Although several international organizations (IOs) participated
actively in Eastern Europe's ethnic politics during the past
decade, research on their role tends to focus on a single institution
and the particular strategy it applied. The Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has been praised for easing ethnic
tensions, but studies rarely focus on its concrete policy effects or
they ignore the role of the European Union (EU).1
Studies of EU conditionality
similarly disregard the vast diplomatic efforts of the Council of
Europe (CE) and the OSCE, or studies focus on broad democratic trends
rather than particular policies.
2 This article sorts out the institutional effects for the first time
by using extensive new data to compare how the OSCE, the CE, and the EU
influenced the governments of Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania to
pass certain ethnic minority legislation during the 1990s. I argue that
socialization-based methods such as persuasion and social influence
were not very effective when they were used alone, and I show, both
through quantitative and qualitative analysis, that more
rational-choice-based efforts such as membership conditionality were
crucial in changing policy.3
I consider as
minorities ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, and native
Russian speakers in Latvia and Estonia. I refer to the EU even when it
was the EC. Similarly I refer to the OSCE, although the OSCE was the
CSCE before 1995.
I make three propositions. First, membership conditionality by the EU
and occasionally by the CE motivated most policy decisions, but
socialization-based efforts often guided them. Case after case
illustrates the link between conditionality and decisions to change
policies, but the cases also show how the CE and especially the OSCE
often shaped the substance of the solutions. Second, domestic
opposition posed greater obstacles to socialization-based efforts than
it did to membership conditionality: when European institutions used
only socialization-based efforts—which they did quite
frequently—governments rarely changed their behavior.
Socialization-based efforts alone failed in particular when the
domestic opposition was strong. Subsequently, in the rare cases when
socialization-based efforts did influence ethnic policy without the
added use of conditionality, the domestic opposition was usually low
and the effect was only moderate. Third, as domestic opposition grew,
incentive-based methods such as membership conditionality were not only
increasingly necessary to change behavior, but they were also
surprisingly effective. Willingness to compromise depended less on the
initial position of policymakers than on how much they wanted the
reward. Indeed, the vocal opposition to some of the policy compromises
and the accompanying political tug-of-war underscored that most of the
changes were reluctant responses to the external incentives, rather
than products of socialization. While these propositions naturally rest
on evidence about ethnic minorities in Europe, the varied involvement
of IOs on different ethnic issues, as well as across countries and over
time, provides valuable insights that deserve to be included in the
larger debate about institutional effects.
I first describe the empirical puzzle and present my analytical
framework drawn on international relations theory and considerations of
domestic policy. I then discuss possible alternative explanations for
the ethnic policy choices of states. I argue that traditional
explanations of ethnic politics that locate the source of the policies
domestically or with the homelands are inadequate. After describing the
data and methods, I examine the statistical findings and case studies
in the light of my propositions. To conclude, I assess the relative
power of conditionality and socialization-based methods in changing
policy and discuss the generalizability and implications of the
findings.
Explaining Policy Choices
One of the most pressing challenges for Baltic and Central European
states in the 1990s was tackling ethnic minority issues such as
residency rights, citizenship, language issues, and education rights.
With the January 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Hungarians became
a much more visible minority group, their proportion rising from 3
percent in Czechoslovakia to nearly 10 percent in the new Slovakia.
Slovakia's Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar quickly realized the
potential of exploiting nationalist rhetoric to maintain political
office, which he managed to do with only a brief interlude until the
1998 elections. Hungarians in Romania made up about 8 percent of a
population of twenty-two million. As had indeed also been the case in
Slovakia, before the 1990s, Romania underwent a strong communist period
that downplayed ethnic identity in favor of party identity. While
ethnic Hungarians had therefore been part of the movement to overthrow
communist dictator Nicolae Çeausescu, the revolutionary move
toward democratization fueled—not decreased—ethnic tension.
Like Meciar, Romanian President Ion Iliescu boosted his popularity
through exploited nationalist rhetoric and had to cooperate with more
extreme parties to maintain political power. Though of a different
nature, ethnic tensions were also prevalent as the Baltic states
emerged from decades of domination by the former Soviet Union. The
ethnic Baltic populations had seen their share of the population in
their countries decline drastically. By the time of independence,
ethnic Latvians barely comprised half the population of 2.6 million,
while Russian-speaking residents made up more than a million, of which
700,000 became stateless when Latvia declared independence. Similarly,
about 30 percent of Estonia's 1.4 million population, or as many
as 400,000, had no citizenship in Estonia or elsewhere and most spoke
no Estonian. This presented a challenge to the desire of ethnic
Latvians and Estonians to reassert their national identity. As this
examination of the domestic politics reveals, the initial circumstances
in the early 1990s did not particularly favor the accommodation of
ethnic minorities. Why, then, did these countries make legislative
concessions at all, and what explains the variation in the degree of
accommodation and the timing of the policy decisions? Why, for example,
did Latvia scrap a harsh quota system for naturalization in 1994, yet
introduce language legislation in 1998 that made it difficult for
non-Latvian speakers to live and work in Latvia? Or why did Slovakia
forbid the issuance of bilingual school certificates in 1996, a nearly
seventy-year-old practice, when it had passed laws permitting the use
of ethnic place and personal names in 1994?
The Effects of International Institutions
International relations theory offers several mechanisms through
which international actors such as IOs may influence state behavior.
Two specific mechanisms are particularly relevant given the IOs'
activities. The first mechanism is membership conditionality whereby
institutions link admission directly to behavior. This is akin to
conventional conditionality and incentive use: states respond to
incentives and sanctions imposed by international actors, thereby
maximizing their payoffs. This mechanism corresponds with a rationalist
set of assumptions that define actors as cost-benefit-calculating,
utility-maximizing actors. It fits well with Bulgarian Prime Minister
Ivan Kostov's comment in April 2000: “With all my respect
for the West, I am watching there only the opinion of the structures,
which finance Bulgaria. All the others, whatever they say, are of no
importance.”4
Reuters Wire
Service, 14 April 2000.
The second mechanism—socialization-based methods—includes
a broader set of socialization processes such as social influence or
persuasion.5
In Kelley
2004, I refer to these as “normative
pressure.”
The defining feature is that external actors
do not link any concrete incentives to behavior but rely solely on the
use of norms to either persuade, shame, or praise actors into changing
their policies. Several causal mechanisms can thus be at play ranging
from constructivist to instrumentalist in their assumptions:
6 socialization-based efforts may
change behavior by changing actors' beliefs,
7 or
actors may rely on a more calculating use of norms to solicit behavior
change through a state's concern for its reputation.
8 Johnston calls this latter form of socialization
“social influence”
9 and argues that it can lead actors to display pronorm
behavior in the absence of exogenous material incentives. While
reputational concerns essentially are about benefits of future
exchange,
10 social influence is a softer method than outright
conditionality. Herein I do not evaluate which of these causal pathways
is at work, but instead examine when such socialization-based efforts
are likely to change behavior.
Because membership conditionality and socialization-based efforts are
not mutually exclusive, it is compelling to study both mechanisms under
the same framework to sort out their effects.11
This is tricky, however, because rational-choice
scholars focus on behavior change, while socialization scholars
traditionally focus on belief change. With the proper caution, it is
nevertheless useful to study both mechanisms in terms of their policy
effects. Although this somewhat slights the norm-based approach, it is
constructive for three reasons. First, behavioral effects are an
important part of the overall socialization puzzle.
12 Second, it
informs policy because it is in line with the actual goals of the
actors: the three European organizations in this study all had the
ultimate goal of changing behavior. Third, it facilitates measurement
of the dependent variable. The caveat is that the conclusions about
socialization-based methods apply only to the behavioral outcome and
not to the more traditional dependent variables of
internationalization, belief change, and so on. As I discuss later,
these may indeed occur without leading to behavior change.
