The European Union's Democratic Conditionality and Domestic Politics in Slovakia: The Me ) iar and Dzurinda Governments Compared

Abstract

THE PROCESS OF MONITORING CANDIDATE COUNTRIES for EU membership has in the past decade become much stricter than ever before, compared with previous enlargements, in terms not only of the scope but also the specificity of conditionality demands. This is evident with respect to both economic and political conditions, but it is the latter which is particularly visible and which has a wider significance for European integration. For the EU has moved resolutely down the path of high as well as low politics and, thereby, into areas traditionally regarded as internal to states. This is demonstrated most recently by the debate, and also controversy, over a formal commitment on human rights. It is also clear that the EU has moved beyond conditions of formal democracy to those pertaining to substantive democracy or qualitative conditions such as the role of political parties and political participation, the independence of the media and an active civil society as well as human and minority rights.' While there has been a general growth of conditionality on the part of international organisations (IOs) in the 1990s, the EU has been at the forefront in pushing both the political and economic versions of this. Some other IOs have been advocates of particular aspects of substantive democracy, like the Council of Europe (COE) over human rights and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) over minority rights as well as fair and free elections, while others, like NATO, have remained committed to more formal requirements (in its case, civilian control over the military and the existence of a constitutional state). The EU, however, has developed an ever more extensive portfolio of conditionality demands and increasingly so in recent years. It has elaborated on and added to the original Copenhagen criteria set out in 1993.2 The reasons for this trend are several-the end of the Cold War and hence of the predominance of security concerns over democracy promotion; the EU's own political dynamic in a federalising direction; and, in particular, the awareness in Brussels of the various problems of accommodating so many still unconsolidated new democracies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with their communist legacies.