Introduction: Reconstituting Political Order in Europe, West and East

Abstract

This article offers a reappraisal of some of the distinctive features and implications of the supranational civil legal order which now encompasses over 500 million Europeans, or about two-thirds of Europe's inhabitants, depending on how Europe is delimited. This order offers unprecedented degrees of security, stability, certainty and calculability and maximum scope and incentives for the peaceful and profitable coexistence of a great multiplicity of peoples with widely differing cultures, values and belief-systems, while minimizing the scope for mutual impairment, friction and violent conflict. The European Union's unprecedented and unique supranational legal order is the bedrock of this rule-governed order. Even though it is not in itself democratic, it nevertheless enhances the resilience and efficacy of liberal democracy at the state and sub-state levels and provides strong support for relatively liberal forms of capitalism and civil society. This continually evolving order is unique and without precedent, and yet it does not involve the acting out or unfolding of a preordained plan, teleology or script. It is having a transformative impact on East Central European, Baltic and Balkan post-Communist states and their positions within the wider European order. This is still dominated by the strongest West European states, but the position of smaller and poorer states is nevertheless much stronger and more secure than in any previous European order. This Introduction also contextualizes the wide-ranging contributions to this special issue. The contributors are united by shared perceptions of the fluidity, indeterminacy, ambiguities and open-endedness of the emerging civil order in Europe and its impact on the reconfiguration of East–West relationships within Europe. The resultant metamorphoses in the European states system, democracy, governance and East–West relations are also central concerns.

Key Words:

• Civil order
• rules of conduct
• vertical versus horizontal power relations
• European Union
• Russia
• Commonwealth of Independent States

Since the lifting of Europe's ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1989, the East Central European, Baltic and Balkan post-Communist states have gradually become integrated into the supranational civil order which was slowly incubated and developed in Western Europe between 1949 and 1989. This civil order involves the rule of law, freely-contested multiparty elections, and growing legal protection of citizenship rights, human rights and minority rights. As a result, well over 500 million citizens of ‘EU Europe’ (comprising the 27 EU member states plus Norway, Switzerland and the current applicants for EU membership) are now fortunate enough to live within this relatively secure, stable, free, law-governed and socially protective ‘First World’ framework. Most West Europeans have simply grown up with this new civil order and therefore tend to take it for granted. It has gradually come to be accepted as part of a ‘given’ decades-old political landscape, alongside but still formally subordinate to the individual EU member states, to which most EU citizens still retain primary affective attachments and allegiances.

This new European political order is a unique and unprecedented achievement in human history (Bideleux, 2005). It provides an increasingly resilient legal and institutional infrastructure which undergirds the rule of law, prosperous market economies, parliamentary democracy, and an ever-widening range of rights and freedoms. It represents the most promising way of providing a coherent and consistent framework for managing the increasingly complex and far-reaching economic interdependence and cultural interlacing between European countries and peoples; and of managing their increasingly important economic, scientific and cultural interactions with (including migrations of people from) adjacent regions and other parts of the world. The single overarching civil/legal framework places all the countries embedded within it on increasingly equal juridical footings and on increasingly level economic and social ‘playing fields'. Indeed, ‘The justification of European integration has always been, and is, that it raises a body of law and operating rules which apply to every member of the union, from the strongest to the weakest’ (Duchêne, 1994, p. 373). These changes have in turn been associated with the rise and proliferation of increasingly autonomous non-state actors and social movements, relative diminutions in the saliency of vertical power relations and hierarchical power structures, and a corresponding growth in the importance of more horizontal and transnational relations, networks, and horizontal accountability (Anderson, 2002; Bideleux, 2007; Castells, 2000; O'Donnell, 1998; Zielonka, 2007).

Thus ‘EU Europe’ has undergone hugely transformative paradigm shifts, not least in the ways that states and peoples see and behave towards one another. Thomas Kuhn (1996, p. 109) pointed out that paradigm shifts have normative as well as cognitive dimensions. The new civil order in ‘EU Europe’ is normative as well as cognitive. As Michael Keating put it at a conference in Cardiff on 2 May 2008, ‘political communities, territorial order, jurisdictions and borders are continually being reconstituted and renegotiated’.

