Democracy
Assistance and Political Conditionality , Basingstoke: Palgrave. The EU’s role in
Central and Eastern Europe is not discussed in Stokke’s work, whileCrawford provides a two-page summary of the EU instruments for aid toNotes 177

the CEECs, but without integrating them into his overall analysis of aid
conditionality.
15. Stokke (1995: 3). 16. The UN’s Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA) was created
in 1949. In 1950 it was transformed into the UN Development Programme(UNDP).
17. John Killick (1997) The United States and the European Reconstruction,
1945–1960 , Edinburgh: Keele University Press; Alan Milward (2000) The
European Rescue of the Nation State , 2nd edition, London: Routledge.
18. Stokke (1995: 1–2). As George Schultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State explained
in a speech to Congress in 1984, foreign aid was ‘in effect, the foreignpolicy budget of the United States … which directly protects and furthersUS national interests abroad’ (cited in Stokke, 1995: 2, n. 1).
19. John Walton and David Seddon (1994) Free Markets and Food Riots: the
Politics of Global Adjustment , Oxford: Blackwell, 333.
20. Georg Sorensen (1993) Democracy and Democratization: Dilemmas in World
Politics , Boulder, CO: Westview Press Inc.; Gordon Crawford (2003)
‘Promoting Democracy from Without – Learning from Within (Part I)’,Democratization , 10 (1), 77–98; Gordon Crawford (2003) ‘Promoting
Democracy from Without – Learning from Within (Part II)’, Democratization ,
10 (2), 1–20.
21. Susan S. Nello (2001) ‘The Impact of External Economic Factors: the Role of
the IMF’, in Jan Zielonka and Alex Pravda (eds), Democratic Consolidation in
Eastern Europe, Vol. 2 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 79.
22. For the classic statement of this position see Seymour Martin Lipset (1959)
‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’, American Political Science Review , 53,
69–105.
23. Walton and Seddon (1994: 335). 24. Randall W. Stone (2002), Lending Credibility, the International Monetary Fund
and the Post-Communist Transition , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
25. Smith (2001a: 31). Other key actors, apart from the EU, involved in the
project included individual states and multilateral organizations such as theCSCE/OSCE, the Council of Europe, NATO, IMF, World Bank, and EBRD.
26. Stokke (1995: 22–3). 27. In theory, EBRD loans are to be made only to states committed to ‘multi-
party democracy, pluralism, and market economics’. In practice loans havebeen made to dynastic and quasi-totalitarian but resource-rich regimes suchas those of Azerbaijan and Central Asia.
28. Crawford (2001: 4, 59–60). 29. Stokke (1995: 22, n. 16); Peter Burnell (1994) ‘Good Government and
Democratization: a Sideways Look at Aid and Political Conditionality’,Democratization , 1 (3), 485–503.
30. Previously, the EC had employed a conditional human rights protection
statement in the Preamble of Lomé III (1985–89), and continued this inthe ACP/EU Cotonou Partnership Agreement 2000, that is to say, in thenon-legally binding part of the Convention. This condition had neverbeen activated, even into the 1990s, with the sole exception of sanctionsagainst Togoland – though the military regime there had been in powersince 1963. 178 Notes

31. European Council (1991), Presidency Conclusions, Luxembourg European
Council, 28–29 June 1991, annex, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities: http://www.europarl.eu.int/summits/luxembourg/lu2_en.pdf.
32. European Council Resolution (1991) Resolution on Human Rights, Democracy
and Development, 28 November 1991, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for OfﬁcialPublications of the European Union: http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/human_rights/doc/cr28_11_91_en.htm.
33. European Union (1992) Treaty on European Union, 7 February 1992,
Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities:http://europa.eu.int/abc/obj/treaties/en/entoc01.htm.
34. European Union (1997) Treaty of Amsterdam Amending the Treaty on Euro-
pean Union, The Treaties Establishing the European Communities and RelatedActs, Ofﬁcial Journal C 340, 10 November 1997, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce forOfﬁcial Publications of the European Communities: http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/treaties/dat/amsterdam.html.
35. For example, at the height of the new rhetoric, Hurd made the decision to
release UK tied aid to Malaysia for the highly controversial Pergau Damproject in 1991, in the face of not only clear evidence of that country’s poorprogress on democracy and its abysmal human rights record, but also of theserious environmental damage that the project would cause, and in clearbreach of the UK’s own legislation on aid. Under the UK’s 1980 OverseasDevelopment and Co-operation Act, aid can only be used for ‘promotingthe development or maintaining the economy of a country … or thewelfare of its people’. The World Development Movement won a HighCourt Judicial Review on the case and the aid was cancelled in 1994.
36. See Crawford (2001: 211–27). 37. Stokke (1995: 46). 38. Smith (2001a: 33). 39. Germany and the UK support enlargement largely for security reasons and
the potential new markets, France and Italy are concerned with the implica-tions for the CAP and the diminishing of their authority within EUdecision-making, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece are concerned aboutlosing structural funds (Schimmelfennig, 2001). These traditional divisionshave been further fragmented by divisions in early 2003 over the waragainst Iraq.
40. See European Council (1993): http://www.europarl.eu.int/enlargement_new/
europeancouncil/pdf/cop_en.pdf.
41. Thomas Carothers (1999) Aiding Democracy Abroad: the Learning Curve,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC.
42. For the weak credibility of aid conditionality toward Eastern Europe see
Wedel (1998); Stone (2002). For aid towards Russia and the FSU see JosephStiglitz (2002) ‘Who Lost Russia’, in Globalization and its Discontents,
Harmondsworth: Penguin; Stone (2002); Peter Reddaway and DmitriGlinski (2001) The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism againstDemocracy, Washington: United States Institute of Peace.
43. The CEEC group included six of the former ‘Soviet bloc’ states in the region
(Poland, Hungary, Czech and Slovak Republics, Romania, Bulgaria), to whichwere added the three former ‘Baltic republics’ of the USSR (Estonia, LatviaNotes 179

and Lithuania), and one former republic of Yugoslavia (Slovenia). It excluded
all the other post-communist states of the FSU/CIS and the Balkans.
44. The FSU/CIS zone was, in practice, also sub-divided, with the EU focusing
its economic cooperation and aid on the Russian Federation and Ukraine,which have received the bulk of Tacis disbursements, overwhelmingly forinfrastructural and environmental projects. Less than 5 per cent of totalcumulative aid disbursed in 1991–99 went into ‘democracy promotion’.Tacis was set up in 1991 as a technical assistance programme to promoteeconomic transition in twelve Eastern European countries not covered byPHARE. In the current budget cycle (2000–06) its mandate has been reori-ented more closely towards the promotion of democratization and the ruleof law in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. See http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/ceeca/tacis/. To some extent the EU’s new‘Neighbourhood’ Policy (2004) formalizes this subdivision of the CIS zone.
45. Mayhew (1998). 46. Mayhew (1998). According to a personal communication from Alan
Mayhew to the authors, the division of the available PHARE commitmentappropriations was made according to the following criteria while heworked there up to 1995: population, demonstrated absorption capacity,expressed priorities (for example, on the importance of environmentalfunds or on the division of funds between Slovakia and the Czech Republicafter their separation), recommendations of the PHARE management com-mittee (for example, on the use of PHARE funds for investment, which thenhad an impact on country allocations), the continued funding needs of suc-cessful programmes. Clearly, these are exclusively economic criteria.
47. The PHARE Programme was funded to the amount of 10.5 billion ecus (as
they were then) for the period 2000–06 and was to focus essentially on pri-orities linked to the adoption of the acquis communautaire by candidates,
especially in regard to administrative and judicial capacity-building andattracting investment into the applicant countries.
48. See Hughes and Sasse (2003) ‘Monitoring the Monitors: EU Enlargement
Conditionality and Minority Protection in the CEECs’, Journal of
Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe , 1, 1–28. If we compare the Europe
Agreements, the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ and the TEU, a softening of the nor-mative content of the EU’s political conditionality is evident over time.This is most obvious in the ‘common values’ of member states declared inthe TEU, which draw selectively from the values set out by the EU in theﬁrst Copenhagen criterion (see Table 1.2). Article 6 (1) TEU deﬁnes the‘common values’ as ‘liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fun-damental freedoms and the rule of law’, but expressly excluded the norma-tive commitment of ‘respect for and protection of minorities’ included inthe Copenhagen criteria. That Article 6 (1) draws on the Copenhagencriteria is speciﬁcally alluded to in Article 49, which speciﬁes that the prin-ciples laid out in Article 6 (1) are preconditions for any state applying forEU membership. There is a clear contradiction between the TEU and theﬁrst Copenhagen criterion, but the TEU is legally binding and, therefore,clariﬁes that the EU has abandoned the minority protection provision ofthe conditionality for membership. The exclusion of an explicit minorityprotection requirement is also consolidated by the Draft Constitution for180 Notes

