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The Enlargement of the EU and NATO: Ordering from the Menu
by Wade Jacoby

The collapse or tearing down of the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) between 1989 and 1990 broke ground for a “return to Europe.” As new governments emerged, often distancing themselves from Communist-era practices and institutions, citizens of all ranks came to a broad consensus that their states should aspire to join the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This return to Europe prompted the abandonment of Communism by these new states as they began to emulate institutions and policy designs drawn either directly from such international organizations as the EU or NATO or from their individual member states. I call this emulation “ordering from the menu,” to underscore that CEE states have institutional choices, but that these choices often are constrained by the menu of options available from Western Europe.

Emulation involves elites — members of government, top parliamentarians, leading civil servants, and other important policymakers — who use models of formal institutions and practices imported from abroad to refashion their own rules or organizations. CEE elites have emulated the West extensively. For example, of the 180 laws passed in Hungary’s June 1999 parliamentary session, 152 were not subject to any debate. They were adopted simply because they were part of the EU acquis communautaire, the set of treaties, rules, standards, principles, and policies that the EU requires acceding countries to adopt.

When does emulation of Western practices result in more effective and efficient institutions? When do reforms fail? By examining a variety of empirical cases — including agriculture, regional policy, consumer protection, health care, civilian control of the military, and military professionalism — in five countries, two of which I discuss in this article, I explain when the adoption of reforms imposed “from above” will be superficial and when these reforms are likely to result in meaningful change.

Core Arguments

How have CEE elites tried to emulate Western European institutions? The messy borrowing of Western structures is best understood by focusing on two factors: how much external pressure is brought to bear on the target state and how faithfully that state replicates the external pattern. Emulation can be relatively voluntary or compulsory, depending upon the extent to which international actors oblige a state to make reforms in order to become members or receive other inducements; this represents the first factor. Emulation can be relatively faithful or it can be approximate, which represents the second factor. The combination of these two factors results in four modes, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Modes of Emulation

	More Voluntary	Less Voluntary
Faithful	Copies	Patches
Approximate	Templates	Thresholds

The first mode of emulation, which I label “Copies,” reflects the voluntary and faithful spread of institutions from one place to another. Such cases, which some analysts call “diffusion,” did occur in Central and Eastern Europe, but they were rather rare. For this reason, the extensive literature on policy diffusion — with its emphasis on foreign debt levels, GDP starting points, presidential vs. parliamentary systems, and religion — is not very helpful in understanding what was actually happening on the ground. Much more common were three other modes of emulation that occurred alongside simple copying.

One such mode I call “templates,” which is characterized by voluntary but approximate emulation. As Communism collapsed, some CEE elites looked to Western Europe for general models rather than for detailed blueprints. In some of these cases, CEE states sought advice directly from EU and NATO officials. But often they simply adapted national templates from Western states and combined these with entirely indigenous institutional reforms, resulting in significant local modifications of the foreign template.

As NATO and, later, the EU announced forthcoming enlargements and began to inventory CEE practices, however, the degree of voluntarism fell off markedly. One result was what I call the “thresholds” mode of emulation; this occurred where the EU and NATO set minimum standards for policy and institutional changes in applicant states. These standards were typically rough and approximate but also significantly less voluntary.

When the CEE states’ membership drew very near, both NATO and the EU sometimes required mandatory and faithful “patches.” This fourth mode of emulation allowed CEE elites the least discretion of all, for these patches were quite explicit, often involving specific legal texts to be incorporated en bloc into national law. CEE elites used patches to “fill out” policy domains where their own existing structures were quite thin, and also to fix what NATO and the EU deemed to be holes in existing legislative practices or administrative capacities. Indeed, policy areas once characterized by the industrious, if voluntaristic, use of “templates” later witnessed a mad rush to “patch” borrowed policy frameworks when international organizations deemed existing local practices inadequate.