The IOs' activities on the ground conform well to the
descriptions of the two mechanisms. The EU, the OSCE, and the CE first
and foremost tried to use communication as a manipulative or persuasive
tool. In a combination of ad-hoc visits, letters, reports,
declarations, and other forms of interaction, institutions advocated
certain legislative goals. The institutions held press conferences and
followed up visits with written communication. In Latvia and Estonia,
the OSCE also had in-country missions, deployed in 1993, to address
citizenship, language, education, employment, and other sensitive
issues. These three IOs also had monitoring mechanisms and issued
reports and formal statements to guide, advise, and sometimes shame a
country. These activities largely conform to what many socialization
scholars study under the rubric of persuasion and social influence.13
For the EU and the CE, membership conditionality was a convenient
extension of these efforts.14
Because the
countries all joined the OSCE when they became independent (except
Romania, which was already a member), the OSCE did not use membership
conditionality.
CE “rapporteurs” visited applicant
countries and recommended policy changes related to minority policies.
Sometimes the CE required the reforms before admission, and sometimes
the CE would accept a commitment from the state to change the policy
within a set timeframe, most commonly six months. The EU also included
ethnic minority issues in its admission criteria.
15 The first direct reference was the 1993 Copenhagen
Criteria, which stated the need for candidate states to demonstrate
“respect for national minorities.”
During the
mid-1990s, the EU addressed issues in various applicant states, but it
lacked a detailed prescription for each state. Starting in 1996,
however, when preparing the 1997
Agenda 2000 reports on
accession progress, the EU began to form a detailed set of
country-specific expectations. The EU followed these up annually in
reports and also continuously in other interaction. In many cases the
EU bluntly stated the need to pass or change certain ethnic minority
legislation as a
sine qua non requirement for opening
membership negotiations. The EU, however, rarely dictated the
formulation of policy as much as it stressed the need to address
critical issues satisfactorily.
Were these organizational efforts effective in changing policies
relating to ethnic minorities?16
The
institutions often have other goals than changing policy, against which
their overall “effectiveness” should be evaluated.
Many of the factors that socialization theory suggests as conducive to
change were certainly present: the target state was in transition, the
socializing actors belonged to a desired in-group, and there was
extensive face-to-face dialogue.
17 This situation would predict the success of socialization
efforts. On the other hand, belief change or reputational concerns
might fail to occur, or might fail to translate into policy. Persuasion
or social influence, if only successful with a minority of
policymakers, might not produce a winning coalition to actually pass a
policy.
18 Thus socialization-based efforts
might well be less likely to change policy as the opposition among
domestic policymakers increases. Indeed, studies of successful
socialization-driven change in behavior tend to be cases with
relatively low domestic opposition.
19 Was the use of membership conditionality effective? Again,
international relations theory makes ambiguous predictions. Studies of
economic conditionality are a natural body of work to examine for
insights about membership conditionality. Scholars are ambivalent as to
the effects of economic conditionality, however, not the least because
there are multiple ways of measuring success ranging from economic
performance indicators, to policy implementation and program completion
measures.20
On the adoption of
policy reforms, however, which is the variable most likely to inform
membership conditionality, studies fail to find a statistically significant
association between economic conditionality and the policies.
21 Subsequently, the policy
community engaged in aid and lending conditionality is now stressing
the necessity of “ownership” of reforms—the degree of
domestic engagement in the design of the “conditions.”
Inferences from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank
economic conditionality to CE and EU membership conditionality are
problematic, because of the different nature of the problems that
economic conditionality addresses. If anything, however, the economic
conditionality literature suggests that conditionality is unsuccessful
at getting governments to reform policies, and that the minimum
condition for effectiveness in any measure is domestic engagement.
The body of other theory relevant to membership conditionality is
slim. Work on political conditionality is sparse.22
Most research on EU conditionality focuses on broader democratic reforms or
institution building and does not test if conditionality produces specific
policy changes. Indeed, Grabbe suggests that EU conditionality has been
quite influential in general, but that for various reasons it has not
been a good “scalpel” for carving out individual policy
reforms.
23 Pevehouse argues that
membership conditionality can largely be ignored as a mechanism for
spurring democratic transitions and that the main effects of IOs on
domestic politics come after countries join an IO.
24 As with socialization-based efforts, it is important to understand
why membership conditionality might fail. The theory of incentive use
rests on the proposition that linking membership benefits with specific
policies can entice domestic actors to change their behavior.25
However, as with any
incentive strategy, discounting and uncertainty complicates decision
making.
26 With EU membership conditionality, this
uncertainty is particularly relevant as the policy costs are typically
up front, while actual membership is distant and uncertain. Decreasing
the likelihood of success further, EU conditionality is often poorly
defined and is intertwined with literally hundreds of other issues from
electricity to trade. Given these factors, which all reduce the
expected value of membership, domestic opposition to accommodate ethnic
minorities may be so strong that future membership fails to offset the
political losses of the key players. The advantage of membership
conditionality, however, is that if the change in payoffs is large
enough, policy actors may change their behavior even if they do not
accept the normative argument. In addition, policymakers can use the
external concessions to rationalize the policy changes to their
constituencies. As an Estonian parliament member—who acknowledged
that she changed her vote because of the linkage to EU
membership—said regarding Estonia's concessions that allowed
stateless children to gain Estonian citizenship: “Some of my
colleagues said in their speeches that they were voting for the law
because of international pressure and because we [could] lose
our nice position and relationship with the EU.”
27 Interviews by author with Liia Hanni,
member of Estonian parliament, 21 September 1999, Talinn,
Estonia.
Thus, the chances of forming a winning coalition may
be higher with membership conditionality than with socialization-based
efforts.
Domestic Politics
The above discussion highlights the need to understand the role of
the domestic opposition. Several groups in the target states have
strong stakes in the outcomes. In young democracies with ethnic
minorities, parties often organize along ethnic lines and oppose
international efforts.28
Such parties are often well organized with
privileged positions on key committees or in relevant ministries. The
quality of leadership is also critical, especially if the
institutions' recommendations jeopardize leaders' personal
interests.
29 Hawkins argues that authoritarian
leaders only will follow international norms to placate international
opponents when it “allows the regime to shore up its authority
and legitimacy and to deflect international pressures.”
30 Even in states without strong nationalist groups,
some parties resist efforts to accommodate ethnic minorities.
31 Figure 1 shows how policymakers'
receptivity to external requirements depends on their initial policy
stance on a given issue. Some policymakers will prefer policies that
already align with the international requirements, and thus
intervention is irrelevant. This was the case, for example, when Latvia
passed a law on cultural autonomy in 1991 without any institutional
prompting. On other issues, some policymakers do not initially agree,
but their policy preferences do not deviate greatly from international
standards. This was the case regarding efforts to ease the testing
requirements for naturalization in the Baltic states. Here involvement
by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the OSCE proved
these issues to be more a point of dialogue, training, and technical
improvements. In other cases, the policy preference differs drastically
from that of the institutions, as in the case of the fervent opposition
of some Romanian and Slovak politicians to the conclusion of treaties
with Hungary. During negotiations, Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Schenk
said that questions remained, “on which Slovakia cannot
yield.”32
CTK National News
Wire, 15 March 1995.
In the last category also fall
policymakers who benefit personally from the status quo even if the
country as a whole stands to gain from admission to the IOs, as in the
case of Slovakia's Meciar on the issue of election reform.
Receptivity of policymakers to external requirements
To account for domestic influences, studies commonly use macro-level
factors such as the nature of party systems, the domestic institutional
makeup, and economic data. These explanations, however, lack variation
across issues. To increase analytical leverage, I examine the unique
circumstances at the decision-making level for each policy issue in a
given parliament. A country's overall receptivity to the different
external strategies is a function of the receptivity of individual
policymakers as well as their ability to form coalitions. Thus, I
analyze how following the institutions' recommendations will
influence the domestic power balance, what the views of key groups on
the issue are, and what positions ethnic minorities themselves hold
vis-à-vis staunch opponents.33
Alternative Explanations
Before discussing the findings it is interesting to explore the
non–IO-based explanations for a state's choice of ethnic
minority policy. Based on theories of domestic distribution of power
among social groups and political actors, scholars of ethnic issues
often emphasize the role of a nation's demographics, political
system of representation, and the relationship between the ethnic
groups within a country.34
While domestic factors
are important puzzle pieces, however, they leave the picture
incomplete: in many cases governments compromised on ethnic policies in
spite of strong domestic opposition. Estonia, for example, fervently
opposed liberalizing the citizenship law. As late as 1997, a poll
showed 44 percent of ethnic Estonians agreeing that only “those
whose families were citizens here before 1940” had the right to
Estonian citizenship, and 62 percent of these held that view very
strongly.