Europe (2003). The EU legal terminology suggests that at the very least a
shifting standard, if not a double standard, is at work. The protection ofminorities appears to be understood by the EU in 1993 as a norm thatshould be implemented by candidates for membership but not by memberstates. By the time of the TEU in 1997, however, this norm had been aban-doned in law for future candidates, though it retained its rhetorical promi-nence in the enlargement process and especially in the Regular Reports.
49. Johan P. Olsen (2001) ‘The Many Faces of Europeanization’, ARENA
Working Papers, WP 1/2, 10.
50. Olsen (2001: 21–2). 51. See Wade Jacoby (2004) The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO:
Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress (2004).
52. Beate Kohler-Koch (2002) ‘European Networks and Ideas: Changing
National Policies?’ European Integration On-line Papers , 6 (6): http://eiop.
or.at/eiop/texte/2002–006a.htm.
53. The original conception of ‘Europeanization’ as a ‘top-down’ process was
elaborated by Robert Ladrech (1994) ‘Europeanization of Domestic Politicsand Institutions: the Case of France’, Journal of Common Market Studies ,
32 (1), 69–88. For more recent studies see Kevin Featherstone (2003),‘Introduction: in the Name of Europe’, in Claudio Radaelli and KevinFeatherstone (eds), The Politics of Europeanization , Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 3–26; Claudio M. Radaelli (2000), ‘Whither Europeanization: ConceptStretching and Substantive Change’, European Integration On-line Papers ,
4 (8), 1–27: http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/2000-008a.htm; Tanja A. Börzel andThomas Risse (2000) ‘When Europe Hits Home: Europeanization andDomestic Change’, European Integration On-line Papers , 4(15), 1–13:
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/2000-015a.htm); Beate Kohler-Koch and RainerEising (eds) (1999) The Transformation of Governance in the European Union ,
London: Routledge, 268–70; Alastair I. Johnston, ‘Treating InternationalInstitutions as Social Environments’, International Studies Quarterly, 45,
487–515.
54. Featherstone (2003: 7). 55. Olsen (2001: 3). Olsen subsumes ﬁve extremely wide-ranging phenomena
under the label Europeanization: changes in external territorial boundaries;the development of institutions at the European level; the penetration ofnational and sub-national systems of governance by a European politicalcentre and European-wide norms; the export of forms of distinct politicalorganization and governance beyond European territory; and the widerpolitical project aiming at a uniﬁed and politically stronger Europe.
56. Christos J. Paraskevopoulos (2001) Interpreting Convergence in the European
Union. Patterns of Collective Action, Social Learning and Europeanization ,
Basingstoke: Palgrave, xxi.
57. Radaelli (2003: 3). 58. C. Knill and D. Lehmkuhl (1999) ‘How Europe Matters. Different
Mechanisms of Europeanization’, European Integration On-line Papers , 3 (7),
1–11: http://eiop.or.at/eiop.
59. Börzel and Risse (2000: 1–3). 60. Olsen (2001: 14); Radaelli (2000: 19). Notes 181

61. Featherstone (2003: 4).
62. Knill and Lehmkuhl (1999: 1–2). 63. K.H. Goetz (2000), ‘European Integration and National Executives: a Cause
in Search of an Effect?’, West European Politics , 23 (4), 211–31.
64. Schimmelfennig et al. (2001). See also introduction n. 5.
2. Communist legacies and regionalization
1. See Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe ,
Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. On path dependency and initial starting conditions, see Adam Przeworski
(1991) Democracy and the Market – Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern
Europe and Latin America , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and
David Stark (1992) ‘Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in EastCentral Europe’, East European Politics and Societies , 6 (1), 17–51.
3. For studies of transition which stress the role of elites see Dankwart Rustow
(1970) ‘Transitions to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model’, Comparative
Politics , 2 (3), 337–63; John Higley and Michael Burton (1989) ‘The Elite
Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns’, American Sociological
Review , 54, 17–32; Przeworksi (1991).
4. For a discussion of the issue of legacies see Beverly Crawford and Arend
Lijphart (1995) ‘Explaining Political and Economic Change in Post-CommunistEastern Europe: Old Legacies, New Institutions, Hegemonic Norms andInternational Pressures’, Comparative Political Studies , 28 (2), 171–99.
5. See Judy Batt (2002) ‘Introduction: Regions, State and Identity in Central
and Eastern Europe’, Regional and Federal Studies , 12 (2), 1–14.
6. Katarzyna Wolczuk (2002) ‘Conclusion: Identities, Regions and Europe’,
Regional and Federal Studies , 12 (2), 207.
7. Michal Illner (1998) ‘Territorial Decentralization: an Obstacle to Democratic
Reform in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Jonathan D. Kimball (ed.), The
Transfer of Power: Decentralization in Central and Eastern Europe , Budapest:
Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, 14.
8. Two excellent studies of the establishment and consolidation of communist
power are Paul Lewis (1994) Central Europe Since 1945 , London: Longman;
George Schöpﬂin (1993) Politics in Eastern Europe 1945–1992 , Oxford: Blackwell.
9. For the interaction between European integration and the development
of local government in Western Europe see Michael J.F. Goldsmith andKlaus K. Klausen (eds) (1997) European Integration and Local Government ,
Northampton, MA and Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar; Ed Page (1995)‘Patterns and Diversity in European State Development’, in Jack Haywardand Ed Page (eds), Governing the New Europe , London: Sage.
10. Marie-Claude Maurel (1989) ‘Administrative Reforms in Eastern Europe: an
Overview’, in Richard Bennett (ed.), Territory and Administration in Europe ,
London: Pinter, 111–23 (116).
11. Janos Kornai (1992) The Socialist System: the Political Economy of Communism ,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 35; Michael Waller (1981) Democratic Centralism:
an Historical Commentary , Manchester: Manchester University Press. 182 Notes

12. Jaroslaw Piekalwicz (1980) ‘Polish Local Politics in Flux’, in Daniel Nelson
(ed.), Local Politics in Communist Countries , Lexington: The University Press
of Kentucky. For the role of party secretaries see Paul Lewis (1989) Political
Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland, 1975–1986, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
13. Ingemar Elander and Mattias Gustafsson (1993) ‘The Re-emergence of Local
Self-Government in Central Europe: Some Notes on the First Experience’,European Journal of Political Research , 23 (3), 305.
14. See Lewis (1994); Schöpﬂin (1993). For a general history see Richard J.
Crampton (1994) Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century and After , London:
Routledge. For a speciﬁc case study see Bennett Kovrig (1979) Communism
in Hungary: From Kun to Kádár, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution.
15. For example, in the case of Hungary, six economic-planning regions were
delimited, while the administrative counties were left unchanged. SeeTivadar Bernat (ed.) (1985) An Economic Geography of Hungary , Budapest:
Akademiai Kiado, 335.
16. Ed Hewett (1988) Reforming the Soviet Economy: Equality vs. Efﬁcienc y,
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
17. W. Surazska, J. Bucek, L. Malikova and P. Danek (1996) ‘Towards Regional
Government in Central Europe: Territorial Restructuring of PostcommunistRegimes’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy , 15, 441–2.
18. For subsidiarity see Treaty on European Union, 1992, Title II, Article G, 5.
http://europa.eu.int/abc/obj/treaties/en/entoc01.htm.
19. See Kovrig (1979). 20. Surazska et al. (1997: 441–4). 21. For details on administrative reforms see Denis J. Galligan and Daniel M.
Smilov (1999) Administrative Law in Central and Eastern Europe, Budapest:
CEU Press.
22. Joachim Jens Hesse (1998) ‘Rebuilding the State: Administrative Reform in
Central and Eastern Europe’, in Joachim Jens Hesse (ed.), Preparing Public
Administrations for the European Administrative Space , Sigma Paper no. 23,
Paris: OECD.
23. These amendments made provision for the strengthening of self-governing
institutions at the county level. See Ilona Palne Kovács (1999) ‘RegionalDevelopment and Local Government in Hungary’, in Zoltan Hajdú (ed.),Regional Processes and Spatial Structures in Hungary in the 1990s , Pécs: Centre
for Regional Studies, 65–7.
24. Helmut Wollmann (1997) ‘Institution Building and Decentralization in
Formerly Socialist Countries: the Cases of Poland, Hungary and EastGermany’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy , 15, 467;
Adrian Campbell (1995) ‘Local Government in Romania’, in AndrewCoulson (ed.), Local Government in Eastern Europe , Northampton, MA
and Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 76–101; Joanna Regulska (1997)‘Decentralization or (Re)centralization: Struggle for Political Power inPoland’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy , 15 (2),
187–208.
25. Kenneth Davey (1995) ‘Local Government in Hungary’, in Andrew Coulson
(ed.), Local Government in Eastern Europe , Northampton, MA and Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 69–70. Notes 183

26. Richard J. Bennett (1997) Local Government in Post-Socialist Cities , Budapest:
Open Society Institute.
27. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse, Claire Gordon and Tatiana
Majcherkiewicz (2004) ‘Silesia and the Politics of Regionalisation in Poland’
and Tomasz Zarycki ‘The Regional Dimension of the Polish Political Scene’,in Tomasz Zarycki and George Kolankiewicz (eds), Regional Issues in Polish
Politics , London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University
College London, 90 and 249–50.
28. See the discussion in Kenneth Davey (2002) ‘Decentralization in CEE
Countries: Obstacles and Opportunities’ and A.J.G. Verheijen (2002)‘Removing Obstacles to Effective Decentralization: Reﬂecting on the Role ofthe Central State’, in Gábor Péteri (ed.), Mastering Decentralization and Public
Administration Reforms in Central and Eastern Europe , Budapest: OSI/LGI,
33–42 and 45–54.
29. Campbell (1995: 76). See also Sulev Mäeltsemees (2000) ‘Local Government in
Estonia’, in Tamas Horvath (ed.), Decentralization, Experiments and Reform ,
Budapest: LGI Books, 61–114.
30. See, for example, the study of Czech and Slovak reforms in this ﬁeld by Martin
Brusis (2003) ‘Regionalisation in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Comparingthe Inﬂuences of the European Union’, in Michael Keating and James Hughes(eds), The Regional Challenge in Central and Eastern Europe: Territorial
Restructuring and European Integration , Paris: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 89–106.
31. Peter Heil (2000) ‘PHARE in Hungary: the Anatomy of a Pre-Accession Aid
Programme, 1990–1999’, unpublished PhD thesis, Budapest.
32. Karel Lacina and Zdena Vajdova (2000) ‘Local Government in the Czech
Republic’, in Tamas Horvath (ed.), Decentralization: Experiments and Reform ,
Budapest: LGI Publications, 255–96 especially at 258.
33. Surazska et al. (1997: 440). 34. For analyses of Czechoslovakian federalism see Carol Skalnik-Leff (1988)
National Conﬂict in Czechoslovakia, the Making and Remaking of a Nation-State, 1918–1987 , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Abby Innes
(2001) Czechoslovakia: the Short Goodbye , New Haven: Yale University Press;
Stanislav Kirschbaum (2003) ‘Czechoslovakia: the Creation, Federalisationand Dissolution of a Nation-State’, in John Coakley (ed.), The Territorial
Management of Ethnic Conﬂict , London, Frank Cass, 2nd edition, 229–63.
35. Martin Brusis (1999) ‘Re-Creating the Regional Level in Central and Eastern
Europe: an Analysis of Administrative Reforms in Six Countries’, in Eric vonBreska and Martin Brusis (eds), Central and Eastern Europe on the Way to the
European Union: Reforms of Regional Administration in Bulgaria, the CzechRepublic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia , Munich: Centre for Applied
Policy, Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science, University of Munich,99; Michal Illner (1997) ‘The Territorial Dimension of Public AdministrationReforms in East Central Europe’, Prague: Institute of Sociology, Academy ofSciences of the Czech Republic, Working Paper no. 7, 40.
36. Lacina and Vajdova (2000: 261); Richard J. Bennett (1993) (ed.) Local
Government in the New Europe , London: Belhaven Press, 10.
37. Illner (1998). 38. See table of ‘State Administrative Organs Operating at the District and
Regional Levels in the Czech Republic’ in Lacina and Vjadova (2000: 263). 184 Notes