But just as there is a range of ways to emulate Western practices, so too is there a range of outcomes. Again, two broad factors are key. First, at the international level, we need to know the extent of the demands emanating from the external actor. What is the “rule density” of the international organization? Are the rules many and detailed or few and vague? Second, within the given policy sector, what sort of institutional capacity was present when Communism collapsed? If the policy sectors are already densely populated, state and social actors may be able to contest the adoption of some Western models and to reshape others.

In the CEE cases I examined, whenever the external actor placed heavy demands (i.e., high rule density) on powerful actors (i.e., policy sectors with substantial existing capacity), these demands led to high-profile struggles. In agriculture, emulation was a precondition for financial support from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which spurred intense debates about the extent of assistance that would flow to farmers after the desired institutions and policies were in place. Likewise for the military, certain thresholds of civilian control were a precondition for NATO membership; sometimes these standards provoked conflicts between civilians and certain factions of the armed forces.

By contrast, when external demands were light, actors who were well-established could use emulation to engage in relatively unpressured learning. This outcome was evident in several health care cases, as CEE Ministries of Health and local groups paid close attention to specific health care models from Western Europe and even from the United States. However, these actors picked and chose the features they liked, ignoring those they did not.

Regional economic development and consumer protection are two areas in which CEE interests were much less organized between 1989 and 1990, and thus domestic structures constituted far less of a brake on reform initiatives. Here, rule density mattered a lot. For example, in regional policy, the EU rules — including ones pushed informally by the European Commission — provided a “scaffolding,” or framework, around which previously unorganized interests could congeal. In consumer protection, on the other hand, where the density of EU rules is quite modest, the rules have been sufficient only to encourage a few isolated pioneer groups to push forward into this new policy area — a phenomenon I call “homesteading.” Looking at the results on the ground, the scaffolding pattern has already made a real difference. Homesteading, at least so far, has not.

Table 2: Outcomes of Emulation (Examples)

	Low Density of Actors	High Density of Actors
Low Density of Rules	Homesteading (Consumer Protection)	Continuous Learning (Health Care)
High Density of Rules	Scaffolding (Regional Policy)	Open Struggle (Agriculture, Civilian Control of the Military)

These four possible outcomes of emulation efforts are summarized in Table 2. Taken together, the two tables help us to see that even if a powerful external actor shapes an emerging state’s ultimate destination, it matters which road the state takes to get there. Emulation is least effective precisely where it is used most often: in policy sectors with pressing external demands and few domestic precursors to respond to such demands. In these situations, local elites have often scrambled to get the right policies on the books, even while lacking the necessary actors to produce the effects that the EU and NATO have intended. The policies look fine on paper, but practices lag far behind.

Cases

To examine and explain patterns of CEE emulation, I have compared the Czech Republic with Hungary. These states share several important features that previous research has linked to emulation by diffusion. They were “close” to Western Europe in terms of history, geography, and the political race for membership in Western institutions. Six policy sectors (agriculture, regional policy, consumer protection, health care, civilian control of the military, and military professionalism) provide twelve initial cases. Other case studies on Poland, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, and Sweden provide a secondary basis for my findings.

Joining the European Union Within the EU, different policy sectors have had radically different dynamics, which has had important implications for the emulation process. In health care, the EU acquis has been particularly small, leaving CEE states free to pick and choose (or ignore) prevailing Western models. Czech and Hungarian elites had strong incentives to renovate this policy area and replace its Communist-era practices; they ordered several items from the Western menu, though they did so selectively and in stages. The CEE states have used policy templates while engaging in continuous learning to reconnect their own pre-Communist, insurance-based traditions of health care with those that now prevail in several Western European states. In fits and starts, they learned which foreign models they could adapt to their needs. Yet local interests did not always reshape foreign designs for the better. For example, the new CEE health insurance systems also have been gamed by local health care providers and further undercut by politicians reluctant to oblige patients to make co-payments that could keep the new systems solvent. One result is that the under-the-table payments to doctors that were supposed to disappear have actually increased in the region, especially in Hungary.