35 Following that lead, Prime Minister Mart Siimann
said that his government would not change the principles of Estonia's
law on citizenship, and, after a visit by OSCE High Commissioner on
National Minorities (HCNM) Max van der Stoel, parliamentarian Mart Nutt,
a frequent spokesperson against liberalization, branded Van der
Stoel's recommendation as potentially dangerous for Estonian
independence.
36 Baltic News
Service, 9 April 1997.
Thus, Estonia's eventual
compromise on the law, as well as similar concessions by other
countries, begs a more detailed understanding of how domestic politics
interacts with other factors.
Other explanations of ethnic minority policies focus on how homelands
such as Russia or Hungary may threaten or sanction states to improve
the lot of their diasporas.37
Hungary
certainly had no desire to use either economic or security clout
against Slovakia and Romania, however, given that all three countries
were vying for EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
membership. Similarly, while Russia had a complex and influential
relationship with the Baltic states, there is little evidence that
Russia actually motivated any specific legislation to accommodate
ethnic minorities. Russia did make some botched military attempts on
Baltic capitals during the early independence movements. If military
influence mattered, however, then the best policy outcomes should have
occurred in the beginning of the 1990s when Russia still maintained
more than 100,000 military personnel in the Baltic states. This was not
the case. Furthermore, Russia mostly used economic threats for domestic
electioneering, and while these played a part at times, they do not
explain the chosen policies over time. Indeed, Russia's efforts
often created more resentment than cooperation and met with sharp
international criticism: EU Commissioner for External Relations Hans
van den Broek warned Russia during its most overt attempt in spring
1998: “We've made it clear to Russia that we do not accept
their attempts to mix political and economic issues…. We resist
unjustified pressure on an EU candidate.”
38 RFE Newsline, 21 July 1998.
If anything,
Russia and Hungary's greatest role was more indirect, in that they
used IOs—particularly the OSCE and the CE—to call attention
to ethnic issues. This sometimes explains why institutions became
involved, but it does not explain the outcomes.
Another possibility is that the countries simply made changes in step
with their understanding and implementation of democracy. If this was
the case, however, then all issues should improve over time, and
efforts earlier in the 1990s should be less effective than those in the
late 1990s. Contrarily, some policy compromises occurred early—as
when Estonia passed amendments in 1993 to simplify naturalization for
so-called “loyal citizens,”39
or in 1994 when Slovakia's interim
government under Jozef Moravcik passed a law on the use of ethnic
personal and place names—while countries sometimes introduced
restrictive legislation even in the late 1990s. One example of this was
Latvia's passage in 1998 of an education law that bore few marks
of the extensive and specific advice that the OSCE HCNM had offered.
Similarly, both Latvia and Estonia attempted to tighten their election
and language laws in the late 1990s by setting language proficiency
requirements for candidates for political office and for participants
in various private business endeavors. Thus, these alternative
explanations fall short.
Summary of Propositions
First, when used alone, socialization-based methods rarely change
behavior; when they do, the domestic opposition is usually low.
Second, applying membership conditionality is crucial: it produces
policy change much more effectively than stand-alone
socialization-based efforts and it can do so even in the face of strong
domestic opposition. Indeed, willingness to compromise depends less on
the initial position of policymakers, than on how much they want the
reward. Thus, as domestic opposition increases, it becomes increasingly
necessary for institutions to use membership conditionality to change
behavior.
Finally, while conditionality motivates most significant behavior
changes, socialization-based efforts often play a key role in guiding
the substance of the reforms.
Data and Methods
Accurately assessing whether an IO influenced domestic policy is
challenging: some policy change might instead be related to domestic
political incentives; in other instances, governments may make hollow
promises to the organizations. The key challenge is to isolate the
effect of the institutions and to understand how that effect came
about. The activities of the European institutions present a good,
though not a perfect, natural experiment as Table
1 shows.
Cases and possible inferences
I rely on a data set and case studies that I developed based on my
research and interviews with seventy-six persons at the EU in Brussels,
the OSCE HCNM in The Hague, and government and other experts in the
countries.40
I interviewed the key policy
participants that represented different ethnic groups as well as the
full spectrum of political views. I also interviewed institutional
representatives who interacted directly with the countries on each
issue. I consistently solicited names from interviewees and outside
experts to confirm the relevance of the various interviewees and
identify their possible biases.
I divided the country studies into sixty-four subcases using
different issues and governments over time to define cases.41
King, Keohane, and Verba
1994, 24. Although each observation is not completely
independent, the outcomes on most issues can be observed separately and
they are often not correlated.
In addition to interviews, I
tracked all the ethnic minority-related legislation in Slovakia, Romania,
Latvia, and Estonia from 1991 to 1999. I compared cases when IOs used
socialization-based efforts alone with cases when they combined it with
conditionality and then again with cases when no IOs were involved (see
Table 1). I used in-depth case studies of how
each government addressed each issue to provide insight into the causality.
Finally, I used counterfactual analysis to examine the relative importance
of the two mechanisms when they were used together.
Given the focus on behavior, the most important data were the initial
policy on a given issue and the final policy.42
For parsimony and consistency, I use legislation as the
primary measurement, but I do consider implementation issues to the
extent that they cast further light on an outcome.
On the
independent variable, the most important data were records of the
frequency, content, and character of IO involvement. To infer
causation, it was crucial to follow the process of interaction between
national and international actors, and to study any comments by actors
about their motivation. In assessing domestic opposition, the most
important data were party documentation, parliamentary discussion, news
media, and interviews. Most of the above data were available, except
the informal or classified records, which interviews to some extent
could probe.
The four countries provide a good analytical set, because
Russian-speakers constitute the main minority group in both Latvia and
Estonia, and ethnic Hungarians are the main minority group in Slovakia
and Romania. At the same time, there is variation in how European
institutions addressed the countries and issues. Importantly, the data
allow the hypotheses to be rejected, because about half the cases were
not successful cases of policy adaptation. There is also a fairly even
division between a complete lack of institutional involvement and the
two institutional mechanisms. Finally, although there is a selection
bias in the data, this bias favors stronger conclusions,
because—probably because of the increased international attention
on high-profile issues—institutions were involved more when the
domestic opposition was high. This makes it harder, not easier, to show
institutional effects.43
The Appendix
includes a table of involvement by domestic opposition.
The dependent variable is the government's legislative behavior
on an issue.44
I do not use lagged
variables, because the institutions directed their efforts specifically
at the current governments, and the governments did consider their
efforts and respond. The consequences of this choice should be
considered, however. If engagement by external actors occurs in period,
but not in t − 1 or t + 1, and a change occurred in period t,
this would suggest that the external action was effective. If there was
no change in period t, however, but a lagged change in period t + 1,
then the applied method would conclude that the efforts of period t
were not effective, and that change occurred in the absence of such
action in period t + 1; thus it was completely uncorrelated. If
socialization occurred in t − 1, however, and conditionality was
added in t and change occurred, then this change could be wrongly
attributed to conditionality, when it was really a lagged effect of
socialization-based efforts. There are several cases, however, where
actors used socialization-based efforts for multiple consecutive
periods, without behavior changing until conditionality was added.
There were also cases where conditionality was never applied. Most
importantly, the case studies provided a way of following issues over
time and considering possible lagged effects.
The qualitative
analysis provides rich descriptions of the policy outcomes, while the
quantitative analysis uses a three-level assessment of the outcome: not
compatible, partly compatible, or compatible with international
standards and demands.
45 A list of the
legal documents against which the outcomes are evaluated can be
obtained from the author.
