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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
DA N I E L C . T HOM A S
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© Daniel C. Thomas 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911452
ISBN 978–0–19–920671–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199206711.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
This book was conceived out of a hunch that the construction of Europe,
including the evolving community’s territorial expansion, was more deeply
contested than one would conclude from the official narrative in recent decades
about enduring commitments to democracy and human rights. The challenge was
two-fold—how to use the theories and methods of political science and the vast
resources available in the EU’s many historical archives to analyse and explain the
arc of EU constitutionalization and enlargement over time, and how to do so in a
manner that also speaks to regional integration processes in other parts of the world.
To this end, I decided to focus not on states’ decisions to seek membership nor
on the community’s readiness to admit particular applicant states, but on the
more fundamental and long-neglected question of how a regional community
decides which states are eligible for membership. This focus would reveal a great
deal, I suspected, about how political actors understand the nature and the limits
of the regional community that they are building and re-building with every
decision they make. Such a study of the conceptual and geographic limits of
Europe acquired a whole new significance as debates over cultural identity gained
salience across the community.
Of course, no such ambitions could ever be pursued, much less achieved,
without the support and cooperation of many individuals and organizations.
When the project was in its infancy, Yves Mény welcomed me back to the
European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies,
where I was able to explore ideas with Thomas Risse, Philippe Schmitter, and
other EUI scholars and to work in the EUI’s Historical Archives of the European
Union. Several years later, an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council
on Foreign Relations allowed me to spend a year in Brussels working at the
European Commission’s Directorate General for External Relations, which gave
me new insights into the dynamics of EU decision-making. Toward the end of
that year, the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Centre in Brussels gave me a
desk and time to read through countless papers in the official archives of the
European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament, as
well as the archives of the Belgian, French, and German foreign ministries. In
later years, I also worked in the Barbara Sloan European Union Document
Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, and repeatedly with two first-rate
online archives—the Archive of European Integration (www.aei.pitt.edu) hosted
by the University of Pittsburgh and the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur
l’Europe (www.cvce.eu) hosted by the University of Luxembourg. I will forever be
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
grateful for the help provided by these organizations, academic colleagues, and
archivist-historians.
In addition, colleagues at the universities where I have worked provided
further ideas and encouragement, including especially Alberta Sbragia and
Gregor Thum at the University of Pittsburgh, and Brigid Laffan and Ben Tonra at
University College Dublin. At Leiden University, when I decided that the book
needed a multi- method statistical chapter to complement the archive- based
process-tracing that was its core, Patrick Statsch co-authored Chapter 4 and the
Appendix while simultaneously writing his PhD dissertation at the University of
Amsterdam. I am deeply grateful for his contribution to the book. Last but
certainly not least, Frank Schimmelfennig has been an invaluable source of critical
comments and friendly encouragement over the years, even when my arguments
departed from his own ground-breaking work on similar questions.
Just as important as these many colleagues and archivists has been the undying
confidence in the project shown by Dominic Byatt, legendary editor at Oxford
University Press. Though I missed deadline after deadline due to parenting
responsibilities overlapping with a move from the USA to Ireland, then a move to
The Netherlands followed by learning Dutch and my duties as chair of a growing
department that left no time for scholarly pursuits, Dominic repeatedly assured
me of his commitment to the project. In the end, when my work was done, he and
his OUP colleagues Céline Louasli, Kim Allen and Saravanan Anandan expertly
transformed the manuscript into a book.
All epigraphs under copyright are reprinted with permission from their respective
publishers or copyright holders. The epigraph by Pierre Werner in the heading of
chapter 4 is reprinted by permission of the Pierre Werner Family archive. The
epigraph by Walter Hallstein in the heading of chapter 7 is reprinted by permission
of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, © Walter Hallstein 1972.
Above all, I am grateful to Susanne, who supports and inspires me in ways
I could scarcely have imagined when we met years ago in the hills overlooking
Florence, and to our son Julien, who amazes me more with every passing year.
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Note on Archival Sources xiii
PA RT O N E Q U E S T IO N S A N D A R G UM E N T S
PA RT T WO M E M B E R SH I P OU T C OM E S
PA RT T H R E E M E M B E R SH I P P R O C E S SE S
PA RT F O U R C O N C LU SIO N S A N D I M P L IC AT IO N S
Appendix: Imputing missing Freedom House data from V-Dem data 243
(with Patrick D. Statsch)
Bibliography 247
Index 257
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List of Figures
List of Tables
Physical archives
Online archives
PART ONE
QUE ST ION S A N D A RG UM E NT S
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1
The Question of Membership
This book begins with a deceptively simple question: where does Europe begin
and end? The significance of this question reaches far beyond cartographic
debates. A recent report on the future of the European Union (EU) argues that
the European Commission should establish a new ‘Directorate General Europe’
focused on completing the unification of Europe while assigning relations with
neighbouring states without any prospect of membership to other parts of the EU
1 AEI: Europe and the challenge of enlargement (24 June 1992), p. 11.
2 Jusqu’où ? Le débat interdit, Le Monde, 9 décembre 1999.
3 Jeroen Dijsselbloem calls for end to EU expansion, Politico.eu, 10 June 2016.
The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration. Daniel C. Thomas,
Oxford University Press. © Daniel C. Thomas 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199206711.003.0001
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
bureaucracy (Cvijic et al. 2019). What the report avoids, though, is the critical
issue of which states are eligible to participate in the integration process led by the
EU and which are not.