In consumer protection, the EU also has relatively low rule density. In contrast to health care, however, this domain is practically devoid of local institutional predecessors. The outcome was the gradual homesteading, by only a few actors, of an almost totally new policy domain in both the Czech Republic and Hungary. The EU had less than twenty directives governing consumer protection to be transposed into national law, and this was sufficient only to attract a sparse group of pioneering state actors and societal partners. Furthermore, these pioneer groups remain almost completely dependent on outside support rather than on dues from actual consumers, their presumed clientele.

In agriculture and regional economic development, by contrast, the EU’s rule density is higher, and specific changes were clearly demanded by the EU. Since the EU spends most of its budget on these programs, local elites had strong incentives to avoid missing out on important sources of external funding. In the agriculture case, the outcome was a high-profile struggle, as agricultural interest groups and their patrons tried to maximize EU agricultural spending in CEE (though ultimately they had to accept second-class status within the CAP until 2013). Why was this “open struggle” so intense? National politicians could win few votes by anticipating the institutional reforms that CAP would require, which would have been extraordinarily expensive and benefited a rather narrow constituency. The reforms made sense only if these costs could be recouped by achieving membership in the CAP. Thus, CEE elites pursued membership, but they tried to avoid the required institutional changes until the eve of that membership.

In regional policy, by contrast, the EU thresholds and technical regulations functioned as a scaffolding for thinly organized domestic interests that might benefit from such funding. Far from attracting only a few homesteaders, emulation in this field helped generate significant shifts in the number and type of sub-state actors. In Hungary and especially in the Czech Republic, given the paucity of existing local structures, the scaffolding served not just as an external platform but also as the framework of the new building. Numerous new actors coalesced around its support. While the resulting structure is unmistakably improvised, it is just as unmistakably present.

Joining NATO

Although CEE elites began calling for NATO and EU membership at roughly the same time, NATO agreed to its first post-Communist enlargement in 1997 — five and a half years prior to the EU decision on enlargement. The much-faster arrival of NATO membership left less time for purely voluntary emulation among CEE states. In addition, because the actual enlargement of NATO (in 1999) came so much sooner than that of the EU (in 2004), there has been a far better opportunity to evaluate implementation after NATO membership. (This is important because a great deal of reform remained undone when NATO expanded and because the new members have already faced two military crises — the bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo crisis and the post–September 11 war on terrorism.) Reforms of civil-military relations were initially voluntary but increasingly came to resemble the threshold mode discussed earlier — that is, heightened external pressure to meet NATO standards, coupled with a willingness by NATO to accept approximate, rather than exact, emulation. NATO made constant, if vague, demands for improvement of civilian control over military institutions. The result was an intense struggle over these thresholds.

NATO also sought to promote military professionalism in the wake of enlargement and in the midst of the two crises. Because NATO members had loose and diverse standards for what constitutes military professionalism, the dominant mode of emulation was the voluntary use of templates. An example is the issue of an all-volunteer force, which NATO has not insisted upon, but which the Czechs and Hungarians have nonetheless embraced.

While the EU gave CEE elites relatively clear guidelines to emulate, NATO took roughly the opposite approach. NATO officials saw their role as giving broad reform thresholds without specifying any one blueprint. CEE officials openly acknowledged the imprecise nature of these targets, and indeed they often wished for more explicit guidance from NATO. But real military modernization was not a consistent priority for CEE politicians, electorates, or the armed forces themselves. Therefore, CEE states made little use of foreign templates during the long period free from external (NATO) pressure. NATO did establish some thresholds, including civilian-control institutions, and it did ultimately pressure CEE states to patch some glaring holes in defense laws and practices. Since achieving membership, the CEE states — helped by foreign consultants, though free of any obligation to do so — have used specific national templates to reform other aspects of their armed forces.

