Teaching Empowerment? Opportunities and Limits of Knowledge Transfer in the EU Accession Context

Inclusiveness is becoming a key focus of the EU accession negotiations. Whereas membership talks in Central and Eastern Europe largely centred on national executives, concerns over patchy implementation of adopted reforms have resulted in calls for a broader participation at the domestic level. Yet, the impact of top-down incentives in achieving empowerment of previously marginalised actors has been shown to be limited (Börzel 2010; Fagan 2009). This paper explores an alternative pathway, studying horizontal efforts to transfer knowledge between civil society actors from different enlargement rounds. Can civil society actors learn from effective mobilisation strategies in neighbouring countries – may successful models even be ‘taught’ to them through transnational exchanges? Preliminary findings from the Western Balkans suggest that such a dynamic is possible where local actors take ownership of external models and adapt them to their specific circumstances.

The paper uses a comparative approach to assess to what extent the model of ‘National Conventions on the EU’, initially developed in Slovakia to bring together parliamentary and civil society actors to discuss integration-related topics, was successfully transferred to Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. Through process-tracing on the basis of written documents and interview material, I find that successful transfer is related to the level of domestic adaptation of the model and the extent of pre-existing forms of domestic access for civil society actors. These findings contribute both to a deeper understanding of the importance of horizontal exchanges in Europeanisation processes, and to the growing literature on the transnational diffusion of social movements.