Simultaneously, Europe's burgeoning supranational legal order has become a norm-giving system in its own right (MacCormick, 1999). As formalized by the work of the Council of Europe since its inception in 1949, the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) from 1975 to 1993 (metamorphosed into the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) since 1994), the promulgation of the EU's famous ‘Copenhagen criteria’ for membership in June 2003, and by the promulgation of NATO's first formal membership criteria in September 1995, countries are no longer accepted into these organizations until their representatives sign up to and show that they can largely be capable of abiding by the specified obligations of membership and rules of conduct. As a result, there has been considerable convergence towards an EU-wide ‘culture of rights' and common ‘European standards'. Political legitimacy has increasingly become bound up with the degrees to which states adhere to these norms.

This momentous transformation is not a ‘magic wand’ or panacea which can rapidly establish full equality between national, cultural and geographical entities of greatly differing sizes, strengths, capabilities, and total and per capita GDPs. But it has created a robust framework within which the great majority of states and peoples in this previously very conflict-prone subcontinent no longer resolve their disputes by sabre-rattling, power diplomacy and force majeure. The principle of ‘might is right’ wreaked colossal and devastating havoc upon the European political order right up to the 1940s. It continued to inflict more limited but nonetheless debilitating and demoralizing damage on East Central Europe's political order up to the 1980s, on the Baltic States until 1991, on the Balkans until 2001, and on the Caucasus region, Moldova and Belarus until the present. By contrast, with localized exceptions such as violence by ETA (Eskaudi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Fatherland and Freedom, founded in 1959) in Spain and Mafia and Camorra gangsterism in Italy, the expanded ‘EU Europe’ resolves its internal and international disputes by negotiation and horse-trading and, in the last resort, by going to court rather than to war. These changes represent especially valuable gains for Europe's smaller, weaker and poorer countries and peoples, which previously tended to get walked over (or worse) by their bigger, stronger or richer neighbours.

Remarkably, and also without parallel in human history, this new civil order is not based upon the prevalence of (and adherence to) a set of values rooted in a particular religion, like the normative and cognitive orders established in medieval Christendom and ‘Islamdom’ (Hodgson, 1974, pp. 57–59). On the contrary, it has been designed to promote the peaceful flourishing and coexistence of a rich, vibrant and ever-increasing diversity of peoples with a wide range of cultures, belief-systems and value-systems, rather than to favour a particular religion or belief-system and the associated culture and value-system. The capacity of this order and its institutional framework to accommodate and respect diversity is crucial to its long-term viability and success. The core purpose of the EU cannot be to try to force states and peoples into a common European identity, culture or mould, nor to impose a uniform set of European values, as many Europhiles and Europhobes would have us believe. The EU has long recognized that promotion of a monolithic‘European identity’ based on increased cultural uniformity would be stultifying, divisive and conducive to stagnation and strife. Instead, it endeavours to promote common standards and rules of conduct to help safeguard Europe against potential backsliding into past patterns of bigotry, barbarity, beggar-my-neighbour protectionism, authoritarianism and genocide. Unity in diversity is the only feasible and defensible long-term strategy.

This new legal, cognitive and normative civil order has also been a major contributor to and consequence of Europe's steadily increasing economic integration and prosperity, setting in motion various overlapping ‘virtuous circles'. Economic integration has been the principal means, rather than the principal end, of this vast European ‘security community’ and ‘peace project’. As the EU Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan aptly wrote in 1994, ‘Ultimately it is economic prosperity that will weld the continent together, leading to a joint political future in one Union’ (Brittan, 1994).

Europe's new civil order is and is likely to remain in a state of flux, and it remains to be seen how successfully it will meet the huge challenges that are being posed by the global economic crisis which began in earnest in September 2008. This collection of articles addresses key questions about the nature, implications and impact of the new order.