39. Galligan and Smilov (1999: 50).
40. Surazska et al. (1997: 455). 41. Vit Novotny (1998) ‘Regional Government in the Czech Republic: the
Process of its Creation in the Constitutional Context’, Paper presented atthe Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association Specialist Groupon Communist and Post-Communist Politics.
42. Elander and Gustafsson (1993: 305). 43. Amendments to the Local Government Act in 1994 gave both local and
county-level self-governments independent tax-raising powers.
44. Palne Kovács (1999: 55). 45. Gabor Bende-Szabo (1999) ‘The Intermediate Administrative Level in
Hungary’, in Eric von Breska and Martin Brusis (eds), Central and Eastern
Europe on the Way to the European Union: Reforms of Regional Administration inBulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, Munich:Centre for Applied Policy, Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science,University of Munich; http://www.oecd.org/puma/sigmaweb.
46. Gyula Horváth (1996) ‘Transition and Regionalism in East Central Europe’,
Occasional Paper no. 7, Tubingen: Europaisches Zentrum fur Foderalismus-Forschung, 34.
47. Brigid Fowler (2001) ‘Debating Sub-state Reform on Hungary’s “Road to
Europe”’, One Europe or Several? Working Paper 21/01, Brighton: Universityof Sussex.
48. Brigid Fowler (2002) ‘Hungary: Patterns of Political Conﬂict over Territorial-
Administrative Reform’, Regional and Federal Studies, 12 (2), 15–40.
49. Kristan Gerner (1999) ‘Regions in Central Europe under Communism:
a Palimpsest’, in Sven Tagil (ed.), Regions in Central Europe: the Legacy of
History, London: Hurst & Company, 188; and Daniele Caramani (2003)‘State Administration and Regional Construction in Central Europe: aComparative-Historical Perspective’, in Michael Keating and JamesHughes (eds), The Regional Challenge in Central and Eastern Europe:
Territorial Restructuring and European Integration , Paris: P.I.E.-Peter Lang,
25–6 and 33.
50. Surazska et al. (1997). 51. Surazska et al. (1997: 443). 52. Jerzy Regulski (1993) ‘Rebuilding Local Government in Poland’, in Richard J.
Bennett (ed.), Local Government in the New Europe , London: Belhaven Press,
197–207; Jerzy Regulski (1999) ‘Building Democracy in Poland, the StateReform of 1998’, Discussion papers, No. 9, Budapest: the Local Governmentand Public Services Reform Initiative, Open Society: http://lgi.osi.hu/news/2001/20010202.htm.
53. See Regulski (1993: 200) for further details of discussions. 54. Regulski (1999). 55. Wiktor Glowacki (2002) ‘Regionalization in Poland’, in Gerard Marcou
(ed.), Regionalization for Development and Accession to the EU: a Comparative
Perspective, LGI Studies, Budapest: Open Society Institute, 105.
56. Andrzej Kowalczyk (2000) ‘Local Government in Poland’, in Tamas Horvath
(ed.), Decentralization: Experiments and Reform , Budapest: LGI Publications,
221. For discussion on different party positions on Poland’s regionalreforms, see Glowacki (2002: 110–11). Notes 185

57. Grzegorz Gorzelak (1998) Regional and Local Potential for Transformation in
Poland , Regional and Local Studies Series No. 14, Warsaw: European Institute
for Regional and Local Development, 16–17.
58. See Brusis (2003); Alexandra Bitus ˇiková (2002), ‘Slovakia: an Anthropological
Perspective on Identity and Regional Reform’, Regional and Federal Studies , 12
(2), 41–64.
59. See James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse (2003) ‘Monitoring the Monitors:
EU Enlargement Conditionality and Minority Protection in the CEECs’,
Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe , 1, 1–28.
60. The Hungarian Coalition Party had even put forward the idea of a thirteen-
region solution, demanding a region around Komarno where the Hun-garian majority is concentrated. See Hughes and Sasse (2003).
61. Eva Perger (1989) ‘An Overview of East European Developments’, in Richard
Bennett (ed.), Territory and Administration in Europe , London: Pinter, 103–4.
62. Perger (1989: 103–4). 63. Mirko Vintar (1999) ‘Re-engineering Administrative Districts in Slovenia’,
Discussion Paper No. 11, Local Government and Public Service ReformInitiative, Budapest: LGI Publications.
64. Stanka Setnikar-Canka, Stane Vlaj and Maja Klun (2000) ‘Local Government
in Slovenia’, in Tamas Horvath (ed.), Decentralization, Experiments and
Reform , Budapest: LGI Books, 390.
65. Anatol Lieven (1993) The Baltic Revolution: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the
Path to Independence , New Haven: Yale University Press; Graham Smith
(1994) The Baltic States: the National Self-Determination of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania , London: Macmillan; Jan Arveds Trapans (1991) Toward
Independence: the Baltic Popular Movements , Boulder: Westview.
66. Mäeltsemees (2000: 66). 67. For details of recent changes in the administrative divisions, see http://
www.stat.vil.ee/pks/indexi.htmlv.
68. See David J. Smith (2002) ‘Narva Region within the Estonian Republic: from
Autonomism to Accommodation?’, Regional and Federal Studies , 12 (2), 89–110.
69. Perger (1989: 102–3). 70. Glen Wright (2002) ‘Assessment of Progress towards Local Democratic
Systems’, in Gábor Soós, Gábor Tóka and Glen Wright (eds), State of Local
Democracy in Central Europe , Budapest: Local Government and Public
Reform Initiative, 378.
71. Campbell (1995: 81). 72. Eniko Baga (2004) ‘Romania’s Western Connection: Timisoara and Timis
County’, in Melanie Tatur (ed.) The Making of Regions in Post-Socialist Europe:
the Impact of Culture, Economic Structure, and Institution s, Opladen:
Leske+Budrich.
73. See Hughes and Sasse (2003).
3. The Commission, conditionality and regional policy
1. European Council (1993) Presidency Conclusions , Copenhagen European
Council, 21–22 June 1993.
2. Heather Grabbe and Kirsty Hughes (1997) ‘Redeﬁning the European Union:
Eastward Enlargement’, RIIA Brieﬁng paper 36, London: Royal Institute for186 Notes

International Affairs; Karen Henderson (ed.), (1999) Back to Europe: Central
and Eastern Europe and the European Union, London: UCL Press.
3. European Council (1994) Presidency Conclusions , Essen European Council, 9–10
December 1994; and European Council (1995) Presidency Conclusions, Madrid
European Council, 15–16 December 1995: http://europa.eu.int/european_
council/conclusions/index_en.htm.
4. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon (2003) ‘EU Enlarge-
ment, Europeanisation and the Dynamics of Regionalisation in the CEECs’,in Micheal Keating and James Hughes (eds), The Regional Challenge in
Central and Eastern Europe: Territorial Restructuring and European Integration ,
Paris: P.I.E.- Peter Lang, 69–88.
5. European Council (1995) Presidency Conclusions , Madrid European Council.
6. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 – Vol. 1 For a Stronger and
Wider Union, COM/97/2000 ﬁnal, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for OfﬁcialPublications of the European Communities; European Commission (ed.)(1997) Agenda 2000 – Commission Opinions on the Application for Membership
of the European Union, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities.
7. European Council (1997) Presidency Conclusions, Luxembourg European
Council, 12–13 December. See also the information on the negotiationsprocess on the EU’s enlargement website: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement.
8. European Council Regulation (1999) No. 1260/1999 of 21 June 1999 laying
down general provisions on the Structural Funds, Ofﬁcial Journal L161,Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Union, chapterI, article 1; chapter II, article 3 (1), article 7 (1), article 7 (2) and annex.
9. The conclusion of the accession negotiations has left only the capital city
areas of Prague (Czech Republic) and Bratislava (Slovakia) excluded fromObjective 1 funding, though they will qualify for Objective 3 support. BothKozep Magyarorszag (the Budapest region in Hungary) and Slovenia will most likely be the only other regions to exceed the threshold in thenear term: http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/negotiations/pdf/negotiations_report_to_ep.pdf.
10. European Commission (ed.) (2001), Enlargement of the European Union:
an Historic Opportunity , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 46.
11. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Directorate General Enlargement,
Enlargement of the European Union, Guide to the Negotiations, Chapter byChapter, April 2002, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, Sec 102 Final, 2: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/negotiations.
12. European Council (2002), Presidency Conclusions, Copenhagen European
Council, 12 and 13 December 2002.
13. Fritz Breuss (2001) ‘Macroeconomic Effects of Enlargement for Old and New
Members’, WIFO Working Paper 143, March, Vienna, 2, 14.
14. Wim Kok (2003) ‘Enlarging the European Union: Achievement and
Challenges’, Report of Wim Kok to the European Commission, RSCAS,European University Institute, 26.
15. Breuss (2001: 12). 16. European Council Regulation (1999) chapter III, article, 7 (8). Notes 187

17. See John Bachtler, Fiona Wishlade and Douglas Yuill (2001) ‘Regional Policy
in Europe after Enlargement’, Regional and Industrial Policy Research Paper
no. 44, European Policies Research Centre, University of Strathclyde, 1–39.
18. The Commission’s Enlargement Strategy Paper, approved at the European
Council at Nice in December 2000, singled out Chapter 21 – as well asChapter 7 (Agriculture) and Chapter 26 (Financial and Budgetary Provisions)– as the priority for the negotiations in 2002. European Commission (ed.)(2000) Enlargement Strategy Paper: Report on Progress towards Accession by each
of the Candidate Countries , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities. Among the CEECs the Czech Republic was ﬁrst toprovisionally close Chapter 21 in April 2002. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuaniafollowed in June 2002; Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia in July 2002; andPoland in October 2002.
19. Michael Keating and Lisbeth Hooghe (1996) ‘By-Passing the Nation-State?
Regions and the EU Policy Process’, in Jeremy John Richardson (ed.),European Union, Power and Policy-Making , London: Routledge, 224–6; Ian
Bache (1998) The Politics of European Union Regional Policy. Multi-Level
Governance or Flexible Gatekeeping? , Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press;
European Council Regulation (1999).
20. In some states structural funds are controlled by central ﬁnance ministries
(as in the UK, Ireland and France). For a criticism of the ‘fairy-tale character’of the structural funds which are often treated as a reimbursement fornational spending rather than a genuine instrument of regional develop-ment policy see Michael Keating (1993) The Politics of Modern Europe ,
Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 299–300.
21. Keating (1993: 302–7); Lisbeth Hooghe (1995) ‘Subnational Mobilization in
the European Union’, West European Politics , 18 (4), 175–98; Charlie Jeffery
(2000) ‘Sub-National Mobilization and European Integration: Does it MakeAny Difference?’, Journal of Common Market Studies , 38 (1), 20; Beate Kohler-
Koch (2002) ‘European Networks and Ideas: Changing National Policies?’,European Integration On-line Papers , 6 (6): http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/2002-
006a.htm.
22. Lisbeth Hooghe and Gary Marks (2001) Multi-level Governance and European
Integration , New York: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 85.
23. Hooghe and Marks (2001: 85–6). To illustrate the point Hooghe and Marks cite
the following Commission statement of 1999: ‘the delivery system developedfor the structural funds is characterized by multi-level governance’.
24. European Council Regulation (1999) article 8. 25. The number of such ofﬁces grew from 100 by 1995 to 150 by 1999 (Hooghe
and Marks, 2001: 86).
26. Authors’ interview with PHARE ofﬁcial, 14 December 2000. 27. See European Council (1993): http://www.europarl.eu.int/enlargement_new/
europeancouncil/pdf/cop_fr.pdf.
28. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon (2001) ‘The Regional
Deﬁcit in Eastward Enlargement of the European Union: Top Down Policiesand Bottom Up Reactions’, ESRC ‘One Europe or Several?’ Working Paper29/01, Brighton: Sussex University, 1–57. See also Antoaneta L. Dimitrova(2002), ‘Enlargement, Institution-Building and the EU’s AdministrativeCapacity Requirement’, West European Politics , 25 (4), 171–90. 188 Notes

29. European Union Committee of the Regions (1999) Resolution of the
Committee of the Regions on ‘The Ongoing EU Enlargement Process ’, Brussels, 24
November 1999; European Union Committee of the Regions (2001) Opinion
of the Committee of the Regions on ‘Supporting the Development of Institutional
Structures at Local and Regional Level in the Applicant Countries ’, Brussels, 14
November 2001.
30. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 – Commission Opinion on
the Czech Republic’s Application for Membership of the European Union , Doc.
97/17, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the EuropeanCommunities; European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 –
Commission Opinion on Estonia’s Application for Membership of the EuropeanUnion, Doc. 97/12, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities; European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 –Commission Opinion on Hungary’s Application for Membership of the EuropeanUnion, Doc. 97/13, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities; European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 –Commission Opinion on Poland’s Application for Membership of the EuropeanUnion, Doc. 97/16, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities; European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 –Commission Opinion on Slovenia’s Application for Membership of the EuropeanUnion, Doc. 97/19, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities.
31. European Commission (2002), Directorate General Enlargement, Enlargement
of the European Union, Guide to the Negotiations, Chapter by Chapter , April
2002, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the EuropeanCommunities: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/negotiations.
32. European Council Regulation (1999). 33. For details of PHARE see European Commission (ed.) (2000) PHARE 2000
Review, Strengthening Preparations for Membership , COM (2000) 3103/2,
Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities.For a discussion of problems with ‘Twinning’ see Hughes, Sasse and Gordon(2001: 51–3).
34. Attila Agh (2002) ‘The Reform of State Administration in Hungary: the
Capacity of Core Ministries to Manage Europeanization’, Budapest Paperson Europeanization, No. 7, Budapest: Hungarian Centre for DemocracyStudies Foundation; Dimitrova (2002).
35. Hooghe and Marks (2001: 102). 36. Gyula Horváth (1998) ‘Regional and Cohesion Policy in Hungary’,
Discussion Paper 23, Pécs: Centre for Regional Studies of the HungarianAcademy of Sciences, 63–4.
37. European Commission (2001), Proposal for a Regulation of the European
Parliament and the Council on the Establishment of a Common Classiﬁcation ofTerritorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) , 14 February 2001, 2: http://
europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/com/pdf/2001/en_501PC0083.pdf.
38. European Commission (ed.) (2001), Regular Report on Slovenia’s Progress toward
Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the EuropeanCommunities: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/report2001/si_en.pdf.
39. Jan Hoich and Kristina Larisova (1999) ‘Reform der öffentlichen Verwaltung
und Bildung der regionalen Selbstverwaltung in der TschechischenNotes 189

Republik im Kontext des EU-Beitritts’, in Eric von Breska and Martin Brusis
(eds), Central and Eastern Europe on the Way to the European Union: Reforms of
Regional Administration in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,Poland and Slovakia , Munich: Centre for Applied Policy Research.
40. European Commission (2001), Proposal on the Establishment of a Common
Classiﬁcation of NUTS , European Council Regulation (2003) No. 1059/2003 of
26 May 2003: http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/dat/2003/l_154/l_15420030621en00010041.pdf.
41. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Hungary , 90.
42. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Poland , 88.
43. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 – Commission Opinion on
Slovakia’s Application for Membership of the European Union , Doc. 97/20,
Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities,100.
44. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on the Czech Republic , 83.
45. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on the Czech Republic , 83.
46. Authors’ interview, Polish Mission to the European Union, 28 March 2001. 47. Authors’ interview, Hungarian Mission to the European Union, 15
December 2000.
48. European Commission (ed.) (1998a) Regular Report from the Commission on
Hungary’s Progress towards Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 33.
49. Authors’ interview, Romanian Mission to the European Union, 13
December 2000.
50. European Commission (ed.) (1998a) Regular Report from the Commission on
Romania’s Progress towards Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 38.
51. European Commission (ed.) (2000) PHARE Annual Report 1998 , Luxembourg:
Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 63.
52. Authors’ interview, Estonian Mission to the European Union, 13 December
2000.
53. Author’s interview with a senior ofﬁcial in the Slovenia team, DG
Enlargement, European Commission, 15 December 2000.
54. Author’s interview with a senior ofﬁcial in the Poland team, DG
Enlargement, European Commission, 15 December 2000.
55. Authors’ interview with senior ofﬁcials in the Romania team, DG
Enlargement, European Commission, 12 December 2000.
56. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in PHARE, DG Enlargement,
European Commission, 12 December 2000.
57. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in ISPA, DG Regio, 14 December 2000. 58. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in DG Regio, 29 March 2001. Since
the fall of the Orban government in 2002, police and the public prosecutorhave initiated several investigations involving corruption in the handlingof public contracts under Orban. The Regular Report on Hungary of 2002noted that corruption continues to be a problem in Hungary.
59. Authors’ interview with senior researchers in Forward Planning Unit, Ofﬁce
of the President, 12 December 2000.
60. Author’s interview with a senior ofﬁcial, Polish Mission to the EU, 28 March
2001; Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in DG Regio, 29 March 2001.
61. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in DG Regio, 29 March 2001. 190 Notes

62. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Hungary’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 100; European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular
Report on Poland’s Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 105–6.
63. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial in DG Regio, 29 March 2001.
4. Monitoring conditionality and compliance
1. The six countries were Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland,
Slovenia.
2. See http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/pas/europe_agr.htm. 3. Ibid. for the links to the individual Europe Agreements. 4. For the Accession Partnerships see the link for each candidate country:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/candidate.htm.
5. See, for example, Romania’s Accession Partnership 1999, 11: http://
europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/report2001/apro_en. pdf.
6. See European Council (2002), The Revised Accession Partnerships,
28 January 2002, Council Decisions, Ofﬁcial Journal L44 of 14 February2002, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the EuropeanCommunities.
7. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Hungary, 90. 8. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Poland, 88. 9. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Czech Republic, 83.
10. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Agenda 2000 – Commission Opinion on
Bulgaria’s Application for Membership of the European Union , Doc. 97/11,
Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities,92–3.
11. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Estonia, 88. 12. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Czech Republic, 84;
European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Estonia, 116.
13. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Bulgaria, 93. 14. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Czech Republic, 84 15. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Slovakia, 100. 16. Ibid. 17. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Lithuania’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 32.
18. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
towards Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 34.
19. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Slovenia’s Progress
towards Accession, Luxembourg, Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 34.
20. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Slovakia’s Progress
towards Accession, Luxembourg, Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 33.
21. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Hungary, 33;
European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Romania , 38. Notes 191

22. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on the Czech Republic’s
Progress towards Accession , Luxembourg, Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of
the European Communities, 30; European Commission (ed.) (1998)
Regular Report on Romania , 38, 49.
23. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Poland’s Progress
towards Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 33, 34, 43.
24. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Hungary , 33.
25. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Hungary , 44.
26. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Latvia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 36.
27. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 46–7.
28. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Latvia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 46; European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular
Report on Lithuania’s Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for
Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 45–6.
29. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on the Czech Republic’s
Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of
the European Communities, 48.
30. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Poland’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 12.
31. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Poland , 47, 48.
32. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Romania’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 51–2; European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular
Report on Slovenia’s Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for
Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 48.
33. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Slovenia , 48.
34. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Romania , 51–2.
35. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Hungary’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 46, 70–1.
36. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Slovakia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 48.
37. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Slovakia , 47, 66.
38. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Latvia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 104; European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular
Report on Lithuania’s Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for
Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 104; EuropeanCommission (ed.) (2000), Regular Report on Slovakia’s Progress toward
Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European
Communities, 86–7. 192 Notes

39. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on the Czech Republic’s
Progress toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of
the European Communities, 81.
40. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on the Czech Republic , 80, 111.
41. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on the Czech Republic ,
82, 112.
42. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Hungary’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 62–3.
43. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Poland’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 67–8.
44. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Slovakia, 63–4.
45. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Slovakia, 64–5.
46. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Slovenia’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 63–4.
47. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Estonia’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 68; European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular
Report on Latvia, 75.
48. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Latvia , 75.
49. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Lithuania, 76. 50. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 69–70.
51. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Romania’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 13.
52. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Romania , 69–70.
53. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Hungary’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 100.
54. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Hungary, 72–3.
55. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Hungary, 74. 56. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Hungary, 75. 57. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on the Czech Republic’s
Progress toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications ofthe European Communities, 82.
58. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Poland’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 79.
59. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Poland , 78–80.
60. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Poland , 13.
61. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Poland , 14.
62. See Martin Brusis (2003) ‘Regionalization in the Czech and Slovak
Republics: Comparing the Inﬂuences of the European Union’, in MichaelKeating and James Hughes (eds), The Regional Challenge in Central and
Eastern Europe: Territorial Restructuring and European Integration , Paris: P.I.E.
–Peter Lang, 89–106. Notes 193

63. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Slovakia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 74.
64. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Slovakia , 72–3.
65. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Slovakia , 71.
66. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Slovenia , 71, 92.
67. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Slovenia , 72.
68. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Estonia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 71; European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular
Report on Lithuania’s Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for
Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 82–3.
69. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Estonia , 71; European
Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Lithuania , 82.
70. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Latvia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 84.
71. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Latvia , 85–6.
72. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Latvia , 113.
73. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Romania’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 79.
74. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Romania , 80.
75. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 74–5.
76. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Hungary , 100.
77. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Hungary , 144.
78. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Hungary , 103, 129.
79. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Poland , 103–4.
80. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Poland , 106.
81. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on the Czech Republic’s
Progress toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of
the European Communities, 101–2.
82. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Czech Republic , 103.
83. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Slovakia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 98–9.
84. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Slovakia , 129.
85. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Slovakia , 137.
86. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Latvia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 101–2.
87. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Latvia , 103–4.
88. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Estonia’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 92, 94, 119.
89. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Estonia , 133.
90. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Estonia , 101–4. 194 Notes

91. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Slovenia’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 91–3.
92. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 99–101.
93. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Bulgaria , 138.
94. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Romania’s Progress
toward Accession, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 102–3.
95. European Council (2003) Presidency Conclusions, Thessaloniki European
Council, 20 June 2003, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications ofthe European Communities, 10: http://europa.eu.int/european_council/conclusions/index_en.htm.
96. Authors’ interview with a Commission ofﬁcial from the Horizontal
Co-Ordination Unit, 13 January 2004.
97. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Communication to the European
Parliament and the Council ‘On the Implementation of CommitmentsUndertaken by the Acceding Countries in the Context of Accession NegotiationsOn Chapter 21 – Regional Policy and Coordination of Structural Instruments ’,
COM (2003) 433 ﬁnal, 16 July 2003: http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/sources/docofﬁc/ofﬁcial/communic/pdf/chap21/com_chapter21_en.pdf.
98. Ibid., 3–6. 99. This introductory paragraph is identical in all Comprehensive Monitoring
Reports (CMRs). See, for example, European Commission (ed.) (2003)Comprehensive Monitoring Report on the Czech Republic’s Preparations forMembership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European
Communities, 39.
100. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on the
Czech Republic, 40.
101. For example, the links between Chapter 21 and Chapter 28 (ﬁnancialcontrol) are clearer; and Chapter 13 (social policy and employment) nowaddresses minority issues more explicitly under ‘non-discrimination’.
102. The CMR on Slovenia is the only one that does not provide this addi-tional information about local and regional governance. EuropeanCommission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on Slovenia’sPreparations for Membership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications
of the European Communities.
103. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on the
Czech Republic, 51.
104. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on
Hungary’s Preparations for Membership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 12.
105. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on
Poland’s Preparations for Membership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 14.
106. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on
Slovenia, 11. Notes 195

107. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on
Estonia’s Preparations for Membership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial
Publications of the European Communities, 12; European Commission
(ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on Latvia’s Preparations for
Membership , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European
Communities, 12; European Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive
Monitoring Report on Lithuania’s Preparations for Membership , Luxembourg:
Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the European Communities, 11.
108. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Regular Report on Bulgaria’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 91–3.
109. European Commission (ed.) (2003) Regular Report on Romania’s Progress
toward Accession , Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of the
European Communities, 94–5.
110. See European Commission (ed.) (2003) ‘Strategy Paper and Report of the
European Commission on the Progress towards Accession by Bulgaria,Romania and Turkey’, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Union: http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/report_2003/pdf/strategy_paper2003_full_en.pdf.
111. Ibid., 3, 11. 112. Ibid., 9–11.
5. Transition, enlargement and regionalization: a
comparison of Hungary and Poland
1. Poland has consistently been ranked ﬁrst, and Hungary second or third, in the
Freedom House ‘Nations in Transit’ democratization rankings between1997–2003: http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/nattransit.htm. Hungaryis ranked ﬁrst and Poland fourth in the EBRD’s average transition performancescore for 2003 out of all the post-communist transition states: http://www.ebrd.org/pubs/tr/03/tr03.pdf.
2. Kenneth Davey (1995) ‘Local Government in Hungary’, in Andrew Coulson
(ed.), Local Government in Eastern Europe , Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 57–75.
3. Jozsef Hegedus (1999) ‘Hungarian Local Government’, in Emil Kirchner
(ed.) Decentralization and Transition in the Visegrad: Poland, Hungary, the
Czech Republic and Slovakia , Basingstoke: Macmillan, 133.
4. See Brigid Fowler (2002) ‘Hungary: Patterns of Political Conﬂict over
Territorial-Administrative Reform’, Regional and Federal Studies , 12 (2), 15–40;
Helmut Wollmann and Tomila Lankina (2003) ‘Local Government in Polandand Hungary: from Post-Communist Reform towards EU Accession’, inHarald Baldersheim, Michal Illner and Helmut Wollmann (eds), Local
Democracy in Post-Communist Europe , Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 94.
5. Tibor Navracsics (1996) ‘Public Sector Reform in Hungary: Changes in
Intergovernmental Relations (1990–1995)’, in Attila Agh and GabriellaIlonszki (eds), Parliaments and Organized Interests: the Second Steps , Budapest,
Hungarian Centre for Democracy Studies, 305.
6. See Gabor Bende Szabo (1999) ‘The Intermediate Administrative Level in
Hungary’, in Eric von Breska and Martin Brusis (eds), Central and Eastern196 Notes

Europe on the Way to the European Union, Munich: Centre for Applied Policy,
Geschwister-Scholl-Institute for Political Science, University of Munich.
7. Peter Heil (2000) ‘PHARE in Hungary: the Anatomy of a Pre-Accession Aid
Programme, 1990–1999’ unpublished PhD thesis, Budapest, 43.
8. Gyula Horváth (1998) ‘Transition and Regionalism in East Central Europe’,
Occasional Paper no. 7, Tubingen: Europaisches Zentrum fur Foderalismus-Forschung, 20.
9. Brigid Fowler (2001) ‘Debating Sub-State Reform on Hungary’s “Road to
Europe”’, One Europe or Several? Working Paper 21/01, Brighton:University of Sussex, 11–14.
10. Fowler (2001: 24); Bende Szabo (1999: 16); Navracsics (1996: 289–93). 11. Bende-Szabo (1999: 6–7); Ilona Palne Kovács (2001) ‘Regional Development
and Governance in Hungary’, Discussion Paper no. 35, Pécs: Centre forRegional Studies, 13–15.
12. Authors’ interview with elite member in Pécs. 13. See Brigid Fowler (2002).14. Bende-Szabo (1999: 5). 15. Authors’ interview with head of a PAO (1999). 16. See Palne Kovács (2001: 25–36); Fowler (2001: 32); Horváth (1996: 28). 17. Fowler (2001: 34–6). 18. European Commission (ed.) (1997) Opinion on Hungary, 90. 19. Author’s interview with ofﬁcial in the Hungarian Mission to the EU,
Brussels, 15 December 2000.
20. Palne Kovács (2001: 29). 21. A. Cziczovszki (2000), ‘The Regional Problem in the Transition to Europe:
the Case of Hungary’, Paper presented at the BASEES Annual Conference,Cambridge.
22. Fowler (2001). 23. European Commission (ed.) (1999) Regular Report on Hungary, 46:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement/candidate.htm.
24. Bende Szabo (1999: 7). 25. European Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Hungary , 62–3;
European Commission, Regular Report on Hungary , 75.
26. Fowler (2001: 41–2). 27. The reform was mentioned but without comment in the CMR. European
Commission (ed.) (2003) Comprehensive Monitoring Report on Hungary, 12.
28. Wollmann and Lankina (2003: 101). 29. Frank-Dieter Grimm, ‘Das Städtesystem Polens in Vergangenheit,
Gegenwart und Zukunsft. Zur Einführung’, in Isolde Brade and Frank-DieterGrimm (eds), Städtesysteme und Regionalentwicklungen in Mittel- und
Osteuropa. Russland, Ukraine, Polen , Leipzig: Institut für Länderkunde Leipzig
(Beiträge zur Regionalen Geographie), 136–47 (141–5).
30. Wiktor Glowacki (2002) ‘Regionalization in Poland’, in Gerard Marcou
(ed.), Regionalization for Development and Accession to the EU: a Comparative
Perspective, LGI Studios, Budapest: Open Society Institute, 110–11.
31. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse, Claire Gordon and Tatiana
Majcherkiewicz (2004) ‘Silesia and the Politics of Regionalisation in Poland’,in Tomasz Zarycki and George Kolankiewicz (eds), Regional Issues in Polish
Politics, London: UCL Press, 83–111. See also Luiza Bialasiewicz (2002)Notes 197

