Oct 06, 2023
"Ends" that Do Not End: Dr. Sergiu Buscaneanu with Insights from the External Incentives Model for the EU's Eastern Neighborhood
Together with Dr. Andrew X. Li (CEU), Dr. Sergiu Buscaneanu, research fellow at the Chair of Comparative Politics (TU Dresden), has recently published a new article on the External Incentives Model in the Journal of Common Market Studies ( ‘The External Incentives Model Embedded: Evidence From the European Union’s Eastern Neighbourhood’). The article focuses on the theoretical and empirical relevance of the External Incentives Model (EIM).
The EIM has proven to be a powerful tool for explaining Europeanization and rule adoption in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European countries.
Building on the ontology of the EIM, the paper seeks to contribute along three key objectives:
- To re-evaluate the EIM for the Eastern European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine);
- To introduce a conceptual distinction between domestic transformation and regulatory costs;
- To integrate and evaluate the EIM in a broader framework, by incorporating domestic and alternative international conditions.
In this article, the authors combine theory-guided case comparisons with panel data analysis, leveraging a rich dataset with evidence from the Eastern ENP countries. Their findings corroborate the relevance of the EIM, revealing that high domestic transformation costs tend to impede democratic development. On the contrary, a positive cost–benefit balance of transformation tends to encourage democratic consolidation in the Eastern ENP region.
The paper concludes that, being blinded by the ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama 1989), an entire generation of external democracy promotors has overlooked that local cultures of informality have long evolutionary trajectories, that informal institutions are highly resilient to change, that such institutions represent a major source of domestic transformation costs and that the latter may mount formidable obstacles to democratization. Because informal institutions tend to generate high transformation costs, any advances towards democratization in the Eastern ENP region require a genuine transformation process of institutions. This final teleological implication is about ‘ends’ that do not end.
Source: Buscaneanu, S., & Li, A. X. (2023). The External Incentives Model Embedded: Evidence From the European Union's Eastern Neighbourhood. Journal of Common Market Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13532.