Jonathan Bradbury's contribution focuses directly on the continually evolving nature, activities and scope of the European Union, especially the contested politics of ‘ever closer union’ since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and subsequent ‘sea changes' in EU approaches to integration, treaty reform and accommodation of state interests. The official EU goal of ‘ever closer union of European peoples' (in the plural) has long been widely read as a principled commitment to an open-ended process of political and social as well as economic integration, involving a multiplicity of peoples and refraining from the highly contentious task of proclaiming a ‘final destination’. So long as European integration was limited to the six founder members of the European Communities, it was just about feasible to envisage that a cohesive, intimate and state-like destination could in principle be negotiated and agreed on long in advance. However, the expansion of the EU to 27 member states in 2004 and 2007 has set in motion an altogether different ‘ball-game’, with even less possibility of pursuing preordained or even preconceived goals. As a result of these eastward enlargements, it is becoming ever harder for the EU to obtain unanimous agreement on and ratification of ‘history-making’ positions. The divergent but still clearly distinguishable voices of the original six founder members have now been superseded by a postmodern cacophony which is making it ever harder to discern what tune is being played, who is calling the tune, and where it is heading. To this the still incipient and highly uncertain impact of the global economic crisis will soon add further layers of dissonance and complexity. Jonathan Bradbury provides an empirical assessment of the ways in which the EU and its member states have endeavoured to deal with these problems. Bradbury stresses that this has gone with the flow of other tried-and-tested approaches, including the successive attempts in the Treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2000), Brussels (2004) and Lisbon (2007) to (re)establish the EU on firmer and much more clearly structured and delineated constitutional foundations. This has also reflected the growing recognition since the early 1990s that the business of the European Union involves much more than ‘integration’. It has established an elaborate and wide-ranging system of supranational governance and a supranational legal order, controlled by but nevertheless located ‘above’ the participating states. This has resulted in growing demands for discussion and clarification of the distribution of powers between the different levels or tiers of governance. This approach is very much in keeping with both the spirit and the practice of the new, increasingly fluid, flexible and kaleidoscopically shifting EU order.

Our second major focus, addressed by Michael Keating and John Loughlin, is on the rescaling of the European states system, the reconfiguration of territorial governance, and the ways in which these have interacted with the development of Europe's new civil order. Since the late 1960s European integration and the erosion and/or abandonment of various forms of étatism have proceeded hand-in-hand with widespread assertion of ethno-national and regional identities, the growing saliency of diverse conceptions of civil society and regional development, and trends towards more decentralized forms of government.

Some devolution specialists, most forthrightly John Hopkins, have portrayed a seemingly inexorable rise of ethno-nationalism, regionalism and devolved governance in Western Europe since the late 1940s:

In 1939, Europe was a patchwork of unitary states … In contrast, the period since 1945 has seen a burgeoning of the federal principle and the decline of the classical unitary model in Western Europe. The regional state, with a democratic level of governance between the national and the local, is no longer the exception; it is the norm. (Hopkins, 2002, p. xxi)

Hopkins has argued that, during the late 1980s and the 1990s, further growth of devolved government in Western Europe was driven by ‘the need to administer and develop particular areas of policy on a regional basis', with the result that ‘by 2000 some form of democratic regional government existed in 13 of the 15 EU Member States' (Hopkins, 2002, p. 40).

Michael Keating, whilst highlighting the emergence of new thrusts towards regional autonomy, has adopted more circumspect stances, emphasizing the indeterminacy, open-endedness and political and economic opportunism of the political and economic interests which have favoured the ‘new’ regionalism:

Regions have now emerged as new places for the construction of policies, as systems of action, and as actors themselves in the global order … Regions still engage in exchange with their respective states, but are also in direct contact with international regimes, and with the global market … States, it must be emphasised, have not disappeared and are not likely to, but they no longer monopolise the external links of regions. (Keating, 1998, pp. 78, 80)

