The paper builds on the recent scholarly efforts to theorise about the process and the mechanisms of external Europeanization. All studies agree that the external Europeanization as the domestic adaptation to/impact of European governance (Schimmelfenning 2010: 3) occurs under the ‘shadow of conditionality’. Also, there is consensus among scholars that the more distant the countries and regions are from EU centre the less significant the EU efforts to directly influence institutional change and the less direct its impact is (Boerzel and Risse 2012: 2; Schimmelfenning 2010: 18). Despite the value added of these studies, they ignore social conditionality as an additional hard mechanism of Europeanization that is relevant to countries far from the EU centre. The paper fills this gap in by assessing empirically the formal and de facto relevance of social conditionality as a hard mechanism of the external Europeanization. To this aim it may also draw comparisons of hard conditionality application to other countries/regions, such as accession and neighborhood countries.
References
Boerzel, T. and Risse, T. (2012), ‘From Europeanisation to Diffusion: Introduction’, West European Politics, 35(1): 1-19.
Ruda, T. (2011), ‘How Legitimate is the EU’s Use of Social Conditionality in Promoting Development Under its Generalised System of Preferences?’, Cambridge Student Law Review, 62-73.
