The Eu's Transformative Power

The EU had enormous leverage to transform Central and Eastern Europe between the collapse of communism and the Union's first eastward enlargement. This book provides the first detailed analysis of how that influence worked. Heather Grabbe explores how the EU used its conditionality for membership to transfer its policies and institutional designs, focusing on measures to control the movement of people from East to West. She analyses how the Europeanization process interacted with post-communist politics, and with other external pressures.

The EU's Transformative Power finds that the EU's long-term influence worked through primarily through persuasion and voluntary adaptation, rather than exclusion and coercion. The EU's experience with its first enlargement thus provides important lessons on regime change, state-building and democratization.