European Union membership conditionality: the Copenhagen criteria and the quality of democracy

ABSTRACT

The European Union has been praised for successfully promoting democracy through its political accession conditionality by incentivizing Central and Eastern European countries to establish stable democratic institutions and improve their human rights practices. However, recent democratic downturns in the region have brought into question the quality and longevity of democracy that the Union promotes. By tracing political developments and progress towards satisfying European Union membership requirements in two countries currently engaged in accession negotiations, Montenegro and Serbia, I find that the European Union’s standards of democracy fall short of requiring stable democratic institutions and long-term successes in producing political systems that respect and protect human rights, the rights of minorities, the rule of law, and fundamental freedoms. Instead of requiring prospective member states to comply with accession criteria, the European Union is allowing them to progress along the integration path with only partial compliance, weakening its own ability to induce meaningful reforms.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union enlargement
• Copenhagen criteria
• democratization
• Montenegro
• Serbia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The two indices are averaged to produce an aggregate Freedom rating on a scale of 1 (free) to 7 (not free).

2. The average score of these seven categories produces a country’s ‘Democracy Score’ on a scale of 1 to 7 with 1 being free and 7 being not free. Based on the Nations in Transit measures of the time period under consideration in this paper, countries were scored in the following way: 1.00–2.99 consolidated democracies, 3.00–3.99 semi-consolidated democracies, 4.00–4.99 transitional or hybrid regimes, 5.00–5.99 semi-consolidated authoritarian regimes, and 6.00–7.00 consolidated authoritarian regimes.

3. Each category is scored on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being least democratic and 10 being most. Countries in the range of 8–10 are classified as full democracies, 6–7.99 as flawed democracies, 4–5.99 as hybrid regimes, and below as authoritarian. A country’s democracy index is the average of score of the five categories.

4. For a comprehensive critique of Freedom House’s Freedom in the World and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index see Diamond et al. (2016).

5. Currently, five countries are considered candidate countries: Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Turkey, but only Montenegro and Serbia are currently engaged in official accession negotiations. Albania and North Macedonia have not started accession negotiations. Turkey’s accession negotiations started in 2005; however, eight negotiation chapters will not be opened and no chapters will be closed until Turkey applies the 1970 Additional Protocol to the Ankara Agreement to Cyprus. In addition, recent democratic downturns in Turkey have led to deteriorating relations between Turkey and the EU, and have held back further accession negotiations.

6. The quality of democracy and progress in EU accession are independent of each other to the extent that none of the three measures of democracy discussed in this paper use EU membership as an indicator of the level of democracy, and the EU relies on the Commission to assess each country’s progress. As a result, while all three measures of democracy mention countries’ relationship with the EU in their narrative accounts, they don’t use those relationships as indicators in determining the level of overall democracy or its disaggregated measures.

7. After the break-up of former Yugoslavia, Montenegro and Serbia remained as the only two constitutive states in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 2003 when the federation was transformed into a looser state union of Serbia and Montenegro. In 2006, following a referendum on independence, Montenegro left the union.

8. For a further discussion of EU’s decision to open chapters 23 and 24 early in negotiations see Nozar (2012).

9. I thank anonymous reviewers for pointing out this distinction.

10. Nations in Transit Democracy Scores exclude Malta and Cyprus.

11. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Since then, 22 European Union member states have recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty. Five EU member states that do not recognize Kosovo’s independence are Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Romania, and Slovakia. Even though not all member states recognize its independence, the EU has agreed that it can engage in negotiations and deepening of relations with Kosovo jointly, while avoiding referring to it as a sovereign country in any official communication. In 2009, the Commission stated, ‘The absence of an agreed position on Kosovo’s status does not prevent the EU from substantial engagement with Kosovo’. See Commission of the European Communities (2009).

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Danijela Dudley

Danijela Dudley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at San José State University in San José, California. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on civil-military relations, institution building in transitioning societies, the influence of international integration on democratization processes, and European politics. Her articles have appeared in Armed Forces and Society, Mediterranean Quarterly, Political and Military Sociology, and Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies.