EU Enlargement and Anti-corruption Standards: From Candidacy to Accession

This chapter analyses substantive changes to the European Union [EU] anti-corruption standards in the process of the most recent phase of EU enlargement, which facilitated membership of some former pro-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The chapter identifies a trend towards greater conditionality for EU membership from candidate countries within Eastern Europe, and argues that the scope of EU conditionality required for their membership was far greater for those countries, than was required of Mediterranean nations that had previously acceded into the EU. Further, it argues that increasing conditionality is grounded in efforts to impose more stringent anti-corruption standards onto Eastern European and Western Balkan states seeking EU membership, than have been applied to Western European member states. Specifically, as case study, the chapter centres the EUs mission to combat corruption, and explores how its anti-corruption standards have been brought to bear on candidate nations as conditionality of EU membership. It addresses the strengthened demands in the frame of rule of law to address the EUs fight against corruption in the candidate countries. The main research question asks how has the EU conditionality changed in the area of corruption, and how the external standards on the fight against corruption developed more extensively than the internal ones. In this context, the chapter considers the development of the EU legal framework which addresses corruption and compares it with the development of external EU action in this field. I argue that the EU endeavours to combat corruption touches upon a number of areas of EU competence, cutting across justice affairs, the EU budget, and criminal law, which therefore lends to fragmentation of EU law and policy in this field. This fragmentation is further emphasized in the context of the enlargement policy, especially since the candidate countries from the Western Balkans have greater levels of corruption in public services and require an even more robust anti-corruption approach in the EU enlargement process than was applied to their Eastern European predecessors. The research examines the anti-corruption standards embodied in the EU enlargement methodology, as well as the anti-corruption mechanisms available to the new EU Member States to illuminate the manner in which the EU has tended to adopt an increasingly proactive anti-corruption policy on the external level. This is true particularly in the context of EU enlargement, where the asymmetry between EU external standards and internal legislation is evidenced by the anti-corruption standards imposed upon candidate countries by the European Union. The chapter concludes that the EU’s enlargement policy needs to go even further, since there is a need for more robust mechanisms to effectively tackle the rife corruption which is considered detrimental to the economic development of the candidate countries applying for membership.