Meanwhile, other devolution specialists have contended that the growth of devolved governance is much less significant than it has been cracked up to be, and that there is no inexorable logic or unstoppable political or economic conveyor belt leading to a ‘Europe of the Regions'. Even where devolved or regional government has developed into a substantial tier of government (as in Germany, Spain, Belgium and, since 1999, Scotland and Wales), it has not lived up to the promises and expectations generated by the ‘regional revolution’ of the 1970s–80s. Some regionalist movements which attracted a lot of attention and publicity in the 1970s subsequently fizzled out, for example those in Brittany, Alto-Adige and Valle d'Aosta. The Committee of the Regions has failed to give much substance to a ‘Europe of the Regions', chiefly because Europe's regions are too varied in character and organization and too disparate in size and muscle to be able to serve as the basis of a uniform regional tier of representation and governance across the wide range of EU member states, which in turn range in size from tiny Luxembourg and Malta to giant Germany. Whether as political or as economic actors, Western Europe's regional government institutions have found themselves having to compete with powerful cities, with local government bodies, with giant multinational corporations, and with much better resourced central governments. Regions are just some among many players or contestants, and are only rarely able to call the shots. The highly successful ‘economic regions' which appeared to lend credibility to the ‘Europe of the Regions' slogan in the 1980s and early 1990s were actually quite few in number and only rarely corresponded to regions of long standing in the political, cultural or institutional sense. ‘Despite the notable exceptions of Germany, Spain, Belgium and the historical nations of Wales and Scotland, regions as a level of elected government have generally remained relatively weak. They have weak autonomy, weak resources, weak political capacity and weak legitimacy’ (Le Galès & Lequesne, 1998, p. 244).

These and related issues are analysed in novel ways by Michael Keating and John Loughlin, both of whom successfully move the longstanding debates on European territorial governance onto fresh terrain and thus surmount the striking circularity of recent treatments of these themes (notably Elias, 2008). It is high time to bring fresh concepts, rubrics and agendas into this particular field of study. Michael Keating focuses attention on the striking fluidity and indeterminacy of the new civil order in EU Europe, and the ways in which this is fostering new forms of governance and opening up new political spaces beyond the established forms and conceptions of the nation-state. John Loughlin highlights the growing hybridity, multidimensionality and ‘intermesticity’ of the major forms and institutions of territorial governance in Western Europe, and the ways in which this is both fostering and interacting with new forms of economic governance and welfare provision. Like previous major crises, the current global economic crisis and crisis of governance is likely to convulse and pose further challenges to the recently prevailing paradigms and approaches to regional and territorial governance and small-nation nationalism in Europe, although it is too early to discern or predict the outcome(s).

In addition, recent trends in European democracy and Western paradigms of engagement with states in the eastern half of Europe are addressed by Alena Ledeneva and by Sabrina P. Ramet. Alena Ledeneva does this by focusing on the anti-corruption drives and the new ‘corruption paradigm’ which have loomed very large in the reconstitution of political order in Europe's post-communist states, under strong pressure from the major international financial institutions (IFIs) and the EU. This phenomenon brings out the close links between the neoliberal hegemony over economics and global governance from the 1980s to 2008 and the ascendancy of the new ‘culturalist’ or ‘civilizational’ paradigms in Western elite thinking. The ‘war on corruption’, a precursor of the ‘war on terror’, has been driven by a combination of neoliberal economics (especially the World Bank's ‘good governance agenda’, which became the centrepiece of the 1990s' ‘Washington consensus') and claims or insinuations that ‘corruption’ is particularly endemic in ‘non-Western cultures' and has to be combated if ‘non-Western’ states and societies are to successfully implement the ‘good governance agenda’ deemed essential to successful development of Western neoliberal capitalism and (increasingly neo-) liberal democracy. It rests on an increasingly instrumental and reductive view of ‘democracy’ as part of the IFI toolkit for the promotion of neoliberal capitalism. The ‘corruption paradigm’ implicitly equates ‘corruption’ with ‘non-Western’ practices and ‘non-Western cultures', including those of the Balkan and CIS post-communist states, as though corruption was not also endemic within Western capitalism and Western democracy. Colossal siphoning of funds into the pockets of Western millionaire bankers, industrialists, salespersons and politicians appears to have been a major factor in the scale and severity of the global crisis of 2008–09. This further exposes the preposterousness of the popular dichotomy between the ‘corrupt’ non-West and a supposedly ‘clean’ West. The main ‘corruption indices' rely heavily on surveys and evaluation of businesspeople by businesspeople plus (potentially complicit) ‘experts' and politicians, in effect relying on potential poachers to be dependable gamekeepers and whistleblowers. Alena Ledeneva exposes the complex mixture of technical flaws, anthropological fallacies, dishonesty and sometimes ignorance and cultural contempt underlying the IFI's ‘corruption paradigm’ and ‘war on corruption’. Her analyses of these maladies carry an even greater explosive charge when they are viewed within the larger frame of Western cultural imperialism and neoliberal tutelage over the ‘non-Western world’, which complements the binary worldview (‘the West versus the Rest’) put forward by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis (1993, 1998). That whole way of thinking is crudely essentialist, disingenuous and simplistic. Thus the ‘essential’ problem or misfortune of ‘non-Western’ countries is that they are ‘non-Western’ in their attitudes, institutions, values and practices. Conversely, the ‘essential’ solution is to make these societies and cultures more ‘Western’ by waging war on ‘corruption’ (a.k.a. ‘non-Western’ practices and culture) and by fostering ‘social capital’ and the kinds of institutional framework advocated by Douglass North (1990). Like the concept of ‘corruption’, Robert Putnam's influential re-formulation of the concept of ‘social capital’ (Putnam 1993, 2000) has also been appropriated by the World Bank and other IFIs to serve their own neoliberal tutelage and Western cultural imperialism (for further critiques, see Bideleux, 2007; Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002; Kornai et al., 2004). Ledeneva shows that the widely used definition of corruption as the ‘misuse of public office for private gain’ is not as culturally or historically neutral as is commonly assumed, especially in Europe's post-communist states.