‘Upper Silesia: Rebirth of a Regional Identity in Poland’, Regional and Federal
Studies , 12 (2), 111–32.
32. Jacek Zaucha (1999) ‘Regional and Local Development in Poland’, in Emil
Kirchner (ed.), Decentralisation and Transition in the Visegrad, Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia , Basingstoke: Macmillan, 75.
33. Wollmann and Lankina (2003: 103); Jadwiga Emilewicz and Artur Wolek
(2002) Reformers and Politicians: the Power Play for the 1998 Reform of Public
Administration in Poland, as seen by its Main Players , Warsaw: Elipsa, 109.
34. Harald Baldersheim and Pawel Swaniewicz (2003) ‘The Institutional
Performance of Polish Regions in an Enlarged EU. How much Potential?
How Path Dependent?’, in Michael Keating and James Hughes (eds), The
Regional Challenge in Central and Eastern Europe , Paris: P.I.E.-Peter Lang,
121–46; Michal Illner (1992) ‘Municipalities and Industrial Paternalism in aReal Socialist Society’, in P. Dostal et al. (eds), Changing Territorial
Administration in Czechoslovakia , Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam,
Charles University and Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 15.
35. See Jerzy Regulski (1999) ‘Building Democracy in Poland, the State Reform
of 1998’, Discussion Paper no. 9, Budapest: the Local Government andPublic Services Reform Initiative, Open Society: http://lgi.osi.hu/news/2001/20010202.htm.
36. Glowacki (2002: 111). 37. Aleks Szczerbiak (1999) ‘The Impact of the October 1998 Local Elections on
the Emerging Polish Party System’, Journal of Communist Studies and
Transition Politics , 15 (3), 86.
38. Glowacki (2002: 110–11). 39. Piotr Korcelli, ‘Die Städte Polens im Wandel – ihre demographischen und
ökonomischen Determinanten’, in Isolde Brade and Frank-Dieter Grimm(eds), Städtesysteme und Regionalentwicklungen in Mittel- und Osteuropa.
Russland, Ukraine, Polen , Leipzig: Institut für Länderkunde Leipzig (Beiträge
zur Regionalen Geographie), 148–66 (164).
40. For details, including the debates in the Sejm, see Patricia Wyszogrodzka-
Sipher (2000) ‘The National and International Inﬂuences on the Reform ofPolish Government Structures’, paper for the workshop ‘Europe, Nation,Region: Redeﬁning the State in Central and Eastern Europe’, London, RoyalInstitute of International Affairs.
41. Interviewee in Katowice (2001). 42. Grzegorz Gorzelak and Bohdan Jalowiecki (2001) ‘Analiza wdrazania i
skutków reformy terytorialnej organizacji kraju, Raport koncowy’ [Ananalysis on the introduction and results of the territorial reform of state, the ﬁnal report], Warszawa, Europejski Insytut Rozwoju Regionalnego i Lokalnego, Insytut Spraw Publicznych.
43. Interviewee in Katowice (2001). 44. European Commission (ed.) (1998) Regular Report on Poland ; European
Commission (ed.) (2000) Regular Report on Poland ; Aleko Djildov and Vasil
Marinov (1999) Regional Policy in the Process of Integration into the European
Union: a Comparative Analysis of Selected Countries , New York: EWI.
45. Tomasz Zarycki (2003) ‘The Regional Dimension of the Polish Political
Scene’, in Tomasz Zarycki and George Kolankiewicz (eds), Regional Issues in
Polish Politics , London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University College London, 239–60. 198 Notes

46. Zyta Gilowska, Jozef Ploskonka, Stanislaw Prutis, Miroslaw Stec and Elzbieta
Wysocka (1999) ‘The Systemic Model of the Voivodship in a Democratic
Unitary State’, Discussion paper no. 7, Budapest: Local Government andPublic Service Reform Initiative, Open Society: http://lgi.osi.hu/news/2001/20010202.htm.
47. Tatiana Majcherkiewicz (2001) ‘An Elite in Transition: an Analysis of the
Higher Administration of the Region of Upper Silesia, Poland 1990–1997’,PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, Departmentof Sociology.
48. Authors’ interview with a senior ofﬁcial, Polish Mission to the EU, Brussels,
28 March 2001.
49. Andrzej Kowalczyk (2000) ‘Local Government in Poland’, in Tamas Horvath
(ed.) Decentralization: Experiments and Reform , Budapest: LGI Publications, 226.
50. Authors’ interview with senior ofﬁcial in DG Regional Policy, European
Commission, Brussels, 28 March 2001.
51. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse and Claire Gordon (2004) ‘Conditionality
and Compliance in the EU’s Eastern Enlargement: Regional Policy and theReform of Sub-National Governance’, Journal of Common Market Studies , 42
(3), September.
52. European Commission (ed.) (2001) Regular Report on Poland , 79.
53. European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Hungary , 102–4;
European Commission (ed.) (2002) Regular Report on Poland , 105–6.
6. Elites and the normative capacity for Europeanization
1. See Jeffrey Checkel (2001) ‘International Institutions and Socialisation in
Europe: Introduction and Framework’, ARENA Working Papers, WP 01/11.
2. There is an extensive literature on the issues relating to the ‘democratic
deﬁcit’. For recent studies see Jeffrey Anderson (ed.) (1999) Regional
Integration and Democracy: Expanding on the European Experience , Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld; Christopher Lord (1998) Democracy in the
European Union, Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press; Svein Andersen andKjell Eliassen (eds) (1996) The EU: How Democratic Is It?, London: Sage.
3. See, for example, Anna Grzymala-Busse and Abby Innes (2003) ‘Great
Expectations: the EU and Domestic Political Competition in East CentralEurope’, East European Politics and Societies, 17 (1), 64–73.
4. Poland introduced a so-called ‘Little Constitution’ adopted in 1992, and
only adopted a ﬁnal version in 1997.
5. See Peter Mair (1997) ‘What is Different about Post-Communist Party
Systems?’, in Peter Mair (ed.) Party System Change. Approaches andInterpretations , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 175–98; Abby Innes (2002) ‘Party
Competition in Postcommunist Europe: the Great Electoral Lottery’,Comparative Politics, 35 (1), 85–104.
6. European Commission (ed.) (2001) White Paper on European Governance,
Com (2001) 428, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, 12.
7. European Convention (2003), Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for
Europe, 18 July 2003, Luxembourg: Ofﬁce for Ofﬁcial Publications of theEuropean Communities, articles 9 (1 and 3), and protocol on the applica-Notes 199

tion of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality: http://european-
convention.eu.int/docs/Treaty/cv00850.en03.pdf.
8. For elite theory see Samuel J. Eldersfeld, Lars Stromberg and Wim Derksen
(1995) Local Elites in Western Democracies: a Comparative Analysis of Urban
Political Leaders in the U.S., Sweden, and the Netherlands , Boulder, CO:
Westview; Manuel Castells (2000) The Rise of the Network Society , Oxford:
Blackwell; Robert Putnam (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. For a study of sub-
national elites in post-communist transition see James Hughes and PeterJohn (2001), ‘Local Elites and Transition in Russia’, British Journal of Political
Science , 31 (4), 673–92.
9. For an empirical proof of this hypothesis, based on research into the atti-
tudes of Czech civil servants, see Petr Drulák, Jirí Cesal and Stanislav Hampl(2003) ‘Interactions and Identities of Czech Civil Servants on their Way tothe EU’, Journal of European Public Policy , 10 (4), 637–54.
10. Ordered probit models were used to analyse the elites’ attitudes to democracy,
the market, and the EU more generally. The analysis grouped the indepen-dent variables into theoretical categories of the sociological (age, education,parental occupation), previous regime socialization (membership of party andapparatchiki), role in the elite (for example, administration, private sector),level of national identiﬁcation, extent of international networks and associa-tion memberships. The data analysis shows that sociological factors and eliteposition predict attitudes to democracy and the market. It was found thatattitudes to transition were also predicted by the elite members’ internationalnetworks and contacts. These results on elite attitudes to transition are beinganalysed in separate work by James Hughes and Peter John.
11. Authors’ interviews in Pécs. 12. In Maribor, 17 per cent of respondents knew of the waste-water plant that
was being built in the city though in fact the ﬁnancing of this project wasarranged by the EBRD and the EU funded only the construction of a watercollector outside the plant.
13. See Janine Wedel (1998) Collision and Collusion: the Strange Case of Western
Aid to Eastern Europe ,1989–1998 , New York: St Martin’s Press.
14. There is anecdotal evidence of contacts between Finnish and Estonian farmers
which might stoke the already growing levels of Euroscepticism in Estonia.Furthermore four days prior to Poland’s parliamentary elections in September2001 a demonstration led by the prominent British farmer Sir Julian Rose washeld in Warsaw highlighting the threat to Polish farming posed by EU mem-bership: http://EUobserver.com/index.phtml?selected_topic=15&action=view&article_id=3499.
15. The interviewees were offered the following options: Economic Cohesion,
Partnership for Peace, Subsidiarity, Europe of Nation States, Free Trade,Common Agricultural Policy, Europe of the Regions, Monetary Union, aFederal Europe, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Common EuropeanHome and Structural and Cohesion Funds.
16. While terms like ‘subsidiarity’ might be more familiar among the elites in
current member states, they might not necessarily exhibit greater knowl-edge about their detailed meaning, thereby highlighting an EU-widecommunication gap. 200 Notes

17. ‘Trends in EU, Czech, Hungarian and Polish Public Opinion on Enlargement:
Implications for EU Institutions and Industry’, Central European Opinion
Research Group Foundation, Joint Omnibus Survey, September 2000.
18. For a discussion see Joseph Weiler (1999) The Constitution of Europe ,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For a focus on the ‘demos’ issue seeLars-Erik Cederman (2000) ‘Nationalism and Bounded Integration: What itWould Take to Construct a European Demos’, EUI Working Papers RSC No.2000/34.
19. Yasemin Soysal (2002) ‘Locating Europe’, European Societies, 4 (3), 265–84.20. For critical analyses of the EU’s role in the development of a ‘European’
identity see Chris Shore (2000) Building Europe: the Cultural Politics ofEuropean Integration . London: Routledge; Bo Stråth (2002) ‘A European
Identity: to the Historical Limits of a Concept’, European Journal of Social
Theory, 5 (4), 387–401.
21. The turnouts in all the referenda on EU accession were: Czech Republic:
55.2 per cent, Estonia: 64.02 per cent, Hungary: 45.62 per cent, Latvia: 72.5per cent, Lithuania: 63.37 per cent, Poland: 58.85 per cent, Slovakia: 52.15per cent, Slovenia: 60.29 per cent.Notes 201