In the subsequent discussion I
merely label these outcomes as “not compatible,”
“partly compatible,” and “compatible.”
Quantitatively, socialization-based efforts take on two values only:
present or not. The case studies develop a thicker description of the
socialization efforts. Similarly, membership conditionality takes on
two values. It is present if the institutions explicitly linked the
recommendations to membership and absent otherwise.
46 Note that by only accepting explicit linkage as
“conditionality,” I group cases where the link was
potentially implicit with the socialization-based efforts. If anything,
the effect of this coding choice will be in the opposite direction of
what I have argued. That is, socialization-based methods are likely to
prove more, not less, effective.
In addition, the case studies
ask how the linkage was expressed in terms of action and consequence,
how the institution committed to rewarding the incentive, and so on. I
code the domestic opposition on a five-point scale, although for
presentational ease I collapse this to three.
47 Note that I derive the quantitative data directly from the
case studies. For more on methodology see Kelley
2004.
Findings from the Quantitative Analysis
The IOs clearly produce policy effects. Table
2 contrasts the cases of no institutional involvement with cases
of involvement, which then again is broken down by type of involvement.
If one compares cases of involvement with cases of no involvement,
Table 2 shows that in twenty-three of the
forty-four cases where the institutions were involved, or 54 percent of
the cases, the policy outcome was “compatible” or
“partly compatible.” This is a 34 percent improvement over
the four of twenty cases when institutions were not
involved.
Distribution of outcomes by institutional involvement (sixty-four
observations)
Table 2 also shows, however, that
membership conditionality is much more effective than
socialization-based methods alone. A “compatible” outcome
occurred in almost three-quarters of cases when the institutions used
membership conditionality, whereas it only occurred in eight percent of
the cases when institutions used the socialization methods alone (or in
two actual cases). This suggests that incentives are a key causal
factor in policy change. Indeed, the policy outcomes of
socialization-based methods alone hardly differ from those where
institutions were not involved at all.
These findings hold when domestic factors are taken into account. In
ordered logit analysis, shown in Table 3,
regression I, institutional involvement is still significant in
explaining the outcomes even when a composite measurement of domestic
opposition is included. This is a rather sparse specification, though
to some extent the similarities between countries such as Latvia and
Estonia does provide for additional control factors, although they are
not specified in the regressions. Nevertheless, it is more interesting
to see whether the relative explanatory power of the different
institutional mechanisms still hold also. Regression II shows
that—although both efforts are significant—membership
conditionality consistently carries more explanatory power than
socialization-based methods. Not only is the finding more robust; the
coefficient is also much greater. Further, this coefficient only
captures the marginal effect of using membership conditionality. The
total effect when the IOs combine socialization-based methods with
membership conditionality is actually captured in the addition of the
two factors, for a total coefficient of 6.0703. Thus, because the IOs
always use membership conditionality in conjunction with
socialization-based efforts the coefficient of the effect of this
combined use exceeds the coefficient on socialization efforts alone by
a factor of approximately 2.5.
The role of institutional involvement in determining policy, ordered
logit
It is easier to grasp the magnitudes of each factor from regression
II by deriving the predicted probabilities for obtaining a compatible
outcome for each type of institutional involvement, while holding the
degree of domestic opposition constant.48
See Appendix for calculation of predicted scores.
For example, as shown in
Table 4 above, given
a strong domestic opposition, the predicted score of a compatible
outcome increases from 3 percent when institutions use
socialization-based efforts alone to 57 percent when institutions also
link membership incentives to the behavior. These results support the
propositions about the role of IOs and about the effectiveness of
conditionality in particular.
Predicted probabilities of a compatible outcome
Regressions III and IV show that including “minorities in
government” or the presence of a “dominant leader” in
the specification adds little explanatory power. Although the presence
of ethnic minorities shows Chi-square significance in Table 7 below, it fails to do so in the regression
analysis. Not only is “dominant leadership” statistically
insignificant, but it shows a positive coefficient. This may be because
the IOs were more likely to use conditionality in these cases. Overall,
however, the weak showing by these factors is likely because of data
limitations. What is important, however, is that even when controlling
for these factors, the other explanatory variables remain robust.
The point of the regression analysis is not that socialization-based
efforts always fail. Indeed, the findings on the effect of
socialization-based efforts remain robust if the sample excludes cases
of conditionality, showing that the effect is not somehow distorted by
the fact that there are no observations of conditionality without
socialization-based efforts. Indeed, in a few cases socialization-based
efforts alone produced results, such as in Romania's education law
improvements, or on Latvia's labor law. The significance of using
persuasion or social influence in isolation, however, only appears when
also considering domestic opposition. In general, it seems that both
methods work better the lower the domestic opposition.49
This is a suggestion of some interactive
effect, however, since the model is additive and does not include
factors that allow domestic opposition to interact with institutional
involvement. The sample size is too small to permit testing of
interactive effects.
Surprisingly, however,
Table 5, which only includes cases with strong
domestic opposition, shows that membership conditionality still
produced policy change in seven of twelve—or in 58
percent—of the these cases.
Outcome for cases of strong domestic opposition, by involvement
(thirty-three observations)
Although the leadership factor was not statistically significant in
regression IV, Table 6 shows that
authoritarian leadership, as displayed by Slovakian Prime Minister
Meciar and Romanian President Iliescu, is correlated with the outcomes.
Of seventeen cases with either Iliescu or Meciar in office, twelve had
incompatible outcomes, and only three were clearly compatible. Table 7 shows the correlation between ethnic
minorities in the government coalition and outcomes. This correlation
is statistically significant, but again, the occurrence is very small;
only eight of the sixty-four cases had ethnic minorities in the
government. Of these eight, two had incompatible outcomes, while six
had compatible outcomes. In some cases ethnic minorities clearly shaped
the policies. For example, Romania's eventual passage of the
education law and the law on the status of the civil service in 1999
was partly due to the negotiation position of the minorities within the
government. In 1998, ethnic Hungarians in the Slovak government also
helped push for the reinstatement of bilingual school certificates and
the passage of a minority language law. Caution is necessary here,
however, because minorities were rarely part of the government
coalitions, and were never part of the government in Estonia or Latvia.
It was also partly because of Western influences that the 1998 Slovak
and 1996 Romanian governments included ethnic minority parities at
all.50
Various author interviews with
members of the Slovak government coalition, February 2000, Bratislava,
Slovakia. See also Pridham 1999; and Vachudová 2001.
At times, domestic
ethnic groups (and their homelands) also used IOs as forums for articulating
their grievances and demanding greater respect for their rights. Ethnic
Hungarians were particularly adept at this, as when the Hungarian coalition
in Slovakia wrote the OSCE, the EU, and the CE, asking these institutions to
exert their influence so that the school directors and teachers who had
issued bilingual certificates would not suffer retaliation.
51 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 4
July 1997.
Thus, even when domestic actors played key parts,
so did the IOs.
Outcome by presence or absence of authoritarian leader (sixty-four
cases)
Outcome by presence or absence of minorities in government
(sixty-four cases)
In sum, while socialization-based efforts alone were primarily
effective when the opposition was low, somewhat contrary to the
expectations, domestic opposition only had a weak effect on membership
conditionality. In several cases, such as citizenship and language
issues in the Baltic states or the Slovak and Romanian treaties with
Hungary, as well as other cases discussed later, membership
conditionality worked in spite of strong domestic opposition. This
shows that policymakers' willingness to compromise in exchange for
benefits such as EU admission did not depend on their initial position
as much as one might assume.
Case Studies
A close study of the policy processes in the four countries bolsters
the statistical findings. To illustrate that the case studies included
herein are not unique but derive from a larger set of similarly
supportive cases, I overview a number of cases briefly before
discussing four cases in-depth. On a general note, policymakers often
did not take social influence or persuasive efforts very seriously.52
Indeed, some interviewees described how
politicians would be very polite during meetings with the OSCE HCNM,
only to quickly mock his suggestions after he had departed.
