Monitoring the monitors: EU enlargement conditionality and minority protection in the CEECs

Abstract:

The issue of minority protection is an extreme case for analysing the problem of linkage between EU membership conditionality and compliance by candidate countries. While EU law is virtually non-existent, EU practice is divergent, and international standards are ambiguous, the issue has been given high rhetorical prominence by the EU during enlargement. The analysis in this article follows a process tracking approach to study the relationship of EU conditionality to changes in minority rights protection in the central and east European countries.

The authors examine how the EU's monitoring process has operated, what its benchmarks have been, how the EU process has interacted with those of other international organisations, such as the Council of Europe and OSCE, and evaluate what its impact has been on the candidate countries. In conclusion, the authors find that EU conditionality is not closely temporally correlated with the emergence of new strategies and laws on minority protection in the central and east European countries. Instead, the EU's main instrument for accession and convergence, the Regular Reports, have been characterised by ad hocism, inconsistency, and a stress on formal measures rather than substantive evaluation of implementation.