There has also been considerable use of, and convergence towards, notions of common ‘European standards' and a ‘Europe of Rights' among the current and prospective members of the EU. This has partly been driven by the exigencies of the June 1993 Copenhagen criteria and quests for EU membership. Michael Johns (2003) and Timothy Snyder (2003, pp. 256–271) have documented some of the substantial ways in which the EU, the Council of Europe, the 1975–91 Helsinki process, the subsequent OSCE, and the June 1993 Copenhagen criteria for EU membership have exerted various pressures on Europe's post-communist candidate states to change laws and adopt EU standards, especially in relation to respect for and protection of the rights of ethno-cultural and religious minorities, but also in relation to increased gender equality extending the rights of homosexuals, although Michael Johns (2003) also highlights the large doses of hypocrisy or double standards in West European insistence on such changes. The post-communist states which have joined the EU have embarked on the kinds of ‘rights revolution’, ‘cultures of rights', and increased awareness of the increasing scope and efficacy of recourse to litigation in defence of rights, which had already been brought about by the civil rights movement and judicial activism in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s and by varying combinations of civil rights movements, appeals to the European Convention on Human Rights, and recourse to the Council of Europe's European Court of Human Rights and the European Community's Court of Justice from the 1960s to the 1990s. Since the 1960s, citizens of Western countries have been discovering that in addition to looking to political institutions and political parties for the redress of injustices such as ethno-cultural and religious discrimination and many other rights violations, they can also increasingly obtain sometimes swifter, easier, cheaper or more effective redress of grievances and rights violations through the legal profession and law courts. Citizens of former communist states have been following suit on a large scale, not only in East Central and South-Eastern Europe, but even in Putin's Russia (Sakwa, 2008, pp. 155–157).

Nonetheless, it is too easy and tempting for West Europeans to overstate EU influence by almost unquestioningly attributing such changes largely to EU pressure, requirements and incentives and by greatly underestimating the degrees to which the new and prospective EU members in East Central and South-Eastern Europe have conceived and undertaken such changes on their own initiative, according their own lights, and/or in response to the internal dynamics of post-communist democratization and liberalization. Sabrina P. Ramet's article in this special issue very illuminatingly analyses the ways and the very large degrees to which the extension and reconfiguration of rights, freedoms and the public and private spheres in the East Central and South-East European post-communist states have been driven by major internal factors. She also draws attention to the persistence of important divergences on each of these fronts, not only between old and new or prospective EU members, but also among the new and prospective members. There are no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions or remedies to the problems European societies face, and it would be arrogant as well as counter-productive to try to force all states in a single EU-wide mould. It is plain arrogant to assume that West Europeans have already worked out solutions and remedies to the problems faced by Europe's post-communist states, not least because they confront far from identical problems.

The transformative potential of Europe's new civil order and the ways in which it impinges on relationships between different parts of Europe are assessed in the article by Sara Clavero and Yvonne Galligan on the evolving gender order in ‘EU Europe’, as well as in my own concluding article on the implications and impact of the ongoing eastward extension of the civil order established in Western Europe and the nature of Europe's new East–West divide.

