Membership with Conditionality: EU Cohesion Policy, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Development-to-Competitiveness
Abstrakt
This paper explores the post-accession conditionality that has become enshrined in the membership status of East-Central European states which have accessed the European Union (EU) since 2004. It is grounded in the concept of positionality as a 'way of capturing the shifting, asymmetric, and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places' (E.
Sheppard, 2002). There are three assumptions postulated.
First, such conditionality is a product of the EU's own repositioning - changing positionality in global economy - that has translated into the emergence of transnational regulation which prioritizes market-making efforts and competitiveness as prime collective goals. Second, the EU Cohesion Policy has played a crucial role in upholding the conditionality because it detects those places (states, regions, cities) which lag behind in fulfilling the EU's collective goals and urges them to catch up through a market-conforming structural adjustment.
Conceived as a threat to EU's competitiveness, such places are thus provided with investment capital under the condition that they converge on the path of development-to-competitiveness. Third, the conditionality reproduces asymmetric power relations between the European Commission and the East-Central European states.
The accession process posed a dilemma because it endowed the EU with larger market in terms of territory and population, but reduced its competitiveness at the same time. As East-Central Europe was detected as entirely lagging behind, the dilemma was resolved by the reform of Cohesion Policy.
The reform would empower the European Commission in decision-making over the redistribution of investment capital, while it would subject the lagging places to ever more competitiveness-oriented development targets. In effect, the East-Central European states would tend to be repositioned rather than repositioning themselves into the EU.