Accession

Abstract: The EU influences the development of governance in central and eastern Europe through its accession process in ways that go well beyond its official competences in the current member states. However, the EU's impact is diffused by the complexity of actor constellations involved. Moreover, it lacks the comprehensive institutional templates that would be needed to shape political institutions into an identifiably 'EU' mould. Instead, EU influence interacts with other pressures, both external and internal, becoming woven into domestic debates about institutional change. Accession conditions and negotiations privilege a relatively small group of central government officials over other political actors. The lack of involvement of parliamentarians and wider society in the accession process could, in turn, exacerbate the EU's own democratic deficit after enlargement.

Abstract: The European Union's pre-accession conditionality was very effective in prompting the alignment of the post-communist candidate countries with EU law. As the conditional membership incentive was the main factor driving alignment, the changing incentive structure after accession suggests that – ceteris paribus – post-accession compliance with EU law will deteriorate. Data on infringements of EU law allow us a first insight into whether this negative scenario has materialized. The data suggest that, far from constituting an ‘eastern problem’, virtually all of the new member states outperformed virtually all of the old members during the first four years of membership. To explain this unexpectedly good performance, further research should focus on two factors, both related to the experience of pre-accession conditionality: a greater susceptibility of the new member states to shaming and an institutional investment in legislative capacity.

Abstract: The European Union has played the most important role in stimulating political change in post-World War II Europe. Turkey had to become more democratic in order to attain candidacy for EU membership in the second half of the 1990s, and when it became a candidate, it had to adopt sweeping political reforms in order to fulfil the EU's accession criteria so that accession negotiations could begin. Thus, this article proposes that Turkey's EU candidacy since 1999 has stimulated Turkish political and legal reforms and intensified the Europeanization process in Turkey. The article analyzes the political reforms in Turkey in the light of EU membership and argues that Turkey's Europeanization is greatly motivated by the EU.

Abstract: The publication of what is often known simply as The Structure of Politics transformed the perceived political landscape of eighteenth-century Britain. Prior to 1929 British political history from 1688 was broadly conceived of as a two-party rivalry of Whig and Tory, underpinning a constitutional monarchy and a modern cabinet system based on a party majority in the House of Commons. That was the classic 'Whig interpretation' of history for the period, embodied in the scholarly work of Lord Macaulay, W.E.H. Lecky, G.O. Trevelyan and G.M. Trevelyan, and popularised in Sir Charles Grant Robertson's textbook England under the Hanoverians, reprinted sixteen times since 1911. What Namier did was to cut a cross-section through the British political system in the middle of the eighteenth century and demonstrate that no such parties existed. It was as if a zoologist had dissected a creature previously thought to have been vertebrate and shown it to be boneless. Namier, instead of viewing political history as the deeds of great men, concerned himself with the behaviour of ordinary MPs, revealing a political system of infinite subtlety, with the great majority of MPs simultaneously seeking favours from government and professing their independence, varying permutations of these two attitudes constituting political reality. Apart from the use of techniques such is prosopograthy, the study of social and family connections, what distinguished Namier's work was meticulous attention to detail and emphasis on original sources. Namierisation, a word coined in his lifetime, was essentially a substitution of accurate detail for the generalisations that had contented earlier historians. Namier went to the grass-roots of politics. He asked such questions as : what determined the conduct of individual MPs? Why did men go into politics? What did they get out of it?