If it so decides, the EU has plenty of room to expand beyond its current 27
member states. The Council of Europe, a non-EU body designed to promote
democracy and human rights, currently has 47 member states. The Eurovision
song contest has accepted contestants from 52 states over the years. And the
European Broadcasting Union, which sponsors the song contest, has member
organizations in 56 countries. So how does the EU, which does not hesitate to
identify itself with Europe as whole, define its own limits?
This is not a new question. Struggles over the geographic limits of ‘Europe’ as a
political community have been a salient feature of European integration from the
beginning. Within months of the entry into force of the Treaty of Rome in 1958,
governments elsewhere in Europe began to talk about joining or at least preparing
for eventual membership in the new European Economic Community (EEC).4
Over the following decades, the community—later renamed the European
Union—grew from 6 to 28 member states. And despite the United Kingdom’s
recent exit from the community, neighbouring states continue to seek
membership and the European Commission continues to negotiate with them on
behalf of the Union.
Yet notwithstanding the EU’s apparently endless tendency to expand, a closer
look at the historical records reveals that over the years, some neighbouring states
were encouraged to apply, some were told to wait, and others were told definitively
that they were ineligible for membership. In some cases, the same applicant state
received positive and negative messages in relatively quick succession. This record
cries out for explanation. As Bahar Rumelili (2004: 28) asked, ‘How is it that with
respect to certain states, the EU constructs firm lines of boundary between self
and other, and with regard to others, fluid and ambiguous frontiers?’
For example, why did the EEC encourage Spain to pursue membership and
then refuse for years to offer it a path to accession? Why did the EU recognize the
Czech Republic as a membership candidate but refuse for several years to do the
same for the neighbouring Slovak Republic? Spain and the Slovak Republic are
both undeniably located on the European continent but this was not enough to
ensure their recognition as eligible to join the European Union. Similar questions
have been asked about Ukraine, whose governments have tried to place their
country on a path to EU membership since the country gained independence in
1991. When President Viktor Yanukovych seemed to abandon this goal in 2013,
4 When referring specifically to the European Economic Community, this book uses that term or
the abbreviation EEC. When referring to the entire period from the creation of the EEC through the
present, or just to the period since the entry into the effect of the Treaty on European Union, the book
uses the term European Union or the abbreviation EU.
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demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan Square braved sniper fire to wave EU flags and
demand closer ties to Europe. Yet despite these appeals, the EU has consistently
rebuffed Ukraine’s pursuit of what Brussels calls a ‘membership perspective’.
Meanwhile, after years of delay, the EU formally recognized Turkey as a candidate
state and began accession negotiations, but this did not quell debate among and
within the member states regarding Turkey’s suitability for membership.
These puzzles cannot be resolved simply by consulting treaties or formal
declarations. Both the 1951 Treaty of Paris and the 1957 Treaty of Rome declared
that ‘Any European state may apply to join the community’ but neither treaty
defined what makes a state ‘European’. Three and a half decades later,
the European Commission offered its own quasi-definition: ‘The term “European” . . .
combines geographical, historical and cultural elements which all contribute to
the European identity. The shared experience of proximity, ideas, values and his-
torical interaction cannot be condensed into a simple formula, and it is subject to
review by each succeeding generation.’ Perhaps deliberately, the Commission’s
open-ended definition provided no clear guidance as to whether a particular state
is actually eligible for membership: ‘The Commission believes that it is neither
possible or opportune to establish new frontiers of the European Union, whose
contours will be shaped over many years to come.’5
According to Kalypso Nicolaïdes, this vagueness is not accidental: ‘the lack of
explicit political ends to the journey has gone along with an equal indeterminacy
in terms of geographical ends. Precisely because the European project is an open-
ended process rather than a frozen structure, it has also been an open-ended
space’ (2014: 237). In fact, she argues, this open-endedness applies to both
the ultimate shape of the community’s external border, by which she means the
definition of ‘which countries should become members of the EU’, and the nature
of that border, by which she means how the border mediates between societies on
both sides. The sum of these two dimensions, says Nicolaïdes, constitutes the
fundamental ‘constitution of Europe as a political community’ (2014: 238).