That differences in policy areas matter so much when looking at processes of emulation helps explain why so much previous research on Central and Eastern Europe has found little explanatory power in the classic diffusion variables mentioned earlier (debt levels, GDP per capita, etc.). These national factors cannot explain reform outcomes — including the strength and configuration of state and societal interests in a given policy sector and the density of external rules imposed on that sector — as well as sector-specific variables can. The existing literature on policy diffusion therefore needs to be seriously reconsidered. In Central and Eastern Europe, at least, diffusion is both the wrong question (because modes of emulation are more variable) and the wrong answer (because the causes of diffusion don’t explain the broader patterns of emulation outcomes).

Policy and Conceptual Implications

Can leaders of one country learn lessons from those of another? If so, is it better to learn by taking explicit advice, or is it better to observe from a distance? Should lessons lead to rapid change, or is real learning best achieved gradually? If local conditions differ — and they always do — should we try to change the imported practices or change the local conditions?

Running throughout all of these questions is the crucial distinction between superficial changes and real, enduring ones. The cases I examined provide grounds for both optimism and pessimism about post-Communist reforms in the CEE states. On one hand, many positive changes have been accelerated far beyond what would have occurred without EU and NATO pressures. Some of these reforms are likely to benefit CEE states considerably. Examples include setting up a rudimentary system of regional policy during a period in which regional disparities are growing rapidly; partially decoupling health spending from fiscally strapped state central budgets; and clarifying the chain of military command. If some of the reforms have strained both budgets and personnel, they have also helped mobilize significant amounts of Western expertise and money to help ease these burdens. Even when some of the changes appear to have relatively low intrinsic value in CEE states — as with some of the consumer protection statutes — the engagement they bring with broader European policy networks probably surpasses the modest efforts made there to match European standards.

On the other hand, many of these reforms are purely elite-driven projects. The EU and NATO reforms are poorly understood by the broad population and even by local and regional government officials of these states. Worse still, some of the EU rules may just be bad ideas in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The prevailing EU rules are the result of protracted debates among current member states, all of whom are wealthier and have more recent democratic traditions than the CEE states. This issue is not easily captured in the question of whether the institutions will “fit” in Central and Eastern Europe. Institutions that really matter rarely do fit; rather, institutional reforms are significant precisely when they force adjustments leading to aggregate welfare or security gains by formalizing procedures that are not well calibrated to prevailing practices. When institutions fit too well, they may simply reinforce existing practices; the whole point of reform, after all, is to challenge existing comfort zones. But when external actors demand radical revisions without specifying intermediate steps or offering transitional aid, the destruction they cause may create nothing but market exit and political resentment. Officials of the EU, NATO, and CEE states are aware of that tension but, given the inflexibility of the superimposed rules in some policy areas, have been unable to resolve it.

The remarkable changes that have come about in the CEE states since the toppling of Communism can hardly be disputed. However, the imperative to transpose the 80,000-page EU acquis and even the looser NATO rules into national law has sometimes given rise to Potemkin institutions that are more facade than fact. Of course, even the older EU and NATO members sometimes fail to meet their commitments to one another, so compliance problems are not prima facie evidence that CEE states will be bad members of either organization.

Conceptually, these cases challenge any exclusive emphasis on instrumental rationality, persuasive norms, or legacies of the past as the privileged explanatory factor. Indeed, all three factors seem essential in explaining different aspects of emulation in the region. For example, even though it seemed rational for CEE elites to assent to almost all international organization demands in order to secure membership, the substance of what national elites assented to was shaped by a set of norms that fit unevenly with prevailing practices and understandings in their own countries. There was also a gap between what elites promised to the international organizations — often in good faith — and what their national political systems could deliver.

Pure rationalist approaches run the danger of radically underdetermining the outcomes of emulation; they focus too much attention on external demands, which are only one determinant of the outcomes we observe. But neither will it do to throw out rationality or, even worse, to assume that CEE elites are too inexperienced to think strategically without the coaching of international organizations. Rather than over- or underemphasizing rationality, we should embed it in the two contexts we clearly see operating in CEE: norms and history. Rationality, thus embedded, can take us a long way toward understanding these outcomes.

Wade Jacoby is an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Europe, a Title VI National Resource Center. This article is based on research from his recent book, The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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