Some of the reply letters that the OSCE HCNM received from states
reflect this view well. For example, once after he had warned Slovakia
about a draft election law, Slovakia's foreign minister replied:
“I have the honour to inform you that this draft law has already
been adopted in the National Council of the Slovak Republic. It can
also be said that through this law the Slovak Republic safeguards the
right of the national minorities to govern the affairs they are concerned
with.”
53 Many other examples similarly illustrate how socialization-based
efforts alone failed to improve policy: The OSCE could not persuade the
Estonian president to veto the introduction of language requirements
for local and national candidates in 1998, and in 1994 the OSCE and the
EU (here not yet using the membership carrot) called in vain for
Estonia to issue permanent residency permits immediately to those who
were residents before July 1990. The pressure by the OSCE to change the
citizenship law in both Latvia and Estonia to allow stateless children
to acquire citizenship went unheeded for many years, and Latvia ignored
most of the OSCE recommendations in the 1998 education law. Thus,
socialization-based efforts alone typically produced meager legislative
results.
In contrast, numerous cases showed the power of membership
incentives. In 1994, the OSCE and CE pushed through changes in the
Latvian citizenship law as a precondition to CE admission, although the
Latvian population overwhelmingly favored a quota approach to
naturalization that would essentially exclude hundreds of thousands of
Russian-speakers from ever obtaining citizenship before their death.
Likewise, once the EU threw its weight behind the OSCE and CE
recommendations regarding stateless children, the legislation passed in
both Latvia and Estonia. EU warnings led Slovakia to abandon a harsh
penalty code, and later, to adopt a minority language law. Both Latvia
and Estonia conceded on their language laws in the late 1990s after the
EU linked this to admission. Conditionality drove the treaties with
Hungary: Romanian President Iliescu acknowledged that the desire to
join the EU and NATO “was indeed the most important
aspect,” driving the cooperation on the treaty with Hungary,54
Budapest MTV Television Network in
Hungarian, 1700 GMT 22 Sept. 96, FBIS-EEU-96-185.
just as
Slovakian Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar said that, “We are
aware, as one of the [EU] associated countries, that the
Stability Pact, through its course and actual results, will speed up
our bona-fide participation in the European Union.”
55 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts,
21 March 1995.
Summing up the logic of policymakers facing
pressure from admission requirements, Toomas Ilves, Estonia's
foreign minister said, “In dealing with laws that are the norm of
the organization you want to join, your choice is to abide by them or
decide not to join. If you don't want to join, fine, do it your
way. But you can't say, ‘We'll take the EU subsidies,
but we won't meet them on standards.’”
56 Baltic Times, 16 May
2002.
I discuss four cases in-depth below.
Failure to Get Romania to Pass a Law on Minorities
The issue of a law on national minorities illustrates the
insufficiency of socialization-based efforts in spite of a formal
promise by the government to pass a suitable law. Even with two years
of OSCE efforts to persuade the government to pass a law and numerous
efforts by the CE to exert social influence on the government by
shaming it through formal criticism, the efforts largely failed.
The ethnic minorities in Romania demanded a national minority law
already in 1991, and the OSCE HCNM and the CE specifically raised the
need in 1993. The OSCE HCNM, Max van der Stoel, addressed the issue in
an August 1993 speech to the Romanian Council on National Minorities
and again in a September 1993 letter to the Romanian foreign
minister.57
Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe 1993a, b.
After a visit, Friedrich König, a CE
Parliamentary Assembly rapporteur, also urged Romania to pass a law on
national minorities.
58 RFE/RL Research
Report 2 (24), 11 June 1993, 38.
Indeed, when inviting Romania
to join the CE, the Parliamentary Assembly wrote that “The Assembly
proposes that the Romanian authorities and the Romanian Parliament: 1. adopt
and implement as soon as possible, in keeping with the commitments they
have made and with Assembly Recommendation 1201, legislation on
national minorities and education….”
59 However, although the Hungarian minority party,
the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, was quick to propose a
draft law in December 1993, little happened on the issue after Romania
joined the CE. In March 1994, Friedrich König and another CE
rapporteur, Gunnar Jansson, visited Romania again on a monitoring
mission. With clear reference to the minority law, they declared that
the government had only partially fulfilled the obligations it assumed
when admitted.
60 BBC Summary of World
Broadcasts, 31 March 1994.
In spite of such criticism, there was no movement, except additional
promises to the IOs.61
The final blow came in January 1995 when the government
formalized a coalition with three nationalist parties,
62 The new four-party protocol was between the
Social Democracy Party of Romania, Romanian National Unity Party, the
PRM, and the Socialist Workers' Party.
enshrining a tacit
agreement that had existed since 1992. The minority language law was
now completely off the table, and even the IOs stemmed their efforts in
realization of their futility. The law on minorities was never adopted,
although several of the provisions did make it into other laws after
President Iliescu left office and the domestic opposition decreased.
Modifying Latvia's Citizenship Law
The CE approached Latvia's admission with demands for
ex-ante policy change on Latvia's most contentious issue
at the time: its citizenship law. In 1991, after Latvia regained
independence from the USSR, Latvia's supreme council issued a
strict resolution on citizenship63
that restored citizenship only to those who were
citizens of Latvia before 1940, and their descendants. This left about
700,000 inhabitants without Latvian citizenship and facing strict
naturalization requirements, including sixteen years of residence.
64 Given the rather rapid turn
of events in the early 1990s, it was not until April 1993 that the OSCE
HCNM visited and offered his first advice on how to tackle the
citizenship issue. With elections approaching, however, he garnered
little attention in spite of recommending a list of specific policy
initiatives.
65 Author's interview
with member of Latvian parliament Boris Tselevich, 19 March 1999, Riga,
Latvia.
After elections, both the OSCE and the CE visited
Latvia.
66 BBC Summary of World
Broadcasts, 24 and 29 September 1993.
The CE began to
explicitly link the citizenship law to CE admission.
67 Because Estonia had already joined the
CE, Latvia was keen to keep pace in the race to reintegrate with
Europe. Nevertheless, extreme opposition to OSCE and CE recommendations
continued. The CE repeatedly criticized the so-called quota system that
limited the people who could even apply for naturalization in a given
year.
68 Even so, by early 1994 a strict proposal by the Latvian National
Independence Movement (LNIM) was setting the terms of the debate,
including a key requirement limiting the future rate of naturalization
of noncitizens to 1 percent of the total number of citizens or about
2,000 per year. This would effectively bar tens of thousands of persons
from ever receiving citizenship before their death. Despite further CE
criticism,69
BBC Summary of World
Broadcasts, 2 March 1994.
the parliament, led by a weak
minority coalition, approved the second reading of a law with the
strict quotas and language requirements as well as numerous categories
of excluded applicant groups. Even so, the Fatherland faction and the
LNIM thought the bill was too liberal. A Latvian delegation met with
the HCNM in Prague and with representatives of the CE Parliamentary
Assembly in Strasbourg. They were told that if the parliament did not
change the quota system in the law on citizenship, then the door to the
CE would be closed.
70 RFE/RL, 15 June
1994. This was also confirmed in author interviews with members of the
delegation, in March 1999, Riga, Latvia.
When the law passed
the final reading without changes, this drew further criticism from the
CE, the OSCE, and various diplomats in Riga. A CE diplomat again
stressed the CE position that “with the adopted provisions of the
law, it will be impossible to admit Latvia into the Council of
Europe.”
71 The unrelenting CE conditionality ultimately worked. Prime Minister
Valdis Birkavs actually asked the president to return the law to
parliament, stressing specifically the need to meet the CE
requirements: “Latvia cannot expect the Council of Europe to
change the aforementioned attitude, which will practically result in
delay in Latvia's admission to that organization.”72
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts,
24 and 30 June 1994.
In the midst of a government crisis,
73 The Farmers Union left the governing
coalition on 11 July 1994 because of disagreements over agrarian
issues. Latvian Way continued as a minority government.
the
parliament managed to approve an amended Law on Citizenship in late
July.