How then can we begin to understand this most fundamental aspect of
European integration, or for that matter, of any regional integration project? The
formal membership rule now prevailing in the EU—that it will only consider
applications from European states with stable institutions that ensure democracy,
the rule of law, respect for human rights, and the protection of minorities, as well
as a market economy able to withstand the competitive pressures of the Single
Market—was not established even informally until many years after the EEC
Treaty. And notwithstanding the apparent clarity of this rule, the eligibility
of some applicant states—including most notably Turkey—remains deeply con-
tested. As such, the much-vaunted ‘Copenhagen criteria’ are neither an original
5 AEI: Europe and the challenge of enlargement (24 June 1992), p. 11.
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6 Les négociations d’adhésion UE-Turquie pourraient être en danger, Le Monde, 29 juin 2006.
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type of government or physical location, nor to the treaty obligations that they
have assumed. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this argument, I test it
empirically across multiple phases of European integration and multiple cases of
EU decision-making with varying outcomes over seven decades. While the book
focuses empirically on Europe, I have designed the argument and analysed the
findings to speak as well to developments in other regions of the world.
The politics of membership eligibility deserves far more attention from scholars
of international organization, regional integration, and community building than
it has received thus far. There is extensive and insightful scholarship on why states
create regional institutions and policies (Moravcsik 1998, Mattli 1999,
Pevehouse 2003), why states apply to join an existing regional organization
(Mattli and Plümper 2002, Emmers 2005, Gray 2009), and how membership in
regional organizations influences domestic political reform, especially the
consolidation of democracy and respect for human rights (Glenn 2004,
Pevehouse 2002, Schimmelfennig 2005, Vachudova 2005, Donno 2010).
In comparison, relatively few scholars have focused on the politics that shape
the geographic limits of regional communities and in particular which applicant
states are considered eligible for membership. Some have trivialized the issue
entirely: ‘A state is coded as an eligible potential member . . . for any regional IGO
that is based in its home region (for example, Bolivia is eligible for membership in
a regional IGO based in Latin America, but not one based in sub-Saharan Africa)’
(Donno et al. 2015: 257). But the reality is far more complex than the names of
continents or the wording of treaties.
One way to conceptualize the issue is to distinguish between an inclusive
approach to building a multilateral organization that involves all potential
members from the outset and a sequential approach that begins with a core group
of states most committed to cooperation and then incorporates others as their
preferences converge with the founders. The inclusive approach is less likely to
yield deep integration because it increases the heterogeneity of integration
preferences in the decision-making process. In contrast, rather than waiting until
all potential members have adopted similar preferences, the sequential approach
allows core states to create an institution to their liking while remaining open to
any like-minded states that present themselves for membership. In this case,
expansion will be ‘a multi-step process in which the multilateral expands only
gradually as potential members or the multilateral itself attains some property not
originally possessed at the time the institution was created’ (Downs et al.
1998: 399).
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The problem here is the argument regarding which states are potentially
covered by an inclusive approach, which might be temporarily excluded by a
sequential approach, and which have no prospect of participation. According to
Downs et al., these distinctions depend entirely on functional policy preferences:
all states with identical preferences regarding policy integration will be included
regardless of whether the organization opts for an inclusive or sequential
approach, while those with divergent preferences will be excluded under a
sequential approach, regardless of other considerations. This may be accurate
with respect to potentially global organizations focused on a functional issue-area
such as trade or environmental protection, but it is hard to reconcile this
expectation with the pattern evident in the course of European integration:
starting with an inclusive approach in treaty rules and practice, then becoming
more selective in practice with a considerable lag before treaty rules are adapted
to the new practice, then more recently welcoming some states (like Bosnia-
Herzegovina) while excluding others (like Ukraine) with very similar policy
preferences and administrative capacities.
In similar terms, Judith G. Kelley (2010) distinguishes between a ‘convoy’
model of membership that in principle allows all regional states to participate and
a ‘club’ model that subjects aspiring members to strict admissions criteria. The
two models have distinct implications for how a regional organization relates to
states in the region: ‘Clubs can leverage higher entry criteria to solicit behaviour
changes prior to admission for any late joiners [while] convoys, with lower entry
barriers, can take a less confrontational approach to outlier states, interacting
with them within the organization rather than erecting barriers’ (2010: 2).
Unfortunately for the purposes of this study, Kelley focuses on how the convoy
versus club choice affects the likely success of regional organizations, rather than
on how such organizations choose between a convoy and a club model or decide
on the eligibility or accession of applicant states.
