Understanding the Limits of the European Union’s Power

Abstract

Building States without Society: European Union Enlargement and the Transfer of EU Social Policy to Poland and Hungary. By Beate Sissenich. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 252 pp., $80.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7391-1222-8), $29.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7391-1223-6). Beate Sissenich's Building States without Society takes a refreshing, new look at the European Union's enlargement process. What is particularly novel and interesting about the book is that Sissenich is not intent on proving how powerful international institutions are or how transformative the European Union has been in Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, the study shows how surprisingly weak even the most densely institutionalized organizations can be. Specifically, Sissenich explains why the European Union's transfer of social policy to Poland and Hungary was mostly perfunctory. For although these two “most likely” cases of EU rule adoption changed their legal codes to comply with the acquis communautaire , in both countries behavioral compliance has been far less than the European Union had hoped. Sissenich argues that this kind of incomplete rule transfer is the consequence, in general, of the weak states in Poland and Hungary (and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe) and, more specifically, of their “insufficient interest differentiation” (p. 16). In other words, the domestic interest groups that might have had the power to implement EU social policy on the …