Larger and more law abiding? The impact of enlargement on compliance in the European Union

ABSTRACT

Although enlargement increases the preference diversity in the European Union (EU), this paper shows that enlargement has not led to a deterioration of compliance with EU law. In three of the EU’s four enlargement rounds, the new member states comply better with EU law than the old member states. The Southern enlargement in the 1980s is the only one that led to a substantial increase in non-compliance. Particularly surprising for the main compliance theories, which focus on state power, adjustment costs, administrative capacities or legitimacy, is the good performance of the post-communist Central and Eastern European new member states after the Eastern enlargement in the 2000s. Our analysis suggests that the use of pre-accession conditionality in the Eastern enlargement explains why these new members perform so well – unlike their Southern counterparts who faced equally unfavourable country-level conditions for compliance.

KEYWORDS:

• Accession
• compliance
• conditionality
• enlargement
• European Union

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Antoaneta Dimitrova, Heather Grabbe, Julia Langbein, Frank Schimmelfennig, Bernard Steunenberg, Asya Zhelyazkova and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. Special thanks go to Moritz Knoll for his assistance with the statistical analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tanja A. Börzel is Professor for European Integration at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Ulrich Sedelmeier is Associate Professor (Reader) in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes

1. Another factor that weakens the capacity of states to comply with their international commitments are domestic veto players (Haverland 2000; Putnam 1988; Tallberg 2002). Yet, since the findings are at best inconclusive (Börzel et al. 2010; Mbaye 2001; Toshkov 2010) and depend heavily on measurement, we do not include it in our analysis.

2. We calculate the (average) annual infringements of new members relative to the median (rather than the mean) of the old members, since there are extreme outliers among the old member states (especially Italy, and for later rounds, Greece). The median appears therefore a better indicator of non-compliance of old members than the mean.

3. Absolute numbers of infringement cases (which need to be used with caution, since, as discussed above, they do not control for factors that change over time) suggest that their relative deterioration is mainly the effect of a general improvement in the other member states.

4. Of course the regression results as such would not be able to tell us whether it is conditionality or something else that is specific to this round, and we therefore discuss below possible ways in which conditionality could have such a positive effect on compliance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FP7 program of the EU (project ‘Maximizing the integration capacity of the European Union: Lessons and prospects for enlargement and beyond MAXCAP’) under grant agreement number 320115.