In contrast, Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson, and Duncan Snidal (2001a,
2001b) examine the possible relationship between the enforcement difficulties
faced by an international organization and the restrictiveness of its membership
rule. Their conjecture is that membership restrictiveness increases with the
severity of enforcement problems, which one might assume would increase with
additional members (Koremenos et al. 2001a). If this were true, then one would
expect international organizations to become less open to non-member states as
the number of member states increased, and to prefer applications from individual
states over applications by groups of states. Unfortunately, these conjectures do
not fit their project’s empirical findings (Koremenos et al. 2001b) nor do they
offer a good explanation for the pattern in EU history described briefly above.
Of course, it is not necessary to conceive of regional organization simply as an
interaction of self-interested states weighing the costs and benefits of behavioural
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options: the identities of states and their relationship to shared norms matter as
well. Inspired by social identity theory, Iver B. Neumann (1999) and Bahar
Rumelili (2004) argue that no group of states can claim that certain characteristics
distinguish its members without referring implicitly or explicitly to other states
that lack the same characteristics, either entirely or in sufficient measure.
Eligibility for regional membership is thus a rhetorical construction in which
certain characteristics are attributed to an Other (in this case, non-Europeans) in
order to provide meaning and coherence to the Self (in this case, Europeans). For
example, Dainotto (1997), Neumann (1998), Morozov and Rumelili (2012), and
Todorova (1997) have highlighted the reframing of Europeanness over time in
juxtaposition to the purported characteristics of various neighbours, especially
Muslims, Russians, Turks, and Mediterranean peoples. It is nonetheless difficult
to judge this approach’s contribution to explaining the politics of membership
eligibility because few of its advocates have specified causal mechanisms or scope
conditions for their arguments or tested competing hypotheses.
There is an extensive and more methodologically explicit literature on EU
enlargement in the post-Cold War period yet even the best works here suffer
from considerable shortcomings. For example, Moravcsik and Vachudova (2005)
propose a parsimonious liberal explanation of how the EU makes enlargement
decisions, but then offer only a thin empirical narrative limited to the eastern
enlargement. In a similar rationalist spirit, Skålnes (2005) proposes that
enlargement decisions are driven by geopolitical calculations, but he too pays
little attention to alternative explanations and offers little direct evidence to
support some of his key claims. Sedelmeier (2005) proposes an alternative,
constructivist explanation focused on commitments made to eastern Europe
during the Cold War, but it is not clear how his argument could apply to
other cases.
Of this genre, the most influential has been Frank Schimmelfennig’s (2001,
2003) investigation of EU and NATO enlargement. In his conceptualization, the
‘collective identity’ of a region is composed of the values of its political leaders,
the norms that they share, and the regional organization’s formal rules on
accession. He thus explains the eastern enlargement as a result of ‘rhetorical
action’: when the states of central and eastern Europe framed their applications in
terms of the Union’s multi-dimensional identification with liberal democracy, EU
member states approved their quest for full membership despite the availability of
less-costly alternatives. This argument and the evidence that Schimmelfennig
amassed to support it offer a powerful explanation of why regional communities
sometimes make membership decisions that seem inconsistent with material
incentives.
However, Schimmelfennig’s work does not associate distinctive causal
mechanisms or scope conditions with his three components of regional identity
and thus cannot separate their respective contributions to the outcome in
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
formal application. In many cases, the states involved have long been parties to
EU association agreements that establish strong incentives for reform. So given
that most states that submit a formal application for accession have been pre-
screened and even counselled by the community itself, the application is best
understood not as a start but as an intermediary step on the path to membership.
Thomas Plümper, Christina Schneider, and Vera Troeger’s (2006) study of the
EU’s 1993 Copenhagen summit is not framed explicitly in terms of membership
eligibility but it does address the EU decision to place ten of the formerly
Communist states ahead of others in the accession process. Their theoretical
expectation is that the EU would welcome applicant states whose policy
preferences resemble their own, as revealed by the applicants’ level of democracy
and the extent of market reforms. To test this argument and to eliminate selection
bias due to the possibility that the EU criteria may have deterred less-democratic
states from applying in the first place, they use a dynamic Heckman selection
model that distinguishes the factors that lead states to apply for membership from
the factors that shape the EU’s response to these applications. Their finding that
the EU is more open to more democratic and market-oriented states thus offers
robust insights into the politics of membership eligibility in the early post-Cold
War period. However, its generalizability is limited: the study only covers the
1993 summit and as documented later in this volume, there is strong evidence
that democracy has not always been a significant consideration in EC/EU
decision-making.
Ivan Katchanovski’s (2011) analysis of EU and NATO enlargement following
the Cold War is more explicit about membership eligibility, using an ‘EU
Accession Index’ that codes states annually from 1997 to 2010 as non-member/
not potential EU member, potential EU member, official EU candidate, and EU
member. Katchanovski’s conclusion that EU decisions on enlargement are
strongly affected by the applicants’ level of democracy and economic development
echoes that of Plümper et al. (2006), but his four-step index is hard to apply to
earlier periods because the formal designations ‘potential candidate’ and
‘candidate state’ did not exist before the 1990s. In addition, his use of country-
year data brings in country-years where there was no risk of an EU decision and
blinds the analysis to cross-temporal interdependencies: EU decisions in year 1
may affect EU decisions in year 2, etc. Finally, as Katchanovski (2011: 316)
concedes, ‘the regression analysis cannot rule out reverse causation between EU
membership and democratisation’.
In sum, the existing literature contains valuable insights into the factors that
influence how regional communities make enlargement decisions, but few
scholars have distinguished decisions on membership eligibility from decisions
on accession. Most importantly here, the literature does not offer a persuasive
explanation of how a regional community assesses the membership eligibility (as
distinct from readiness for accession) of non-member states, nor does it provide a
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7 Standards of membership eligibility are also relevant in principle to current member states, but
decisions on whether the community should impose sanctions on norm-violating member states are
subject to different dynamics and thus are not theorized here.
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The intergovernmental focus does not deny the important agenda-setting and
advocacy roles that the EU’s supranational bodies have always played in
enlargement decision-making (these feature prominently in the process-tracing
of EU decision-making in Chapters 5–8). Nonetheless, final decisions on the
eligibility of non-member states are made collectively by the member states. The
European Commission makes recommendations to the Council and negotiates
with non-members on its behalf, but it does not have a vote on the eligibility or
accession of any state. The original EEC treaty did not give the European
Parliamentary Assembly any role in membership decision-making, while the
1986 Single European Act and subsequent treaties require only that the European
Parliament give its assent to accession treaties.
General principles of membership eligibility are often discussed when
governments or non-state actors deliberate on the construction of a new regional
community or re-examine the foundational principles of an existing community.
However, the question of whether a particular non-member state is eligible for
accession—the ultimate focus of this book—arises most clearly when its
government communicates to a regional community its interest in joining the
club. This communication could involve a formal declaration of interest in
accession, an application to negotiate an association treaty focused explicitly on
preparation for membership (hereafter, a ‘pre-accession treaty’), or an application
to negotiate full accession.8
An applicant state is eligible for membership in a regional community when
the community’s member states conclude collectively that it possesses the
fundamental characteristics required of all members. Indicators that a regional
community considers a non-member state to be eligible for membership include
any of the following acts by the community:
Regarding the first point above, a decision to hold talks with representatives of a
state that has expressed interest in closer ties to the community would not
constitute evidence of eligibility if such talks were intended to clarify whether the
8 These ‘pre-accession treaties’ are a distinct class of association treaties, which also include purely
contractual accords without any membership perspective.
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9 CVCE: Conclusions of the Santa Maria da Feira European Council (19–20 June 2000).
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All of these time windows (‘within two years’ etc.) are chosen to be large enough
to ensure that the indicated non-action was deliberate and not a result of the
community’s busy agenda or its need to gather information before making a
decision.
However, none of these developments would constitute evidence of non-
eligibility if it were clearly due to circumstances unrelated to the characteristics or
actions of the aspirant state, such as a diplomatic or institutional crisis that
prevents the community from responding to aspirants in a timely or normal
manner. For example, the de facto suspension of negotiations with Denmark,
Ireland, and Norway in 1963 and 1967 cannot be viewed as the result of a negative
decision on their eligibility because they were clearly due to the turmoil following
France’s veto of negotiations with the UK.
Once adopted, a regional community’s position on the eligibility of an aspirant
state is resistant but not impervious to change. In general, reputational costs and
the difficulty of achieving consensus militate against revisiting a decision on a
particular aspirant’s eligibility. However, new circumstances in the aspirant state,
within the community, or in the outside world, perhaps in conjunction with the
efforts of non-governmental or supranational policy entrepreneurs, may lead
member states to revisit an earlier conclusion. As such, the longer an aspirant
state that has been deemed eligible for membership waits before completing
accession, the more it risks having its eligibility challenged. Likewise, an aspirant
that the community has judged ineligible may be reconsidered later if its
characteristics or the community’s expectations change significantly. As a result, a
single aspirant state may be the subject of multiple eligibility decisions over time.
However, as the second list of indicators suggests, critical statements by
community institutions or officials do not necessarily constitute a negative
position on the eligibility of a particular aspirant or candidate state. For example,
European Commission ‘opinions’ and European Parliament declarations on
particular states may be part of a political process leading to a denial of membership
eligibility, or even to the retraction of a prior recognition of membership eligibility,
but neither can substitute for a collective decision by the member states in deter-
mining eligibility.
