| Review of: | Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU's Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: The Myth of Conditionality by J. Hughes, G. Sasse, C. Gordon |
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| Reviewed By: | Ana Maria Dobre |
| 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
Mainstream literature on the Europeanization of territorial structures in candidate countries assumes that EU conditionality requires the creation of subnational institutions to administer its regional aid after accession, leading therefore to regionalization. Hughes, Sasse and Gordon challenge these conventional approaches to Europeanization and regionalization, arguing that no inherent cause-effect relationship exists between EU conditionality and the domestic change in territorial and administrative configuration of regional governance.
In the first chapter, the conceptual framework is drawn from the literature on Europeanization, conditionality and transition. The second chapter presents domestic variables that explain the different policy outcomes and trends of regionalization across the CEECs. By focusing on specific case studies (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Romania), the authors identify the communist historical legacy of extreme institutional centralization as a factor that constrains the process of regionalization in EU enlargement and transition.
Chapters three and four concentrate on the explanatory power of the EU conditionality variable, and investigate, on the one hand, the evolution of the Commission's approach to regional policy and regionalization, and, on the other hand, the EU's main monitoring and compliance instruments during the accession process, in particular the Commission's annual Regular Reports. This detailed analysis, based on interviews with the Commission's officials and the CEEC delegations in Brussels, leads the authors to support and refine hypotheses of the 'thinness' and fluidity of the
Chapter five illustrates how the interplay between the domestic and external EU variables determines the outcomes and trends of regionalization in the CEECs, by comparing Hungarian and Polish regional policy reforms. The authors argue that candidate countries' compliance with EU conditionality has been shaped by their specific local and regional governance, leading to variant forms of regionalization, ranging from administrative-statistical regionalization in Hungary to democratized regionalization in Poland. The penultimate chapter analyses the subnational level, examining normative and attitudinal Europeanization among the regional and local elites.
Overall the book is an excellent contribution to the literature on Europeanization, conditionality, regionalization and transition. While the analysis is empirically thorough and well-constructed, the explanatory framework is not theoretically grounded. It undoubtedly would have benefited from a theoretical chapter to evaluate the various analytical frameworks currently proposed. In this context, the authors explain the different domestic outcomes of regionalization in the CEECs by resorting to a number of necessary, but insufficient variables such as EU formal and informal conditionality, the institutional communist legacy and national governmental elites. A more comprehensive approach would highlight additional variables such as the presence of veto players opposed to regional reform, and the emergence, despite the 'regional deficit' in the pre-accession phase, of norm agents from the subnational level who supported different projects of political regionalization and who initiated a process of demystification of the taboo issue of regionalization in some of these highly centralized countries.
However, these comments should not reduce the value of this highly relevant book, which provides a significant, well-documented empirical analysis of the Europeanization and regionalization in the EU's enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe, along with an important range of data, very useful to any comparative researcher in this field.