| Review of: | Designing Democracy: EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe by G. Pridham |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Evangelos G. Manouvelos |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 2, Pages 515-533 |
Book Reviews
The period since the early 1990s has proved to be a new era in democratic conditionality across the world, which has been adopted or developed further by a wide range of international organizations and agencies. This book is a systematic and in depth study of the effects of the EU's democratic conditionality, originally set out in the Copenhagen conditions of 1993, on the new political systems of Central and Eastern Europe. It examines this development up to the accession of new Member States in 2004. The main conclusion of Pridham's analysis is that it was the dynamics of enlargement and the promise of actual accession that actuated the post-Communist new democracies to agree unquestioningly with the political conditions of Brussels and to pursue them assiduously.
The theoretical perspectives of this basic idea are logically set out in the first chapter, which is focused on the belief that European integration facilitates, encourages and promotes democratic consolidation. Using material drawn from elite interviews in several CEE countries as well as in Brussels, Pridham throws much light on how far the EU enlargement process has really strengthened these new post-Communist democracies following their transitions in the 1990s. Applying an interactive approach to the relationship between Europeanization and democratization, the author analyses both the EU's evolving policy of conditionality and the domestic arenas of the candidate countries in a three-dimensional analysis of governance, intermediary actors and the socio-economic arena.
Each dimension is analysed in a chapter by itself. Governance is all about policy orientation and institutional adjustment of the accession governments of the new Member States. Political parties, opinion-makers and public impacts constitute the political arena and intermediary actors in the candidate states. Finally, the socio-economic arena involves economic transition, civil society and ethnic minorities. Altogether, the assumption about European integration as democratization's bene-factor raises many pertinent questions that are answered in this part.
Pridham's analysis considerably enhances our understanding of many aspects of this critical period of modern Europe. The author has clearly examined a large number of events in the CEE's struggle towards accession. As such, it will be a worthy addition to the bookshelves of EU scholars, particularly those interested in the political ramifications of enlargement, and the perspectives and limitations of the EU's conditionality strategy.