Some might argue that a community’s decision to freeze certain parts (‘chap-
ters’ in contemporary EU parlance) of accession negotiations also constitutes a
negative decision on eligibility, even if negotiations continue on other parts. After
all, accession does not have to be accomplished by any given date: negotiations
can proceed slowly if the applicant is not making the necessary reforms. As such,
a decision by the community to deny the applicant a possibility of progress in
certain areas is a political decision that calls into question the applicant state’s
eligibility for membership. If so, then eligibility would be restored when all
blockages are lifted and the progress of negotiations is limited only by the aspirant
state’s political will and administrative capacity. However, this logic does not
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
outweigh the fact that accession negotiations are only held with states that are
considered eligible for membership, so we consider the continuation of any such
negotiations as an indicator that the community has not revoked its prior
confirmation of membership eligibility.
Having clarified the nature of membership eligibility and ineligibility and how
they can be recognized empirically, the chapter now turns to a brief summary of
the book’s core argument and alternative explanations.
transportation costs, which have an inverse relationship with the net gains
of economic integration (Frankel et al. 1997). By this logic, a regional
community would welcome all non-member states with which a current
member state shares a land border or close proximity across water. Shifting
the focus to social purpose, which John Gerard Ruggie (1982) considers
key to understanding the costs that states are willing to bear in international
organization, casts territorial location in a new light. Quite simply, if a
regional organization aims to integrate or govern a particular geographic
space, such as a continent or portion thereof, one might expect that any
state located fully or even partly within this space would be considered
eligible for membership, and states outside this space would be ineligible.
For example, any state located in Europe would be eligible for membership
in the European Union.
3. Treaty rules. Regional communities are founded on intergovernmental
treaties that establish formal rules regarding which states may join. The
community’s decisions on the membership eligibility of non-member states
may be determined by the content of these rules. If so, then a regional
community will recognize the membership eligibility of non-member states
that fit the formal rule on memberships established by the community’s
treaty, and reject others. For example, a regional community whose
founding treaty requires that all member states must also belong to a
particular military alliance would exclude a non-member state that was not
part of the alliance.
4. Regime type. The member states of a regional community may view its
evolution as an opportunity to consolidate their own position domestically
and/or to spread their values by ensuring the prevalence of states like theirs
within the community and keeping dissimilar regimes out. A regional
community’s decision on the membership eligibility of non-member states
may therefore be shaped by variations in the member states’ form of
government. If so, then a regional community will recognize the
membership eligibility of non-member states whose regime type is similar
to that of the member states, and reject those that are dissimilar. For
example, a regional community composed of hereditary monarchies will
not consider a parliamentary democracy eligible for membership, regard-
less of the other interests of its member states.
5. Commercial interests. In regional communities including a customs union
or single market, which are likely to influence the economic profile and
competitiveness of their members, there is a strong incentive for member
states’ governments to base their preferences regarding possible
enlargement on calculations of how integrating an applicant state would
affect their own state’s economic welfare. For example, if they prefer to keep
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
It is also important to explain why the book does not give equal status to an
explanation of membership eligibility focused on socio- cultural identity.
Identities are ‘relatively stable, role-
specific understandings and expectations
about the self ’ that provide a basis for both social distinctiveness and social
solidarity (Wendt 1992: 397). Some scholars define regions as groups of states
whose populations or elites share a cultural identity (Kupchan 2010, Acharya
2011). One could therefore attempt to explain eligibility for membership in a
regional organization with reference to the socio- cultural identities of the
applicant state and the member states.
From this perspective, one might expect regional communities to welcome
membership applications from states whose cultural characteristics they share
and to reject applications from states with different cultural characteristics.
Prescriptive versions of this logic are widely heard in public debates. Former
French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (2000) argues that Turkey is ineligible
for EU membership because it does not share Europe’s cultural heritage, while
former Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein (2011) goes a step further, stressing the
Christian roots of European civilization. Hence Thomas Risse’s suggestion that
‘one cannot even begin to understand EU enlargement without taking identity
politics into account’ (2012: 92).
However, in order to test the identity explanation of EU decision-making over
time, it would first be necessary to determine what historical memory or set of
cultural values were shared by Europeans at various points in time since the
1950s. The problem is that apart from the claims of political entrepreneurs, ‘a
meaningful common European historical identification barely exists’ (Mayer and
Palmowski 2004: 575). As a result, scholars tend to treat the joint legal
commitments of European states as a proxy for European identity even though
the cultural sources of these commitments are ambiguous at best.