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Zielonka, Jan (2001) ‘Conclusions: Foreign Made Democracy’, in Jan Zielonka
and Alex Pravda (eds), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe , Volume 2,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.Bibliography 217

Statistical Appendix
A1 Distribution of elites interviewed by position
218Frequency Percentage
Administration and politics 128 44.6
Administration and other position 56 19.5
Business/private sector 53 18.5
Professional/education/media 48 16.7
Missing 2 0.7
Total 287 100.0
Missing
Professional
Business/private sector
Admin/otherAdmin/political16.7%
18.5%
19.5%44.6%

A2 Distribution of elites interviewed by position and
city/countryStatistical Appendix 219
City
Maribor Pécs Tartu Katowice Total
Administration Count 34 27 23 44 128
and % within city 47.2 36.5 34.8 60.3
politics % of total 11.9 9.5 8.1 15.4 44.9
Administration Count 18 10 23 5 56
and other % within city 25.0 13.5 34.8 6.8
position % of total 6.3 3.5 8.1 1.8 19.6
Business/ Count 10 22 11 10 53
private sector % within city 13.9 29.7 16.7 13.7
% of total 3.5 7.7 3.9 3.5 18.6
Professional/ Count 10 15 9 14 48
education/ % within city 13.9 20.3 13.6 19.2
media % of total 3.5 5.3 3.2 4.9 16.8
Total Count 72 74 66 73 285
% within city 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
% of total 25.3 26.0 23.2 25.6 100.0
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0Percentage
Admin/political Business/priv. sector
Admin/other post ProfessionalCity
Maribor
Pécs
TartuKatowice

A3 Distribution of elites interviewed by age220 Statistical Appendix
Frequency Percentage
> 30 11 3.8
30–39 48 16.740–49 108 37.650–59 92 32.160–69 20 7.070> 7 2.4
Total 286 99.7
Missing 1 0.3
Total 287 100.0
60–69
50–5970>
>30
30–39
40–497.0%
32.1%
37.6%16.7%

A4 Distribution of elites interviewed by educationStatistical Appendix 221
Frequency Percentage
No further education 5 1.7
First degree 36 12.5
Postgraduate diploma 97 33.8
Candidate/doctorate 59 20.6
Other 46 16.0
Professional qualiﬁcation 5 1.7
Total 248 86.4
Missing 39 13.6
Total 287 100.0
Missing
Professional cert
Other qualification
PhD (doct/cand)Postgrad diplomaUniversity degreeNo further education
13.6%
16.0%
20.6%33.8%12.5%

A5 Distribution of elites interviewed by sex222 Statistical Appendix
Frequency Percentage
Male 239 83.3
Female 48 16.7
Total 287 100.0
Female
Male16.7%
83.3%

A6 Cross-tabulationsStatistical Appendix 223
Opinion of the European Union/Travel abroad in last six months
cross-tabulation
Travel abroad in last
Opinion of the European Union six months
Yes No Total
Positive Count 142 79 221
% within Opinion of the
European Union 64.3 35.7 100.0
% within Travel abroadin last six months 81.1 71.8 77.5
% of total 49.8 27.7 77.5
Negative Count 3 6 9
% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 33.3 66.7 100.0
% within Travel abroadin last six months 1.7 5.5 3.2
% of total 1.1 2.1 3.2
Neutral Count 30 25 55
% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 54.5 45.5 100.0
% within Travel abroadin last six months 17.1 22.7 19.3
% of total 10.5 8.8 19.3
Total Count 175 110 285
% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 61.4 38.6 100.0
% within Travel abroadin last six months 100.0 100.0 100.0
% of total 61.4 38.6 100.0
Chi-square tests
Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)
Pearson chi-square 4.841a2 .089
Likelihood ratio 4.730 2 .094
Linear-by-linearassociation 2.378 1 .123
No. of valid cases 285
Note:a1 cell (16.7%) has expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 3.47.

224 Statistical Appendix
Age of respondent/Opinion of the European Union cross-tabulation
Opinion of the European
Age of respondent Union
Positive Negative Neutral Total
< 30 Count 7 2 2 11
% within Age of
respondent 63.6 18.2 18.2 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 3.2 22.2 3.6 3.9% of total 2.5 0.7 0.7 3.9
30–39 Count 32 1 15 48
% within Age ofrespondent 66.7 2.1 31.3 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 14.5 11.1 27.3 16.9% of total 11.3 0.4 5.3 16.9
40–49 Count 85 3 19 107
% within Age ofrespondent 79.4 2.8 17.8 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 38.6 33.3 34.5 37.7% of total 29.9 1.1 6.7 37.7
50–59 Count 76 2 13 91
% within Age ofrespondent 83.5 2.2 14.3 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 34.5 22.2 23.6 32.0% of total 26.8 0.7 4.6 32.0
60–69 Count 16 4 20
% within Age ofrespondent 80.0 20.0 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 7.3 7.3 7.0% of total 5.6 1.4 7.0
70> Count 4 1 2 7
% within Age ofrespondent 57.1 14.3 28.6 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 1.8 11.1 3.6 2.5% of total 1.4 0.4 0.7 2.5
Total Count 220 9 55 284
% within Age ofrespondent 77.5 3.2 19.4 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
% of total 77.5 3.2 19.4 100.0

Statistical Appendix 225
Chi-square tests
Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)
Pearson chi-square 18.724a10 .044
Likelihood ratio 13.618 10 .191
Linear-by-linear
association 1.761 1 .184
No. of Valid Cases 284
Note:a9 cells (50.0%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is .22.
Visitors from abroad in last six months/Opinion of the European Union
cross-tabulation
Visitors from Opinion of the European
abroad in last Union
six months Positive Negative Neutral Total
None Count 85 6 27 118
% within Visitors from
abroad in last six months 72.0 5.1 22.9 100.0% within Opinion of the 38.5 66.7 49.1 41.4European Union% of total 29.8 2.1 9.5 41.4
1–3 Count 64 2 17 83
% within Visitors fromabroad in last six months 77.1 2.4 20.5 100.0% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 29.0 22.2 30.9 29.1
% of total 22.5 0.7 6.0 29.1
More Count 72 1 11 84
than % within Visitors from
3 abroad in last six months 85.7 1.2 13.1 100.0% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 32.6 11.1 20.0 29.5
% of total 25.3 0.4 3.9 29.5
Total Count 221 9 55 285
% within Visitors fromabroad in last six months 77.5 3.2 19.3 100.0% within Opinion of theEuropean Union 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
% of total 77.5 3.2 19.3 100.0

226 Statistical Appendix
Chi-square tests
Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)
Pearson chi-square 6.271a4 .180
Likelihood ratio 6.547 4 .162
Linear-by-linearassociation 4.161 1 .041
No. of valid cases 285
Note:a3 cells (33.3%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 2.62.
Involvement in EU-funded projects/Opinion of the European Union
cross-tabulation
Involvement in Opinion of the European
EU-funded projects Union
Positive Negative Neutral Total
Yes Count 126 5 26 157
% within Involvement
in EU-funded projects 80.3 3.2 16.6 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 57.3 55.6 47.3 55.3% of total 44.4 1.8 9.2 55.3
No Count 94 4 29 127
% within Involvementin EU-funded projects 74.0 3.1 22.8 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 42.7 44.4 52.7 44.7% of total 33.1 1.4 10.2 44.7
Total Count 220 9 55 284
% within Involvementin EU-funded projects 77.5 3.2 19.4 100.0% within Opinion ofthe European Union 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
% of total 77.5 3.2 19.4 100.0

Statistical Appendix 227
Chi-square tests
Value df Asymp. Sig. (2-sided)
Pearson chi-square 1.780a2 .411
Likelihood ratio 1.771 2 .412
Linear-by-linear
association 1.737 1 .188
No. of valid cases 284
Note:a2 cells (33.3%) have expected count less than 5. The minimum expected count is 4.02.

