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Civil society in Central and Eastern Europe: The ambivalent legacy of accession

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Abstract

Civil society organisations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have remained weak players compared to their counterparts in established democracies. Given the particular incentives that the EU offered for the empowerment of non-state actors during pre-accession, it has often been assumed that EU intervention improved this situation. We argue that, instead, the EU's impact was highly ambivalent. Although the EU aid and EU-induced policy reform levelled the way for established actors’ involvement in multilevel politics, it reinforced some of the barriers to development that the civil society organisations face in CEE. In particular, EU measures have failed to address the lack of sustainable income, of formalised interactions with the state and of grassroot support. Drawing on the experiences of trade unions and environmental groups, we show that this ambivalent ‘legacy of accession’ is due to an unfortunate interrelation between various, often implicit mechanisms of the EU's enlargement regime on one hand, and particular problems inherited from state socialism and transition on the other.

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Notes

  1. ‘Central Eastern Europe’ here comprises those post-socialist countries that were part of the 2004 and 2007 EU enlargements: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Although our argument holds true for many Central and Eastern countries, most examples refer to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

  2. The term ‘civil society organisations’ is used here according to the definition provided by the European Economic and Social Committee (1999/C329/10) and used by various EU institutions. It encompasses social partners, pressure groups and NGOs promoting a broader agenda.

  3. We are aware of the fact that, by restricting our study to these two factors, we do not give a full picture of civil society organisations in CEE, let alone of civil society as a whole. However, studies on other types of civil society organisations show that the described legacies of EU accession can be considered a general tendency (cf. Raik, 2006; Coman, 2009).

  4. This is especially true for Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria where the ‘velvet’ revolutions have often been called ‘green revolutions’, cf. Hicks, 2004 and Olearius, 2006.

  5. The latter juxtaposed two poles of mutually subverting counter-identities – the communist rulers on the one hand, who proclaimed Leninist–Marxist ideologies, and anticommunist activists, on the other, whose legitimacy came from the moral superiority of the ‘antipolitical’ (who distanced him/herself from any involvement in corrupt communist organisation), the ‘true patriot’ or the religious (Thaa, 1996).

  6. In Poland, Solidarity representatives, who are active in government, did not protect workers, but supported economic liberal reforms (‘umbrella protection’). They even opposed participatory forms of self-management, such as employee councils, as ‘vestiges of socialism’ that would undermine the proper function of the market.

  7. In Poland, social dialogue started later. As trade unions participated in government, tripartism was considered superfluous given the possibility to directly shape policies.

  8. Anticorruption measures and administrative–judiciary reform will not be further assessed in this contribution. However, studies on these measures (Open-Society-Institute, 2002) echo our findings for the EU-induced introduction of new governance instruments, cf. Section 5.

  9. The EU's prescriptions must also be consistent with the development goals defined by the Copenhagen Criteria in order to be considered legitimate by the target actors, which in practice and due to the unilateralism of enlargement policy has often not been the case (Kutter and Trappmann, 2006, p. 32).

  10. This money was distributed by the Regional Centre for Environment in Central and Eastern Europe (REC), an agency founded in 1990, that coordinated international donors’ capacity building for environmental groups in CEE in line with the steering intention of the EU (Olearius, 2006, p. 343).

  11. European Social Dialogue is an element of the European Social Model, defined in the EC Treaty. It refers to consensus-oriented discussions, consultations, negotiations and joint actions taken by the social partner organisations (management and labour). European Social Dialogue takes place on the sectoral level, cross-industry and in bipartite and tripartite arrangements. It has produced more than 300 texts agreed upon by the European social partners, with some of them becoming European legislation, ec.europa.eu/employment_social/social_dialogue/capacity_en.htm.

  12. ‘New governance’ is characterised by a definition of goals and procedural guidelines that leave broad discretion for concrete implementation; positive incentives for the involvement and dialogue with addressees; information and participation rights for the addressees; and an emphasis on voluntary agreements and other forms of self-government, see Lenschow (2002) and Holzinger et al (2006) for a discussion of the concept.

  13. Prescriptions for the adoption of internal market regulations had been credible, precise and consistent from the very beginning, defined by cooperation agreements (1988–1991), the Europe Agreements (1991–2002) and the White Paper on Adaptations to the Internal Market (1995). Compliance with these stipulations has been the decisive criteria for admission to the next step of accession preparation (Maresceau, 2003, p. 13).

  14. Political criteria, though named as the initial criteria for the opening of accession negotiations, were merely mutually obliging declarations (Fierro, 2003), and commitment to these declarations, not enforcement, was monitored (Maresceau, 2003, p. 13). Yet, as these declarations were part of all agreements, including PHARE contracts, they were institutionalised agreements and, therefore, bore the threat of exclusion (withdrawal of aid and acknowledgement as a partner) in case of violation, especially until the opening of accession negotiations.

  15. We are aware of the fact that differential empowerment is usually associated with augmenting the bargaining and/or networking power of some actors; however, the provision of arguments is also empowering, regardless of whether actors use them instrumentally, as a resource for bargaining, or as a means to persuade their fellows.

  16. For imitation resulting from (failure-driven) ‘lesson drawing’, see Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005.

  17. For such cases of ‘lesson drawing’ and the example of constitutional engineering, see Beyme, 2003, p. 192.

  18. While all companies with more than 1000 employees and at least 150 employees in two different EU countries have to create a European Works Council, only one-third (about 700) of these companies has introduced an EWC.

  19. Waddington (2006) cites the example of Polish works council members who received invitations written in French only on the day before the meeting, without an offer of travel funding.

  20. NGO representatives are rather sceptical with regard to the capacity-building effects of structural funds as they do not help to build capital and tend to absorb energies with operational work. However, NGOs endorse subsidiary and more inclusive governance models and still expect the EU/the structural funds to exert a modernising influence in this respect Nicholson, 2008).

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Acknowledgements

This contribution draws on the book Legacies of Accession: Europeanization in Central and Eastern Europe co-edited by the authors. The text benefitted from the systematisation of pre-accession Europeanisation in Kutter (2008). We thank Tanja Börzel, François Bafoil, Timm Beichelt, Guglielmo Meardi and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

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  1. Centre for European Integration, Otto-Suhr Institute for Political Science, Free University Berlin, Ihnestr. 22, Berlin, 14195, Germany

    Amelie Kutter

  2. Department of Social Sciences, University of Osnabrück, Seminarstr. 33, Osnabrück, 49069, Germany

    Vera Trappmann

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Kutter, A., Trappmann, V. Civil society in Central and Eastern Europe: The ambivalent legacy of accession. Acta Polit 45, 41–69 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2009.18

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