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This part of the chapter outlines the empirical research design used to explain
how regional communities decide which states are eligible for membership. It
starts with a justification of the focus on Europe—why it makes sense to
investigate the politics of EU enlargement and why doing so should yield valid
insights with broader applicability. It then discusses how the country-cases are
identified and introduces the 48 country-cases that are the focus of the book’s
empirical investigation. It then distinguishes three distinct dependent variables
and the analytical methods used to explain them: discursive-process tracing of
EU membership norms over seven decades, statistical analysis of eligibility
outcomes in 48 country-cases, and causal-process tracing of eligibility decision-
making in three countries over time.
they had made in the treaties. At the same time, the EU was born as an economic
community and always had economic integration as its core project, so
governments of the member states faced strong incentives to base their
membership decisions on assessments of economic fit or gain. On the other hand,
given how the rise of fascism in the 1930s had demonstrated the fragility of
democratic rule, the strength of communist parties in the post-war period created
a strong incentive for EEC member states to do whatever they could to bolster
democracy, such as limiting membership to democratic states that protect human
rights. Finally, with the Cold War raging, the Warsaw Pact’s forces never far away,
and the United States constantly pressuring its allies to reinforce NATO solidarity,
west European governments faced strong incentives to base their EC membership
decisions on geopolitical calculations. These incentives were sustained after the
Cold War by intense ethnic conflict in states bordering the EU, massive refugee
flows, and Russian military adventurism. In this complex and potentially over-
determined environment, it is far from obvious that membership norms would
have any significant impact on member states’ decisions regarding enlargement.
The second reason is purely empirical. If one aims to test competing
explanations of decision-making on membership eligibility, there have to be
enough cases to provide variation on the dependent variable and on possible
explanatory variables, as well as sufficient transparency for the researcher to
access the relevant data. The EU is ideal in both respects, given the large number
of non-member states that have sought to join the club over seven decades, some
successfully and some not, plus the relative accessibility of official records and the
intense media coverage of these developments since the beginning.
The study thus rests on a deep and varied empirical foundation. At its core lie
the most primary of primary sources in EU scholarship: preparatory studies and
preliminary drafts (travaux préparatoires) and transcripts (procès verbaux) from
meetings of the member states, the internal notes of member states and EU
institutions, as well as diplomatic correspondence and position papers found in
the historical archives of the Belgian, French, and German foreign ministries, the
Council of the European Union, the European Commission, and the European
Parliament, plus the Historical Archives of the European Communities located at
the European University Institute in Florence and the European Union Delegation
Collection held at the University of Pittsburgh. Other important documents were
found in the University of Pittsburgh’s online Archives of European Integration
(aei.pitt.edu), the University of Luxembourg’s online Centre Virtuel de la
Connaissance sur l’Europe (www.cvce.eu), and the Fondation Paul-Henri Spaak,
an independent but now-defunct institute in Brussels. These archival sources
were supplemented by interviews with senior EU officials, memoirs, speeches,
and other statements by key decision-makers, as well as print and electronic
media reporting on events as they unfolded, statistical data from the World Bank
and the Center for Systemic Peace, and some secondary historical sources.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
In the simplest sense, the dependent variable and key unit of analysis in this study
is the EU position on the membership eligibility of an applicant state. But in order
to evaluate the various possible explanations introduced above, the study distin-
guishes between two dimensions of EU decision-making: the content of positions
on membership eligibility since 1957 and the process by which these decisions
were made in critical cases over time. Studying both dimensions yields more valid
insights into EU decision-making than studying either one alone. In addition, as
a foundation for testing the membership norms explanation, it is necessary first
to trace the evolution of EU membership norms over time. Addressing these
three empirical challenges necessitates a broad range of analytical methods whose
rationale and application are elaborated below.
the relative fit between the expectations of the various arguments and the
positions observed in the 48 country-cases (i.e. episodes where the EU took a
position on the eligibility of a particular state). Notwithstanding the nuances of
each decision, these outcomes are reduced to a binary variable (eligible–ineligible)
in order to facilitate comparison of the various arguments. Data on the outcome
in each case comes from the same sources indicated above for the genealogy of
membership norms. Variations over time in the membership norms themselves
are drawn from the preceding analysis. Data on the other arguments’ explanatory
variables comes from the EUR-Lex database (treaties), Polity IV and V-Dem
(regime type), the World Bank (commercial interests), and secondary sources
(geopolitical threats).
Once the data are assembled, we evaluate each case to determine whether the
outcome fits the expectations derived from the various hypotheses in light of the
relevant values on their respective explanatory variables. The cases are then
analysed using three complementary methodologies. First, the correlations
between explanatory variables and outcomes are presented in cross- tab or
contingency table format: this provides an initial assessment of their relative
explanatory power. Second, as a check on the robustness of the initial findings, we
analyse the same cases and outcomes using logistic regression. Third and finally,
the cases and outcomes are analysed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis,
which offers yet another robustness check. This combination of techniques is well
suited to maximizing the validity of conclusions regarding each argument’s
explanatory power. The opening of Chapter 4 provides more details on this
analysis.
the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 through the end of 1961, the EEC
defined itself as a community of non-Communist states and expected any state
seeking membership to fit this norm. Through the remainder of the 1960s, the
EEC defined itself as a community of non- Communist parliamentary
democracies. Starting about 1970 and continuing for another thirty-five years,
the EEC (and later EC then EU) defined itself as a community of liberal
democracies. Most recently, since about 2006, the EU has lacked a dominant
conception of itself as a political community and thus of what type of state is
eligible for membership.