acquis: accession and transposition in
the CEECs, 10, 11, 12, 24–7, 61–4,
110–15, 141, 165, 180 n. 47;Chapter 21, 47, 68, 70, 71–7, 89,119, 165–74, 188 n. 18, 195 n. 101;structure, 25–7, 167; ‘thinness’, 5,26–7, 68, 70, 73–6, 87, 89, 173
Bulgaria: accession negotiations, 64,
86, 114–15; regionalization, 47, 90,94, 97, 100, 105–6, 109, 179 n. 43
Capacity: seeCommission, PHARE,
Regionalization
Commission (EC): ‘Accession
Partnerships’, 10, 25, 63, 84, 87–9,97, 106, 110, 139, 143; ‘Agenda2000’ (1997), 63, 64, 167; CAP, 65,67, 152; ‘capacity’ issue, 8, 23, 24,25–6, 62, 64, 71–2, 73, 77, 78,89–91, 96–117 passim , 135, 139,
141–63 passim , 165, 166, 168, 171,
180 n. 47; CMRs (2003), 86, 110–14,116, 195 n. 102; conditionality, 2,3, 5, 7, 8, 27, 68, 71, 78, 83, 174;DG Enlargement, 70, 75, 84, 101;DG Regio, 70, 79, 80, 81, 82;enlargement negotiations, 47, 61–2,70, 72, 80, 87, 96; institutionalculture of, 12, 19, 179 n. 35; NPAAs,63–4, 88, 97; Opinions on candidatecountries (1997), 9, 25, 63, 64, 71,72, 77, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89–92, 106,116, 119, 135, 139, 166, 171; ‘pre-accession strategy’, 62, 71, 114;Regular Reports on accessioncountries (1998–2003), 8, 9, 11, 25,47, 64, 72–4, 82, 84, 85–7, 91–117passim , 126, 135, 137, 138, 139,
166–7, 170, 181 n. 48, 190 n. 58;‘reinforced pre-accession strategy’,63, 88; self-interest in enlargement,12, 13, 22, 177 n.9; ‘structureddialogue’, 61–3, 142–3; White Paperon European Governance (2001),144–5; see also: acquis ,
conditionality, enlargementEuropeanization, PHARE,regionalization
Committee of the Regions, 72Conditionality: causal effects, 10–11,
26, 166; CEEC perceptions, 76–9,135; colonialism, 13–14;deﬁnitions, 1–3, 12, 14, 25, 176 n. 3and n. 5; democracy promotion, 11,16, 18, 20–4; domestic resistance, 3,7, 8, 76, 174; EU conditionality,16–19, 21–2, 24–7; inconsistencyand ambiguity, 8, 24–5, 64, 164,166, 174; ‘international’, 11–12,13–16; neo-liberalism, 15–16, 18,20, 41, 71; ‘normative’ elements,10, 14, 17–18, 19, 89, 166;positivism, 11, 173, 175 n. 5; powerasymmetry, 14, 164; redeﬁned as aprocess, 174; as reinforcementstrategy, 11, 28, 166; transitionconstraints, 8, 17, 20, 23, 31, 60,169, 171, 174; UK policy, 17, 179 n.39; ‘Western’, 3, 12, 165; see also:acquis, Commission,Europeanization
Copenhagen criteria, 2, 10, 19, 21, 25,
61, 62, 71, 91, 115, 166, 180 n. 48
Czech Republic: accession
negotiations, 64, 191 n. 1; Law onConstitution (1997), 49; partypolitics and regional reform, 49;regionalization, 40, 47–9, 59, 77,90–2, 94–8, 102, 107, 113, 118, 139,158, 169
Dzurinda, Mikulas, 54
EBRD, 119, 150, 178 n. 25, 196 n. 1,
200 n. 12
228
Index

Elites: attitudes towards enlargement,
144, 148–64 passim, 172; attitudes
to regionalization, 136, 139, 157–8;Euroscepticism, 7; identity, 158–62;norms, 2, 7, 8, 28, 61; role intransition, 28, 30–1, 59, 130, 144,182 n. 3; see also: Europeanization,enlargement, regionalization,transition
Enlargement: bilateralism of
negotiations, 62–4, 85, 102–3,143–4; costs and beneﬁts of, 65–7,143, 152–6, 158, 162, 165, 171, 187n. 9; creation of ‘CEECs’ group, 20,179 n. 43 ; member states’ interestsin, 13, 23, 25, 179 n. 39; pressurefor regionalization, 41–7; ‘queuingsystem’, 25, 64, 85; redivision ofEurope, 20; referenda on, 162, 172,201 n. 21; ‘regional deﬁcit’ andexclusion of subnational elites, 7, 8,62, 63, 143–4, 163: Treaty ofAccession (2003), 109; see also:acquis, Commission, elites, PHARE,regionalization, transition
Estonia: accession negotiations, 64,
191 n. 1; Euroscepticism, 200 n. 14;regionalization, 40, 47, 56–7, 59,78, 80, 90–1, 97, 100, 104, 108,113, 118, 168, 170; russophoneminority, 57, 158, 170
Europe Agreements, 18, 19, 21, 62,
87–8, 89, 121, 142–3, 180 n. 48
Europeanization: CEEC elite norms,
141–63 passim, 165; deﬁnitions, 13,
27–8, 160, 181 n. 55; power, 1–2, 5;relationship to elite identity,158–63; relationship toenlargement, 62, 74, 164; ‘return toEurope’ notion 1–2; transitioncontext, 31, 119–20; weakness inCEECs, 140, 162; see also:
conditionality, elites
European Convention Draft
Constitution, 145
European Council: Berlin (1999), 65;
Copenhagen (1993), 10, 12, 19, 21,61, 62, 71; Copenhagen (2002), 5,66, 106, 109, 165; Dublin (1990) 17;Essen (1994), 62; Helsinki (1999),65, 86; Luxembourg (1991), 18;Luxembourg (1997), 64, 85–6, 88;Madrid (1995), 62, 92, 166; Rome(1990), 17; Thessaloniki (2003), 110
European Union: CFSP, 18, 152;
European identity, 28, 141–2, 164;intergovernmentalism, 13, 68;Maastricht Treaty (1992), 18, 37,69; multilevel governance, 68, 69,75, 81; TEU (1997), 21, 180 n. 48
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 36, 154
Hungary: accession negotiations, 64,
85, 102; Commissioners of the
Republic, 38, 50, 121, 123; EC/EUaid, 23; Law on RegionalDevelopment and Physical Planning(1996), 77, 89, 98, 123; Law onRegional Development and PhysicalPlanning (1999), 126; LocalSelf–Government Act (1990), 38, 50,120–1; Local Government Act(1994), 39, 43, 123, 185 n. 43; partypolitics and regional reform, 38, 51,81, 120–7; Public AdministrationOfﬁcers, 51, 123; regionalization, 8,39, 40–1, 47, 49–51, 55, 59, 77–8,80, 81, 82, 93, 95, 98, 102, 106–7,113, 118–28, 138–40, 168, 169,170–1, 179 n. 43, 183 n. 15
Hurd, Douglas, 17, 179 n. 35
IMF, 14, 16, 18, 178 n. 25
ISPA, 16, 74, 81, 98, 142
Kadar, Janos, 37, 50
Katowice, 9, 135, 136, 137, 146, 147,
148–62 passim
Klaus, Vaclav, 48Kwasniewski, Alexander, 133
Latvia: accession negotiations, 64, 86,
113, 118, 170; regionalization, 47,
94, 100, 108
Lithuania: accession negotiations, 64,
86, 118; regionalization, 47, 94,100, 104–5, 108, 113Index 229

Maribor, 9, 146, 147, 148–62 passim
Masowiecki, Tadeusz, 40, 52
Meciar, Vladimir, 53, 54, 77
NUTS (NUTS II), 4, 47, 49, 54, 56, 60,
65, 75–8, 94–5, 97–9, 102, 105,
106–8, 112, 118, 123–6, 136,168–70
OECD, 17, 74Orban, Viktor, 81, 190 n. 58
Pawlak, Waldemar, 131
Pécs, 9, 127, 146, 147, 148–62 passim
PHARE: ‘capacity-building’, 24,
96–117 passim ; creation, 12, 22, 177
n.11; geographical remit, 180 n. 44;priorities, 22–3, 62, 65–7, 74, 119,121, 137, 148, 180 n. 46 and n. 47;private sector consultants (use of),151; regionalization in the CEECs,47, 69, 70–1, 78, 79, 80–3, 101, 105,168; regionalization in Hungary,121–3, 126, 128, 170–1;regionalization in Poland, 137;regionalization in Romania, 58;reorganization of (1997), 12, 61, 80
Poland: accession negotiations, 64,
102–3, 191 n. 1; EC/EU aid, 23; Lawon Regional Government (1998),132–7; Local Government Act(1990), 52; party politics andregional reform, 40–1, 52, 53, 129,131–3, 170; regionalization, 8, 39,40–1, 47, 51–3, 77, 79, 80, 82, 93,94, 99, 102–3, 107, 113–14, 118–20,129–40, 168–70
Prodi, Romano, 177 n. 9
regional identity, 31, 59, 161–2, 169;
see also : elites
regional funds: seestructural funds
regional policy: and development,
86–7; in the EU 4, 32, 37, 60, 67,
89, 90, 95; role of Commission,68–71
Regionalization: acquis , 5, 26–7, 68,
110–12, 115; communist legacies,31, 32–8, 59–60, 118, 138, 170;deﬁnition, 4; effect of transition on,32, 38–41, 118–40 passim ; Habsburg
legacies, 48–51; inconsistent viewsof the Commission on, 8, 60, 64,68–84, 91–117 passim , 126, 130,
137–8, 144–5, 166–74; regional‘administrative capacity’, 63, 64,71–2, 75, 79, 81, 97, 107, 119–20,126, 139, 163; trends in the CEECs,8, 38–60, 118–40, 169–74; trends inWestern Europe, 37, 39, 68, 173; see
also: Bulgaria, Commission, Czech
Republic, elites, enlargement,Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania,PHARE, Poland, Romania, Slovakia,Slovenia
Regular Reports: seeCommission
Romania: accession negotiations, 64,
86, 102, 114–15; Hungarianminority, 58, 168, 169, 170; Law onLocal Public Administration (1991),58, 105; Law on RegionalDevelopment (1998), 58, 78, 93;regionalization, 39, 47, 57–8, 59,78, 79, 80, 93, 95, 97, 100–1, 105–6,109, 168–9; see also : PHARE
Santer, Jacques, 81SAPARD, 16, 74, 98, 142Slovakia: accession negotiations, 64,
86; Hungarian minority, 54, 77,169, 179 n. 43; Law on LocalPublic Administration (2001), 54;Law on Local State Administration(1996), 53; regionalization, 47,53–4, 59, 77, 91, 92, 95–6, 99, 104,107–8, 113, 114, 118, 139, 168,179 n. 43
Slovenia: accession negotiations, 64,
191 n. 1; regionalization, 47, 54–6,59, 76, 79, 80, 92, 99, 104, 108–9,113, 118, 169, 170
Spidla, Vladimir, 1structural funds, 4, 5, 13, 16, 62,
65–6, 69, 70, 73–4, 78–9, 81–2,88–9, 93–6, 100, 102–15 passim ,
127–8, 135, 137, 149, 152, 154,162, 167–8, 172, 179 n. 39, 187 n.9, 188 n. 20; see also : elites230 Index

subsidiarity, 37, 69, 145, 152–4, 200
n. 16
Suchocka, Hanna, 79, 131, 170
TACIS, 180 n. 44
Tartu, 9, 146, 147, 148–62 passimtransition: role of historical legacies,
8, 30–1, 182 n. 2 and n. 4; theories,7, 30; relationship to enlargement,4, 64; see also: conditionality, elites,regionalization
UN, 14, 178 n. 16USA, 14, 16, 17, 20
Verheugen, Günter, 1World Bank, 14, 18, 178 n. 25Index 231

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