defeat. Yet if elections are to serve as a reliable instrument of conditionality, a majority of the electorate must either identify itself strongly enough with
‘Europe’ or be suffi ciently concerned with the opportunity costs of non- compliance to make a conscious choice for reform-oriented political parties.
However, it seems that actual voting behaviour is more strongly shaped by immediate concerns with personal security and welfare than by concerns about the government’s compliance with European norms. Most often, changes in government have been caused by societal dissatisfaction with the hardships of economic shock therapy, economic mismanagement by the incumbent government, and corruption scandals. Dissatisfaction has turned against both reform-friendly and reform-adverse governments (Jasiewicz, 1998, p. 186; Pravda, 2001, pp. 26–7).
practices to preserve their power, and risked losing power after changing these institutions and practices, generally failed to comply. They preferred jeopardizing their accession chances to risking domestic power. Two cases may serve to illustrate this confi guration of conditions.
Slovakia during the Mečiar government (1994–98) represents a combination of a credible accession perspective with high domestic power costs. Although Slovakia had long been named together with the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as a strong candidate for early EU enlargement and had received repeated and consistent signals that the authoritarian practices of the Mečiar government would be an obstacle to opening accession negotiations in 1997/98, that government did not comply with the demands of the Western community for respecting the constitutional rights of the parliament, the president, and the judiciary and for granting improved rights to the Hungarian minority. Compliance with some of these demands was strongly opposed by the extreme nationalists on whom Mečiar depended to remain in power. Others would have undermined the centralized control of the Slovak state that the Mečiar government established to limit the competences of the parliament and the president, which had worked together to bring down the previous Mečiar government.
Slovakia only complied with the Western demands after a broad anti-Mečiar coalition came to power in the parliamentary elections of 1998. Thus even a highly credible membership perspective did not produce compliance in the presence of high power costs.
In contrast, the case of Turkey demonstrates the necessity of a credible membership perspective. Although Turkey had been associated to the EU since 1963, the absence of a credible commitment to full Turkish membership undermined the effectiveness of the EU’s demands for a thorough liberalization of the Turkish state. When, however, the EU decided to accord Turkey ‘candidate status’ in 1999 and treat it like the Central and Eastern European applicants, it triggered a massive reform of the Turkish legal system, an improvement of rights for the Kurdish minority, and a far-reaching disempowerment of the military in anticipation of the EU’s decision to open accession negotiations with Turkey in 2005. At the same time, the power costs of reform for the Turkish government were signifi cantly reduced after the end of the anti-terrorist warfare in the Kurdish region of Turkey and after the decisive victory of the AK Party in the parliamentary elections of 2002, which was not part of the old Kemalist élites and stood to gain from curbing the military’s political competences.
Comparative analysis also shows the crucial role of EU political conditionality compared to the efforts of other Western organizations. For instance, the OSCE and its High Commissioner for National Minorities had urged Estonia and Latvia to reform their citizenship law and improve the
rights of the large Russian-speaking minorities in their countries since the early 1990s. However, the governments and parliaments of both countries only complied with these demands when the EU took them up in the late 1990s and linked them explicitly to accession. The same applies to the long-standing concerns of the Council of Europe with regard to the death penalty and the rule of law in Turkey.
However, under the condition of electoral volatility in the CEECs, the long-term prospects for democratic socialization not only depend on the cost–benefi t calculations of the government currently in power but on those of potential future governments as well. All major parties – that is, all parties that are able to form a government or will be dominant in any feasible coalition government – must therefore make the same basic cost–
benefi t assessment in favour of rule adoption. Therefore the effectiveness of international socialization depends on the party constellations in the target countries.10 Three basic types can be distinguished: liberal, anti-liberal and mixed-party constellations.11
If all major parties base their legitimacy claims and programmes on liberal reform and integration into the Western organizations (liberal party constellation), the conditions of intergovernmental reinforcement by reward are favourable because the perceived costs of adaptation are low and do not change after a change of government. Whenever a government is dismissed or voted out of offi ce, its successors follow the same basic parameters of political change. This not only applies to the parties of the centre and the moderate right but also to the reconstructed post-communist parties that came to power through democratic elections only a few years after the communist breakdown in Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. Accordingly CEECs with a liberal party constellation (which include the Baltic countries and most Central European countries) went through a quick and smooth socialization process and reached a high level of democratic consolidation.
The independent contribution of the EU and other Western organizations to this outcome was small, however. These CEECs had made signifi cant progress before accession conditionality was in place and would probably have continued on the path to democratic consolidation without it.
Nevertheless EU political conditionality had two kinds of positive impact.
First, it reinforced and stabilized democratic consolidation through a virtuous circle. It rewarded initial reform steps with material assistance and a strengthening of institutional ties. These rewards strengthened the norm-conforming government domestically, created incentives for further adaptation, and raised its stakes in integration. Second, it furthered compliance with particular rules not generally shared by liberal parties. In
Central and Eastern Europe, this has mainly been the case with minority protection (above all in the Baltic countries).
In contrast, if the major parties base their legitimacy claims and programmes on nationalism, communism, populism and/or authoritarianism (anti-liberal party constellation), the political costs of adaptation to liberal norms are always high. As a consequence, the conditions for successful reinforcement are unfavourable in the long term. Whereas governments may agree to cosmetic changes or tactical concessions to reap the political benefi ts of Western rewards, adaptation to liberal norms would undermine the basis of their rule. In these CEECs, such as Belarus, Russia, Serbia under Milošević or Ukraine, reinforcement by reward has little impact; autocracy rather than democracy is consolidated. These countries are excluded from the benefi ts of assistance and membership. In the absence of increasing EU integration, the stakes in reform and democratization do not grow, the political gap between these countries and the rest of the CEECs widens, and the prospect of EU accession becomes ever more distant. Thus a vicious instead of a virtuous circle operates. Only a domestic revolution (such as in Serbia in 2000) can reverse this dynamic.
In mixed-constellation countries with both major liberal and anti- liberal parties, there is no élite consensus on liberal-democratic reform and Western integration. Liberal parties or coalitions have been able to come to power in these systems but did not exclusively shape their post-communist development. Either superfi cially reconstructed communist parties initiated (but also slowed down and distorted) democratic transition from above (such as in Romania), or reform-adverse nationalists and populists benefi ted from the failure of reform-oriented parties to provide for economic recovery or effi cient governance. In some of these countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovakia), governmental authority has shifted more than once between the two camps.
Over time, however, these countries still made signifi cant progress on the way to democratic consolidation and political conditionality was a major factor in this development. When liberal parties were in government, the liberal domestic changes they institutionalized led to progress in EU integration, and the benefi ts of EU integration subsequently raised the stakes in democratic consolidation and increased the costs of any future reversal. Populist parties therefore adapted their political goals in order to preserve the achieved benefi ts of integration. After the major nationalist- authoritarian parties of Croatia (HDZ), Romania (PDSR) and Slovakia (HZDS) had been voted out of government, Romania and Slovakia started accession negotiations with the EU, and Croatia became an EU associate and applied for membership. During the same time, these parties modifi ed their programmes and presented themselves as unequivocally pro-
integration. When the PDSR and the HDZ were back in power in 2000 and 2003, they stayed the course of reform and integration. Thus the lock-in effects of Western integration create path-dependency across changes in government and, eventually, change the party constellation from mixed to liberal. Accession negotiations with Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia started in 2000 and with Croatia in 2005.