European societies (like most others) are dominated by three main forms of hierarchy, inequality and oppression, based on class, gender and race/ethnicity. Confronted by these powerful and deeply entrenched hierarchies and inequalities, the EU has largely refrained from direct redistributive and affirmative action. This is partly because such actions would intrude upon problems that are deeply embedded in the political and social structures of the individual member states and are considered to be too politically sensitive for the EU to take on, but also because EU institutions (which in total spend barely 1% of the EU's GDP) conspicuously lack the power and resources to have major redistributive and affirmative impacts. Notwithstanding its major contributions to democratization and the establishment of rule of law and more level ‘playing fields', the European Union has on the whole been much less successful at changing power relations within states than between states. Instead, the EU has largely relied on the rule of law and various forms of regulation, anti-discriminatory legislation, and promotion of more level playing fields, in attempts (merely) to regulate and mitigate the effects of these hierarchies and inequalities (as well as any resultant oppression). Some argue that, realistically, this may be as much as the EU can and should do in these domains. Yet others argue that the EU can and should do much more to reduce structural inequalities, as Western Europe has experienced only modest degrees of convergence towards standard European paradigms of gender relations and equality. Indeed, EU approaches have been almost exclusively confined to work or employment-related gender equality, fostering uniform regulation and anti-discrimination systems and modest reductions of pay differentials between males and females, while saying nothing about gender relations in the home and in society, where very diverse patterns of structural inequality have persisted.

Sara Clavero and Yvonne Galligan examine explanations of why, in the field of gender relations, the EU has accomplished little more than modestly increased gender equality in employment-related matters. They mainly focus on the degrees to which implementation of the EU gender acquis communautaire has varied in accordance with the political, cultural and legal environment of individual EU member states, and on the ways in which the institutional and decision-making structure of the EU helps member states to block broader agendas of gender reform and restructuring. They find that research data collected by major research teams based in Germany and Austria indicates the absence of systematic links between degrees of state compliance with EU gender norms and the nature of the gender regime and the presence or absence of strong women's movements in particular states; and the absence of systematic differences in gender compliance between old and new member states. This dovetails with frequent claims that the EU's main advances towards greater gender equality have been brought by judicial activism (judicial or quasi-judicial remedying of perceived gaps, inconsistencies or deficiencies in EU Treaties and laws, or interpreting the perceived requirements thereof), which can sometimes bypass dominant vested interests in the Council, the elected Parliament, the unelected Commission, and the governments and parliaments of individual member states. However, they also find that there is no systematic correlation between high compliance with the gender acquis and high judicial activism on gender issues within individual member states. They conclude that degrees of compliance are determined by a complex multiplicity of factors, rather than just one or two main factors.

This collection is brought to a conclusion by my own reappraisals of the historic significance and implications of the ongoing eastward extension of the EU civil order, and of the light which this sheds on the new divide between ‘EU Europe’ and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Until the late 1980s, the emerging European civil order and the benefits it conferred were largely confined to Western Europe. Since the end of communist rule, however, this order has been extended quite rapidly to the East Central European, Baltic and Balkan post-communist states. These states, which were until very recently dominated by vertical power relations and power structures, have been transformed into polities, economies and societies in which horizontal power relations and power structures are becoming increasingly important. This transformation has both entailed and made possible the establishment of the rule of law, limited government, substantial equality before the law, liberal/representative democracy, law-governed civil societies, and rule-governed ‘civil economies' with relatively ‘level playing fields' – legally and socially as well as economically.