74 The amendments replaced the quotas
with a so-called “window system” that the European
institutions had helped devise. While the amendments did not exempt the
elderly from language tests,
75 Only
persons with a special “grade I invalid status” were
exempted from the language test.
base naturalization on the
actual time of residence, or grant automatic citizenship to stateless
children, the institutions had accomplished the main goal of
eliminating the quotas, and the CE recommended Latvia for
membership.
76 Prime Minister Birkavs most pointedly confirmed that it was the
membership conditionality that had been at work when he argued that,
“We shall not allow this law to bar our way to Europe, the only
place where Latvia can survive.”77
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 30 June
1994.
The parliamentary debates also showed increasing concern
with the possibility of being excluded from the CE.
78 Author interviews with members of parliament, March 1999,
Riga, Latvia.
One LNIM parliamentarian noted that “In
1994 the CE was very important…. At that time I was chairman for
the Foreign Affairs committee and the Latvian delegation to the CE. The
CE pressured us. If we want membership we must have citizenship for
all—so we found the windows compromise. We had lots of
discussions within the political committee. The CE was very much part
of this process.”
79 Author's
interview with Aleksandrs Kirsteins, member of parliament for the
Latvian National Independence Movement and then presently with the
People's Party, 19 March 1999, Riga, Latvia.
In sum, the
CE conditionality worked: the politicians clearly got the message and
weighed their options in response. In contrast, for the next several
years, the institutions unsuccessfully used socialization-based methods
to try to address the remaining problems, but it was not until the late
1990s, when the EU linked the core issues to membership, that
Latvia's government was again willing to compromise on the
citizenship law. Although I do not extend this case into the future
here, in 1998 Latvia again responded to conditionality, and in a rather
striking exchange, finally completely eliminated the window system and
permitted citizenship for stateless children.
Gaining Citizenship for Estonia's Stateless
Children
As in Latvia in the late 1990s, the European institutions were also
pivotal in Estonia's decision to allow stateless children to
become citizens.80
The term
“stateless children” refers to children whose parents were
either unknown or former citizens of the old Soviet Union with current
citizenship of neither Russia nor Estonia.
After using
persuasion and social influence ineffectively since 1992, the OSCE HCNM
visited Estonia again in April 1997 and reiterated his recommendation
that Estonia should grant citizenship to stateless children. However,
Prime Minister Siimann, heading a weak thirty-seven-member minority
government, said that the government would not change the principles of
Estonia's laws on citizenship and language. While the coalition
parties themselves were open to some liberalization, their adherence to
the status quo was seen as a political necessity for survival in light
of the weak power base combined with the presence of nationalist
opposition. Mart Nutt, a deputy from the more nationalist Pro Patria
party, an author of Estonia's citizenship policy and also a member
of the parliament's constitutional law committee, branded Max van
der Stoel's recommendation as potentially dangerous.
The tune began to change, however, when the EU began to support the
OSCE recommendations. Published in July 1997, the EU Commission's
Agenda 2000 report, which was largely understood as a
screening step for EU admission, stated frankly that “The
Estonian authorities should consider means to enable stateless children
born in Estonia to be naturalized more easily.” In response, the
Estonian government began to consider an amendment. Andra Veidemann,
then Minister of Ethnic Affairs said: “The minister of foreign
affairs, I and the minister of justice discussed this and proposed an
amendment [regarding stateless children]…. Right from
the beginning the right wing said that they wouldn't vote for the
amendment. They said it betrayed the interest of the Estonian
nation…. Anyhow, different ministers defended this legislation
in parliament. The EU argument was a very strong one.”81
Author's interview with Andra
Veidemann, 23 September 1999, Riga, Latvia.
On 9 December
1997, just a few days before the summit where EU leaders would meet and
choose which countries to invite to open membership negotiations, the
government decided to discuss amendments to the citizenship law to
allow children of noncitizens born in Estonia after 26 February 1992 to
become citizens. The U.S. embassy, the OSCE HCNM, and the EU all
praised the decision.
82 It was not to be so easy, however. The domestic opposition balked at
the government's draft, and in early 1998 the amendments failed
twice. However, illustrating the dynamics of the EU factor, when the EU
negotiations were about to start, the government introduced its draft
to the parliament. The bill passed in the first of the three required
readings. Keeping up the pressure, the EU noted in the Estonian
Accession Partnership in March 1998 the short-term objective of
“measures to facilitate the naturalization process and to better
integrate noncitizens including stateless children.” The
EU-Estonian Joint Parliamentary Committee also urged progress. However,
domestic opposition still hindered progress.
As the year passed without results, the EU used the November 1998
first regular report on Estonia to push for change again. The report
noted: “it is regrettable that the Parliament has not adopted
amendments to the citizenship law to allow stateless children to become
citizens.”83
The day after, the EU Commissioner for
External Relations van den Broek met with Estonian President Lennart Meri.
OSCE HCNM staff also went to Tallinn to try to persuade the amendments'
opponents.
84 Author's interview with
John Packer, personal assistant to OSCE High Commissioner on National
Minorities, November 1998, The Hague, Netherlands.
This time,
the combined OSCE and EU efforts moved things along: parliament passed
the amendments in December 1998. Members of parliament as well as
international experts and NGO workers overwhelmingly affirmed that the
incentive of EU membership had been pivotal.
85 Author's interview with Mart Nutt, member of
parliament since 1992, and author of legislation on citizenship and
residency; author's interview with Andra Veidemann, member of
government 1992–99, Minister of European Affairs 1996–97,
and Minister of Ethnic Affairs 1997–99, 23 September 1999,
Talinn, Estonia; author's interview with Kristina Mauer, UNDP in
Estonia, 20 September 1999, Talinn, Estonia; author's interview
with Liia Hanni, member of parliament, 21 September 1999, Talinn,
Estonia.
This case illustrates how effective the additional use of
conditionality can be even when there is considerable domestic
opposition. It also contrasts the strong response to conditionality
with the inefficacy of using socialization-based methods alone for six
years. The dynamic timing of the Estonian government's decisions
and EU actions highlights the power of conditionality.
Derailing Slovakia's Penal Code
Slovakia's decision not to amend its penal code illustrates that
even leaders such as Slovak Prime Minister Meciar may succumb to EU
pressure when pressure is linked to membership. When Meciar, after a
brief interlude, returned to power in 1995, he seized control of the
key areas of political power in what came to be known as the
“night of the long knives.”86
Steve Kettle, “Slovakia's One-Man Band,”
Transition, 23 August 1996.
The Slovak Nationalist
Party (SNS) formally entered Meciar's government, forming a strong
majority government with eighty-three out of 150 seats. The SNS's
main focus was the Hungarian minority. Specifically, the SNS wanted to
amend the penal code to make it possible to criminally prosecute
members of the opposition, and in particular Hungarian deputies who
spoke about Slovakia abroad. In April 1995, in connection with a
campaign of civil disobedience to be launched in mid-May by the ethnic
Hungarians, SNS chairman Jan Slota said: “If anyone wants to
question Slovak sovereignty, he must be punished accordingly. We want
to pass the ‘law on the protection of the republic’
… and then we shall apply it.”
87 CTK National News Wire, 27 April 1995.
In January 1996, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) promised
the SNS to pass the law in exchange for SNS votes to ratify the
Slovak-Hungarian Treaty.
88 CTK
National News Wire, 24 January 1996.
The OSCE HCNM and the EU criticized the draft bill in letters and
meetings and called for Slovakia to “respect ethnic minority
rights and freedom of speech.”89
However, the coalition nevertheless rammed
amendments to the penal code through parliament after cutting short a fierce
debate by proposing that deputies' speeches be limited to ten minutes
each. People could now be jailed for organizing public rallies judged
to be “subversive,”
90 Slovak National Council 1996, Article 92. In
particular, the amendment said that, “Anyone who with the
intention of harming the constitutional order, the integrity of the
territory or the defense of the Republic or undermining its
independence organizes public meetings will be liable to a term of
imprisonment of between 6 months and 3 years or a fine.” Article
92b sub. 1.
although the amendment did not define the
“interests of the republic” or “subversion.”
