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ABSTRACT
The Copenhagen criteria for EU accession are the essential preconditions that candidate countries must satisfy to be deemed eligible for membership. In line with the strand of the literature that focuses on candidate countries’ convergence with the EU, the paper examines whether converge with the EU in terms of the Copenhagen political criteria can be established empirically for candidate and potential-candidate countries. Currently, the candidate country status is granted to Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. Bosnia–Herzegovina and Kosovo are recognized by the EU as potential candidate countries. In addition to the candidate and potential candidate countries, we include in the convergence tests the six countries of the Eastern Partnership EU policy: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine. Using unit root tests, convergence is examined in terms of two indices drawn from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project: the Liberal democracy and the Civil liberties indices. The findings reported herein, are not uniform and on the whole offer only scant evidence in favour of the convergence hypothesis. For some of the candidate and potential candidate countries convergence is established, while for others the results do not point to such a process.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to sincerely thank two anonymous referees for useful comments and constructive suggestions and for spotting flaws in an earlier version of the manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
1 Defined by the 1993 European Council in Copenhagen. https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/glossary/terms/accession-criteria_en.
3 https://www.v-dem.net/en/ and at https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/f9/08/f908eb53-c0e2-40f0-9294-e067537d8f0b/v-dem_policybrief_5_2016.pdf for a brief outline of the project and the indicators it compiles using both factual information from official documents as well as subjective assessments by experts.
6 Negotiations on EU-Belarus Partnership Priorities begun in 2016.
7 For a detailed presentation of the methodology used to construct the indices of the V-Dem project see Coppedge et al. (2019).
8 EEC at the time of the Agreement.
9 Data availability differs in the case of four countries. For Montenegro data is available from 1998 onwards, for Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992, for North Macedonia from 1991 and for Kosovo from 1999 onwards.
10 For instance, Presidents Erdogan in Turkey, Aliyev in Azerbaijan, Lukashenko in Belarus.
11 The candidate country status was awarded to Turkey in 1999.
12 See for instance the recent statement (March 22, 2021) by Josep Borrell EU’s High Representative/Vice-President: “ … the domestic situation in Turkey remains of serious concern, including the threats to close one of the major opposition parties, the HDP, and the withdrawal of Turkey of “the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence”- better known as the Istanbul Convention. You will have seen the statements I issued on these matters expressing our strong concern and condemnation and also the fear that these kind of measures are taking Turkey out of the European path … ”. https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/95458/foreign-affairs-council-remarks-high-representativevice-president-josep-borrell-press_en.