In the East Central European and Baltic states which joined the EU in May 2004, the struggles to meet the famous June 1993 ‘Copenhagen criteria’ and the less widely known December 1995 ‘Madrid criteria’ for EU membership generated powerful political/economic incentives and ‘leverage’ for growing societal and cross-party consensuses on: (i) macroeconomic stabilization policies designed to promote fairly robust fiscal and monetary discipline, low inflation, inward foreign direct investment, and rapid and sustainable economic resurgence and job-creation; (ii) microeconomic restructuring policies, involving extensive economic liberalization and privatization; (iii) administrative, institutional and judicial/legal reform; (iv) emulation of West European models of taxation and social welfare provision; and (v) respect for and protection of human and minority rights, including what can be most aptly characterized as ‘cultures of rights' and various forms of ‘rights-based politics'. To meet the 1993 ‘Copenhagen criteria’, candidates must establish: stable, viable and law-governed representative democracies; stable, functional and law-governed market economies capable of withstanding the competitive pressures of the EU Single Market; and constitutionally entrenched respect for and protection of human and minority rights. To meet the 1995 ‘Madrid criteria’, candidates must develop and demonstrate their administrative and judicial capabilities to implement, enforce and comply with the vast accumulated corpus of EU legislation (the acquis communautaire), without which they would simply be incapable of discharging their membership obligations. The drive to meet the EU's exacting membership requirements has strongly promoted: the rule of law, equal citizenship (in the sense of equal civil rights and equality before the law), and more ‘level playing fields'; more fully marketized and liberalized economies; increased stability, predictability and calculability of all forms of political and economic activity; reduced inflation, risk premia and interest rates; and increased foreign and domestic investment (Bideleux & Jeffries, 2007b, pp. 574–618).

The pursuit of similar transformations became the basis on which Bulgaria and Romania were also allowed to join the EU in January 2007. Even though the admission of these two states was partly an act of faith based upon promises of continued reform which have been very incompletely fulfilled since then, the major justification for nevertheless encouraging and allowing them to enter the EU on this basis is that the pressures, incentives and leverage generated by preparations for EU membership have played crucial roles in the transformation of political and economic power structures and power relations by persuading strongly entrenched ruling elites that it was in their own interests to persevere with the kinds of restructuring and reform demanded by the EU (Dimitrova, 2004, pp. 1–16, 145–162). In both countries, change has been faster and much more far-reaching than almost anyone had considered possible during the 1990s. All the same, both still have a lot of ‘unfinished business' to clear up. The continuing power and apparent impunity of organized crime remains a serious limitation on the further democratization and liberalization of Bulgaria, while the apparent impunity of high-level corruption still needs to be addressed in Romania (Bideleux & Jeffries, 2007a, pp. 103–123, 151–182; 2007b, pp. 610–618).

Integration of the Western Balkan states into the EU has also been seriously hampered by well-founded perceptions that highly clientelistic, clannish and extensively criminalized vertical power structures have remained deeply and tenaciously entrenched in these countries. This has continued to seriously restrict the jurisdiction/remit of the state, democratically elected institutions and the rule of law (Bideleux & Jeffries, 2007a, pp. xii, 5–21, 72, 102, 118, 141, 180–182, 323–328, 340–341, 382, 400, 467–470, 497, 504–506, 571, 580–587, 591–592; CARPO Project, 2006; Centre for the Study of Democracy, 2004; Jurekovi & Labarre, 2003).

Even though most of the Balkan post-communist states are still grappling with serious problems posed by the deeply entrenched ‘verticality of power’, as well as the tenacious hold of organized crime and racketeering on large swathes of the economy, employment and the state apparatus, it is also crucially important to recognize that their populations, political parties and media engage in vigorous political negotiation and debate and accept that all major issues and problems should ultimately be resolved by negotiation, compromise and/or through the ballot box, as even Serbia has demonstrated by holding two parliamentary elections and a presidential election in the wake of its gradual de facto‘loss' of Kosova between October 2005 and spring 2008. Under EU and NATO pressure, encouragement and sometimes unduly heavy-handed tutelage, the forces championing greater democratization, more ‘horizontal’ power relations, and more level playing fields have gradually been winning most of their battles, as well as the moral high ground. Very few political parties or interests are seriously seeking to curtail or overthrow democratic governance and, in this sense, democracy has indeed become ‘the only game in town’ in these states, even though that game is still sometimes played much more roughly than in Western Europe (Bideleux & Jeffries, 2007a, pp. 72, 120–123, 179–182, 230–231, 324–325, 403–404, 470, 506; 2007b, pp. 610–618).