Chapter 4 then uses three empirical methods—cross-tab correlation, logistic
regression, and crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis—to test the fit between
the six theories’ expectations regarding EU decisions on membership eligibility
and the actual decisions that were taken in the 48 cases. Both individually and
collectively, the three methods provide a strong empirical basis for the argument
that membership norms play a significant role in decision-making, arguably even
more significant than commercial or geopolitical interests. (The book’s Appendix
elaborates the techniques used to impute a small number of missing values for the
statistical analyses in this chapter.)
Building on this finding, Chapters 5–8 trace the process of EU decision-making
regarding the membership eligibility of four countries—Greece, Spain, Turkey,
and Ukraine—across four time periods. Chapter 5 examines decision-making on
Greece, Turkey, and Spain in the years 1957–1961, when the prevailing
membership norm defined Europe as a community of non-Communist states.
Chapter 6 examines decision-making on Greece, Turkey, and Spain in the years
1962–1969, when the prevailing membership norm defined Europe as a commu-
nity of parliamentary democracies. Chapter 7 examines decision-making on
Greece, Turkey, Spain, and Ukraine in the years 1970–2005, when the prevailing
membership norm defined Europe as a community of liberal democracies.
Chapter 8 examines decision-making on Turkey and Ukraine since 2006, when
no single normative definition of Europe has prevailed. Overall, these chapters
reveal a strong fit between the procedural expectations of the membership norms
argument and the actual decision-making process as it unfolded over time.
In conclusion, Chapter 9 summarizes the empirical findings and considers
their implications for the future course of EU decision-making on enlargement,
for the behaviour of regional organizations in other parts of the world, and for
future scholarship on inter-governmental decision-making and the construction
of regional communities.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
2
Explaining Membership Eligibility
The Limits of Europe: Membership Norms and the Contestation of Regional Integration. Daniel C. Thomas,
Oxford University Press. © Daniel C. Thomas 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199206711.003.0002
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
are themselves sources of power for political actors with their own motives and
goals. In the same spirit, Benedict Anderson (1983: 7) defined the nation, one of
the most familiar building blocks of political geography, as ‘an imagined political
community . . . imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. Limits are thus
inherent to the definition and the lived experience of community: ‘The nation is
imagined as limited because even the largest of them,’ said Anderson, ‘has finite, if
elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.’
But to assert that all political communities have imagined limits is not to claim
that these limits are somehow false: they are ‘distinguished not by their falsity/
genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,’ wrote Anderson (1983:
6–7). Similarly, William Rogers Brubaker (1990: 380) defines the nation as ‘an
idea—and an ideal: it is a distinctive way of characterising and evaluating political
and social membership’. More recently, Roger M. Smith (2003: 20) defines a
‘political people or community [as] a potential adversary of other forms of human
association [whose] obligations legitimately trump many of the demands made
on its members in the name of other associations’. In other words, the imagined
limits of a political community may be near or far, and they may change over
time, but they shape the behaviour of its members and those who seek to join.
Anderson, Brubaker, and Smith were speaking principally about communities
composed of individuals, but their logic helps us to understand the construction
and limits of groups or communities of states. A regional community is a group of
states who identify collectively with a particular area of the world and whose
norms and rules compete with and override some of the demands on those states
deriving from other identities or institutions. These norms and rules are typically,
though not necessarily, embedded in a formal international organization designed
to govern the community and represent it to the outside world. The limits of such
a regional community are determined by the collective imagination of the
governments that comprise the community at any given time.
So how do regional communities define which states are eligible for membership
and which are not? The governments that create a regional community often
emphasize what they have in common, such as location, cultural heritage, values,
or material interests, but building and sustaining a regional community of states
is as much about establishing difference as it is about reinforcing commonality.
After all, no group of states can claim that certain characteristics distinguish its
members from others without referring implicitly or explicitly to other states that
lack the same characteristics, either entirely or in sufficient measure. However,
this differentiation need not assume the irreconcilability of identities: the
community of states that differentiates itself from others in terms of certain
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/10/21, SPi
Priory of Brewood
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house
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parler hengynges of lynyon ar soulde for
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to the Sume of viijd.xls.
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crosse ylez wyth the glasse and pauement in the Churche wt.
the Roffes glasse yron pauement tyle shingull of the Cloyster
and Chapter house whych ys soulde.
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befor the dyssolucon therof
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xiijli.
grauestones And all the glasse Jeroun[237] & the tymber vjs.
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for
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baudekynne, j vestment of grene and dune sylke, j
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viijd.
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forseyd late Monastery by the forseid Commissionors