By Ivan Pusic
When countries apply for membership in the European Union (EU), the EU has substantial leverage to insist on various economic, political, and governance reforms—including anticorruption reforms. The EU has used this leverage, mandating (among other things) various anticorruption measures as a condition for accession. Has this worked? Does this form of conditionality help galvanize meaningful improvement in the corruption situation in candidate countries?
One of the most systematic attempts to answer this question, a 2014 study by Mert Kartal, compared corruption trends from 1995-2012 in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that did and did not apply for EU membership. The study found that applicant countries made significant progress during the accession process—but after accession, these countries’ anticorruption performance tended to deteriorate substantially. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the EU loses its leverage after accession takes place. Nevertheless, the finding is disheartening, in that it casts doubt on whether the EU was able to spur meaningful, lasting anticorruption reform. Notably, though, the results were not uniform across the twelve applicant countries studied: In some, the improvement that occurred prior to accession almost completely reversed after accession, but in others, the improvements appeared more sustainable. Diving into individual stories of accession suggests several factors that may have played an important role in the success or failure of EU attempts at using the carrot of membership to spur sustainable anticorruption reform.
First, it is worth noting that in some countries, the promise of EU membership—and the ostensible imposition of anticorruption conditions—never managed to jumpstart reform to begin with. The expectations that the EU set at the start of the process—in particular, whether the EU created a de facto presumption in favor of eventual accession—may have played an important role here. In those cases where the EU withheld assurances of membership, it made its conditions more credible and sustained the momentum for reform. Conversely, when the EU set a tentative date for accession, it created a presumption that accession was inevitable, and undermined the credibility of its conditions.
The contrasting cases of Poland and Bulgaria illustrate this. In Poland, the EU refused to set a date for membership until the country enacted meaningful reform. As a result, Leszek Miller’s government took seriously the requirements imposed. From 2001-2004, desire to join the EU acted as “the most important motor” of reform, motivating parliament to overhaul its public procurement process, extend criminal liability for private corruption, and enact a broader anticorruption strategy. Only after these reforms took place did the EU offer a Treaty of Accession in 2003 and membership in 2004.
In Bulgaria, by contrast, the EU put its faith in reforms that would be made after a target date for membership has been set. In 2004, the EU signed a Treaty of Accession with Bulgaria that offered membership by 2007 if the country complied with a detailed set of reforms. To be sure, the terms of the agreement specified that, if the Commission felt progress wasn’t being made, it could postpone membership. But once the target membership date was announced, it became too politically difficult for the EU to insist on postponement—even though, by late 2006, EU experts found that Bulgaria’s reform efforts remained “a total mess.” The EU apparently felt that it couldn’t postpone accession, especially since, as the Bulgarian Prime Minister declared, “a postponement would be perceived as a rejection.” So the EU tried to finesse the issue by admitting Bulgaria on the condition that the country meets anticorruption benchmarks within three years after accession. But this only strengthened the expectation that membership was inevitable. By 2009, Transparency International reported that “hardly any concrete, irreversible measures to prevent and combat corruption have been implemented,” but the EU never applied meaningful sanctions.
This is a partial explanation, but of course, as Kartal’s research shows, even in those countries where, unlike Bulgaria, the EU’s successfully catalyzed efforts for reform, the improvement was often short-lived, with substantial backsliding after accession. But this was not always the case. In some instances, the EU’s conditions seem to have achieved a more sustained improvement in the corruption situation of new members. It seems that the EU was most effective where it prioritized empowering an anticorruption agency capable of longer-term efforts rather than seizing on quick wins. For example, in Latvia, the EU pressed for the creation of the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (KNAB). Despite resistance from some politicians, KNAB has achieved significant results (see, for example, here, here , and here). While threats to its independence remain, the empowerment of KNAB as a specialized anticorruption body has allowed for more sustained progress. In other cases, by contrast, the EU conditions focused mainly on de jure reforms, such as changing laws. While legal reforms are important, in many countries enforcement of these new laws saw a dramatic decrease in enforcement after accession. Hungary, for example, passed a comprehensive set of anticorruption reforms (the Glass Pockets Act) in 2003, but after Hungary joined the EU, the Prime Minister who championed the law was replaced, and the body tasked with implementation was reduced to a small team of civil servants in the Ministry of Justice. Similarly, in Slovakia, a law requiring disclosure of state contracts with private firms was never fully implemented due to business opposition, and a law on political party financing was delayed and weakened with loopholes after accession in 2004.
In some cases the EU did insist on actual enforcement: Learning from its experiences in Hungary, when the EU considered Romania’s application the Commission insisted on actual “investigations into allegations of high-level corruption,” implementation of new civil and penal procedure codes, capacity building in the judiciary, and frequent reports on the impact of these reforms on levels of corruption. But entrenched cultures of corruption are rarely resolved on fixed timelines, much less within a window as brief as three years, and few lasting reforms were achieved within the brief monitoring period. The EU seems to have had the most impact when it focused its limited political capital on empowering local, independent institutions that can continue to advocate for reform long after the Commission’s leverage dissipates.
In spite of its shortcomings, the EU’s experience demonstrates that anticorruption conditions can work. Where it withheld assurances of membership, the EU created a credible incentive for reform, and generated momentum for change. But this momentum was too short-lived for the EU to enact reforms directly. Instead, the EU’s anticorruption conditions were most successful where they prioritized longer-acting, domestic agencies. With careful management of expectations, and with humility as to what can be accomplished by a foreign actor, conditionality can spur reform.