Unfortunately, the development of a new civil order has made much less headway in the 11 post-Soviet states loosely grouped together as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Consequently, Europe now exhibits a new kind of East–West divide: between those states which do, and those which do not, participate in the new civil political order which was incubated in Western Europe from 1949 to 1989 and has since then been gradually extended into East Central Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans. The nature of this new divide, as well as the historic significance of the burgeoning civil order in ‘EU Europe’, is fully appraised in my concluding contribution to this collection.

Conclusion

Each in their own ways, the contributors to this special issue recognize the fluidity, indeterminacy, ambiguities and open-endedness of the emerging civil order in ‘EU Europe’ and in its relations with the rest of Europe. Even though the continually evolving order in ‘EU Europe’ is unique and without precedent (Bideleux, 2005), it does not represent the unfolding or realization of a predetermined script, plan or teleology. In practice, moreover, it has already gone far beyond what Europe's leading inter-governmentalists (Winston Churchill, Ernest Bevin, Charles de Gaulle) envisaged after World War II. Nevertheless, the elements of incipient federalism in this emerging civil order do not resemble the types of polity advocated between the 1930s and the 1960s by Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and prominent European federalists, including Altiero Spinelli, R.W.G. Mackay, Lionel Robbins, Denis de Rougement, Alexandre Marc, Konrad Adenauer and Heinrich von Brentano. None of these thinkers attached much importance to the kind of supranational legal order which has become the bedrock of Europe's new civil order and which differs markedly from the much more ‘political’ and statist forms of supranational polity which they advocated. Thus, like the USA, the European Communities have evolved in ways quite different from what their ‘founding fathers' envisaged at the outset. This is a useful reminder that such projects are necessarily journeys to unknown (and inherently unknowable) destinations, and that their unfolding necessarily involves a great deal of unforeseeable improvisation, serendipity and sheer opportunism along the way (Hayek, 1960, pp. 183–192; Shonfield, 1973).

The emergence and gradual eastward extension of the EU civil order has simultaneously been changing the basis and the location of Europe's East–West divide, which in turn has been altering the nature of the relationships between Europe's expanded West and its reduced East. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, there were high hopes in some quarters that the East–West divide could be abolished completely by cocooning the whole of Europe in an expanded civil order based on liberal democracy, liberal capitalism, limited government, unfettered and vibrant civil societies, and the rule of law. However, these hopes have been dashed to varying degrees by the arrested transformations of the CIS states, in which highly unequal and divisive neoliberal capitalism has indeed triumphed, whereas democracy and civil society have developed in markedly illiberal forms (Aslund, 2007a, 2007b; Kopecky & Mudde, 2002; Shevtsova, 2005; Wilson, 2005, 2007; Zakaria 1997, 2003, pp. 92–94). This sad outcome has been greatly exacerbated by the degree to which Western Europe and the USA have repeatedly gone out of their way to humiliate, alienate and marginalize Russia. This has naturally encouraged many millions of Russians to vote in droves for an unsavoury but ‘strong’ authoritarian ruler who has done much to restore Russia's battered national self-esteem by refusing to kow-tow to the West. Worse still, this in turn has helped to create a new East–West divide, based on a steadily hardening marginalization of Russia and the illiberal states which are clustered around it and to varying degrees depend upon it for fuel, trade, transit or security support. Of course the main responsibility for this unhappy outcome resides in the illiberal nature of the post-Soviet Russian state and most of the other CIS states, whose very nature excludes them in large measure from Europe's new civil order. Nevertheless, it would be both factually and morally wrong to overlook the important ways in which the US and its major European ‘bear-baiting’ allies have helped to bring this about. Whether this is cynical and short-sighted calculation or sheer incompetence (or a bit of both) remains to be seen. Either way, Western Europe's contributions to the emergence of a new East–West divide between ‘EU Europe’ and most of the CIS detract considerably from its remarkable achievements in fostering a robust supranational civil order and extending it eastwards to encompass East Central Europe, the Baltic States, the Balkans and Turkey.

Acknowledgement

This special issue grew out of a one-day workshop which was hosted and funded by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University on 1 May 2008, under the auspices of the department's ‘Macro-Political Change and Comparative Territorial Governance’ research cluster. The editors wish to express their thanks to the department for funding this workshop and to the colleagues who made stimulating contributions to the workshop discussions as well as to the contributors to this special issue, who responded very willingly and efficiently to our requests and suggestions.