Critics said the law would lead to political trials, or at least to a
new atmosphere of fear and self-censorship.
In a presidency declaration a week later, the EU welcomed the
ratification of the Treaty with Hungary, but in the same breath
criticized the amendments and urged Slovakia to find a solution:
“compatible with the conclusions of the Copenhagen Summit of the
European Union and with the EU membership for which Slovakia has
applied [emphasis added].”91
Days later President Michal Kovac, already at political and personal
odds with Prime Minister Meciar, returned the amendments to the
parliament. The determined government coalition nevertheless promised
to re-open the debate on the penal code, despite continued admonitions
from top OSCE and EU officials.
92 Letter
from the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Max van der
Stoel to Slovak Minister for Foreign Affairs Juraj Schenk, 13 August
1996.
The parliament soon adopted a second and slightly milder
amendment that nevertheless retained the clauses on treason and mass
disturbances. During the debate, Slota said that, “with the help
of this law, people who want to break up the republic will be where
they belong.”
93 CTK National
News Wire, 17 December 1996.3
However, using a
technicality, the president returned the law again in the end of
December.
94 Referring to Article 87 of
the Constitution, Kovac claimed parliament had not fulfilled its duty
of discussing the law after the president returned it in April.
Consequently, parliament could not discuss a further amendment before
having discussed the previous version of the law.
In a last
and final attempt, the SNS pushed the amendment on the agenda in
February 1997. However, this time a united opposition, with help from
HZDS and Association of Workers of Slovakia (ZRS) defections, defeated
the amendment. EU Commissioner Van den Broek welcomed the decision not
to push through controversial amendments.
95 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 19 February
1997.
Importantly, Bela Bugar, a prominent Hungarian deputy,
and others stressed that the international denouncement was critical to
the defeat,
96 Author's interview
with Bela Bugar, 7 February 2000, Bratislava, Slovakia. Author's
interview with Grigorij Meseznikov, President for the Institute for
Public Affairs, 9 February 2000, Bratislava, Slovakia.
and
that the international community “had a very clear and absolute
role”
97 Author's interview
with Peter Hunzik, founder of the Hungarian Civil Liberal Party, 9
February 2000, Bratislava, Slovakia; author's interview with
Frantisek Sebej, Chairman of the Committee for European Integration, 8
February 2000, Bratislava, Slovakia.
in defeating the
amendment. The chairman of the foreign affairs committee stressed that
the commission clearly expressed EU disagreement with the penal
code.
98 Author's interview with
Peter Weiss, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, 10 February
2000.
Thus, in this case, the European organizations helped overcome
repeated attempts by nationalists to pass legislation opposed by the
organizations. Most notably, the case occurred as the EU release of the
Agenda 2000 opinion in the summer of 1997 was approaching,
illustrating the power of the EU membership incentive.99
Other criminal defamation/insults
provisions in the Penal Code were abolished in 2002 and
2003.
Sorting Out the Effects of Socialization
and Conditionality
To this point I have shown that socialization-based efforts alone are
not very effective in influencing a state's domestic policy, and
that as domestic opposition to policy change grows, it becomes crucial
to use membership conditionality. However, the question remains as to
the relative impact of socialization efforts vis-à-vis
conditionality when both efforts are used simultaneously. I have shown
that conditionality is not always sufficient, given the cases where
conditionality failed—particularly during Meciar's Slovakia,
such as Meciar's refusal to allow issuance of bilingual language
certificates, his insistence on changing the election laws, and his
failure to pass a minority language law. The question is, however, when
the institutions used membership conditionality effectively, would they
have failed if socialization-based efforts had been absent? This is a
complex question, because institutions never applied conditionality
without also relying on softer efforts. There are several ways to
address the question of relative impact, however.
One way is to examine whether the policy changes endure, because this
could be read as evidence in favor of internalization, a result more
likely brought about through socialization. In this study, there are
actually no examples of reversal in the policies. However, there are
several competing explanations. The durability of these policy changes
may, for example, arise because of a certain path-dependency of
policymaking in the countries that makes it difficult to actually
reverse policies in the short term. Also, although the CE membership
incentives no longer exist, the incentive of EU membership has remained
powerful long after some of the legislative changes occurred. Although
all states, except for Romania, were confident that they would join the
EU in May 2004 (even Romania in spring 2004 appeared quite likely to
join the EU in 2007), some incentive remained not to “rock the
boat” as a state entered the EU harbor. Further, continued
routine monitoring and attention from the international community
decreases the chance of backsliding by imposing reputational costs: it
could be damaging to a country's credibility to have the issues
resurface. Thus it is possible that reputational concerns act as
reinforcement. The observed durability is therefore not strong evidence
of internalization. That strong domestic opposition often remains when
conditionality is effective also suggests that broad internalization is
not driving the change.
Given the data constraints, there are three other ways to sort out
the effects. First, variation in the level of socialization-based
efforts may make it possible to say whether socialization-based efforts
condition the effect of membership conditionality. In all but one of
the nineteen conditionality cases, however, the OSCE and the CE were
active participants and it is difficult to compare their levels of
engagement. This brings up another important point, which is that the
relationship between the OSCE, the CE, and the EU often became
intertwined because the EU relied on the OSCE and the CE for evaluation
and information. Thus the very character of the socialization-based
efforts changed once behavior was linked to admission in an
organization: even the normative actors indirectly gained instrumental
leverage through their relationship with the admitting organization.
Counterfactual analysis is a more effective way to assess how pivotal
socialization efforts were. Does systematic examination of each case
suggest that the socialization efforts created links in the process of
change that would not otherwise have been made? In the three cases of
successful institutional influence discussed above, this does not seem
to be the case. Although the socialization efforts framed the problems,
facilitated dialogue, and helped formulate solutions, the
conditionality appeared to be such a strong motivating factor that it
is plausible that the results would have come about eventually even if
these supportive actions had been absent.
In the case of stateless children in Estonia, for example, the OSCE
clearly was highly active—yet the timing of compromises
corresponded highly with the timing of EU actions regarding membership:
the compromises were reached prior to EU meetings, the drafting of EU
reports, and interaction with EU officials. This suggests that joining
the EU was by far the most important motivation for the legislative
reforms. It is quite possible, however, that the EU would not have
framed the issues the way it did without the OSCE involvement,
or—more generally—that the softer actors influence the
content of norms that the more instrumental actors apply. However,
given the strong EU membership ambitions and the open EU support for
the OSCE, the high level of OSCE involvement itself does not
necessarily mean that the socialization-based OSCE efforts had any
independent effect. The efforts were no doubt helpful. For example, as
the Estonia citizenship issue was drawing to a climax in 1998, OSCE
staff visited Talinn urging specific swing policymakers to change their
position. The reasoning of the OSCE staff was both instrumental (by
arguing that the benefits of conversion outweighed the cost) and moral
(by arguing that the reforms were morally right).100
Author's interview with John Packer, Personal
Assistant to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, October
1998, The Hague, Netherlands.
Their efforts, regardless,
helped build the necessary coalition to pass the amendments. Thus, that
one-on-one engagement seemed to be beneficial in this case in framing
the issues and in building coalitions. Judging from the timing of
events, however, conditionality was the motivating factor.
In the case of Slovakia's rejection of changes to its penal
code, the OSCE was again highly active and probably flagged the
attention of the EU on the matter. While the OSCE and EU were mutually
supportive, the fact that Slovakia rejected amending its penal code as
the EU was preparing the Agenda 2000 report and after the EU
officially linked the law to admission suggests that the relative
causal impact of conditionality was larger than that of persuasion or
social influence. Indeed, the Slovakia parliament rejected the law
because a few members of the governing coalition finally defected from
the party line on the third attempt to pass the law. However, several
factors make it unlikely that these politicians had changed their
beliefs drastically since the two previous votes: only a few months had
passed since those votes and there were little to no socialization
efforts during that time. Furthermore, the law had been slightly
softened since the two previous attempts; this should have made the law
more acceptable to any swing voters, not less. Thus, it makes most
sense to interpret the rejection of the law as a response to the EU
pressure in the light of the upcoming evaluation for admission.
Counterfactual analysis is more challenging in Latvia's 1994 change to the citizenship law, because
the membership incentive came from the CE, which is also a heavily norm-based
institution. Thus one cannot simply separate the actors and ask: Would the CE
have succeeded without the OSCE? Both the CE and the OSCE clearly helped
define a solution to the problem of naturalization at the time. The question,
however, is whether the willingness to compromise resulted solely from
the CE's conditionality or whether it indeed depended also on the
CE norm-based efforts. Understanding this requires a more in-depth
examination of the CE efforts themselves. While the CE had made seven
visits between 1991–93, it made only two in 1994 before the
passage of the citizenship law: first in January, but then not again
until August 1994, just a few days before the final draft was approved.
The CE did not issue formal documents on Latvia during spring 1994. The
absence of visits in the spring of 1994 suggests that the main activity
of the CE was not intensive persuasion efforts. One must also recall
that the Latvian parliament actually passed an unsatisfactory version
of the law in June 1994 and then reversed itself only two months later.
However, during these two months the relationship with the CE seemed
very much to be one of negotiation—not about what was
“right”—but about what was sufficient to gain CE
approval: As the opinion on membership stated later, adoption of the
law had been a “major pre-condition for accession.”101
Thus, counterfactual analysis suggests that while
the CE's and the OSCE's socialization efforts were integral
to the outcomes in many ways, conditionality was the motivating factor.
The leverage this conditionality provided did not depend on the
concurrent efforts to shape the solutions.
The last way to view the question of the relative causal power of
conditionality vis-à-vis socialization-based efforts is to
examine what rhetoric accompanied the policy changes: if the
socialization-based efforts were important, one might expect some
rhetoric about the moral imperative of the changes, rather than just
comments linking the changes to EU membership. Indeed, politicians may
prefer to present the policy positions as their own to avoid being seen
as puppets. Of course, this effect could be distorted by the fact that
policymakers might prefer to blame the IOs for unpopular moves, even if
they actually agreed with them. Given these contradictory expectations,
it might be fair to predict a mix of public rhetoric on the causes for
the changes. However, the comments by policymakers rarely ever
reflected any moral support for the policies at all. Indeed, when
Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda drew fire for making concessions
to Hungarians on a minority language law, he almost excused himself
from his action: “I am not responsible for the fact that someone
has suggested that the law on the usage of ethnic minority languages in
public administration be drafted. I repeat, it was not me who made sure
this law was embodied in the constitution and it was not me who
concluded the basic treaty with Hungary in France.”102
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts,
9 March 1999.
This was hardly a ringing endorsement. In
contrast, returning from a working meeting in Brussels, EU chief
negotiator Jan Figel said that if Slovakia did not adopt a law on
ethnic languages a “big question mark” would hover over EU
membership negotiations. The conditionality, not the norms, was in the
forefront here. There are numerous similar examples where policymakers
frankly explain their actions as moves to gain EU or CE admission.
Indeed, in 1998 when Latvia was again modifying the citizenship law,
this time in connection with EU admission, then Prime Minister Guntars
Krasts explained the domestic calculus driving his willingness to
compromise: “There was no other way to get a positive progress
report from the EU in October,” he said. “We were forced to
go ahead—well, forced wouldn't be the right word. It was
reasonable from our side to go ahead with changes…. Not to get a
positive report would be more negative than current instability or
current pressure from Russia. In that case, we would be out of the game
entirely.”
103 Baltic
Times, 23 April 1998, 5.
These inquiries do not prove that conditionality would have worked in
isolation, but they do suggest that incentive-based methods such as
membership conditionality are the primary factors in changing behavior.
Before concluding that socialization-based efforts may as well be
discarded, however, it is useful to return to the findings of economic
conditionality. Economic conditionality has faced the most difficult of
challenges and only met with partial success. However, recent efforts
to improve economic conditionality stress the necessity of engaging the
domestic actors through “ownership” of the reforms, the
notion that domestic actors are involved in the designing of policy
solutions.104
Indeed, it may be that membership
conditionality has been successful precisely because the European institutions
rarely pushed specific policy solutions on the countries as the IMF and the
World Bank were accused of doing in the past. Rather, the institutions
mostly allowed the domestic actors to negotiate policy solutions.
Membership conditionality thus frequently had a strong element of
“ownership” built in. Thus, although socialization-based
efforts alone were ineffective, it really may not only be about getting
the incentive right, but also about getting the dialogue right. Because
socialization-based actors often have better domestic contacts and
command greater respect in framing the issues, combining both
socialization-based efforts and conditionality thus appears not only
effective, but also wise.
Conclusion
The ethnic politics of the Baltic and Central European countries
offer a clear example of how and when IOs can influence domestic
policy. The European organizations effectively used membership
conditionality and socialization-based efforts to influence domestic
legislation—even when they faced quite strong opposition to their
policy recommendations. Further, by examining the IOs' efforts
side by side and considering how domestic opposition conditioned the
efforts, the study addresses a long-standing debate among international
relations scholars about the relative explanatory power of
socialization-based efforts such as persuasion and social influences
vis-à-vis more rational-choice-based efforts such as membership
conditionality. Both the statistical and the qualitative analysis
showed that membership conditionality was much less sensitive to
domestic opposition than were socialization-based efforts. That is, the
spectrum of policymakers who responded to conditionality pressure was
larger than expected, while the spectrum of policymakers who responded
to socialization alone was narrower. In most cases, IOs could change
policy with membership conditionality, whereas socialization-based
efforts only really worked when the domestic opposition was quite low
or if ethnic minorities themselves had bargaining power in the
government. Examining issues over time, socialization-based efforts
were typically fruitless for several years, only for policies to change
dramatically once the linkage to membership was made. Case studies,
counterfactual analysis, and examination of public rhetoric further
support that conditionality was the factor motivating change. It is
worth noting, however, that the IOs always applied membership
conditionality to an existing mix of diplomatic efforts. These efforts
often helped frame the problems, facilitate dialogue, and formulate
solutions. Thus, conditionality motivated the actors while
socialization-based efforts guided them.
Two pertinent questions remain: Will the legal changes change deeper
social behavior, and are the findings generalizable to other issues and
other regions? I address these briefly in turn. Legislation is one of
the behaviors that external actors can influence most concretely, but
it is naturally only one dimension of reform. Given the continued
monitoring by the European institutions, however, there is good reason
to believe the legislative concessions will have some beneficial,
though hardly a cure-all, effect on ethnic relations. At least
incidences of nationalist rhetoric have decreased, particularly in
Slovakia and Romania, where they were commonplace in the early 1990s.
Further, ethnic minorities are reaping benefits from the rights
regarding education and language use. Naturalization in the Baltic
states still suffers from implementation problems, primarily because of
the magnitude of the problem, but progress is nevertheless
occurring.
It is most natural to limit the conclusions of this study to
political conditionality. As discussed, it would be unfair to conclude
that this research proves that studies berating the ineffectiveness of
economic conditionality are wrong. It is important to note, however,
that this study does highlight that the converse is also true:
disillusions with economic conditionality may not apply to political
conditionality.
To some extent the findings are clearly specific to the EU and
Europe. The insights will most readily apply to candidates such as
Turkey and the Balkan states queuing for EU membership. The
implications may be broader, however. NATO and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) also rely on conditionality in entrance
negotiations, and the Organization of American States and Mercosur have
also had human rights related requirements. The Organization of
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has used political criteria
in its Development Assistance Committee and is also debating more overt
membership criteria for the swelling applicant pool. Thus,
“clubs” will continue to play a large part in global
cooperation. Insight about leverage from inclusion and exclusion
may—or could if one so uses it—apply to them in the
future.
Appendix
Calculation of Predicted Score for Table 4
The predicted scores for Table 4 are
calculated as follows. If
is the predicted score, and k1 and
k2 are the cut points, and
uj is the error term, which is assumed to
be logistically distributed in ordered logit, then the probability that
Sj + uj lies
between the two cut points is:
Type of involvement by domestic opposition
