Book Launch: Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism
Milada Anna Vachudova, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina-Chapel HillDiscussant: Kathleen R. McNamara, Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service, Department of Government, Georgetown University
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Overview
Europe Undivided analyzes how an enlarging EU has facilitated a convergence toward liberal democracy among credible future members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe. It reveals how variations in domestic competition put democratizing states on different political trajectories after 1989, and how the EU's leverage eventually influenced domestic politics in liberal and particularly illiberal democracies. In doing so, Europe Undivided illuminates the changing dynamics of the relationship between the EU and candidate states from 1989 to 2004, and challenges policymakers to manage and improve EU leverage to support democracy, ethnic tolerance and economic reform in other candidates and proto-candidates such as the Western Balkan states, Turkey and Ukraine. Albeit not by design, the most powerful and successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement - and this book helps us understand why, and how, it works.
"Europe Undivided is an exemplary work of the new comparative-international politics. It is a subtle and substantial analysis of how asymmetric interdependence and meritocratic European Union membership criteria combined to enhance the influence of the EU on domestic political reforms in Eastern Europe."
Robert O. Keohane, Professor of International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton University
"In this important study, Vachudova develops an original and compelling analysis of how variations in domestic competition and changes in EU leverage combined to shape post-communist political and economic pathways in East Central Europe."
Valerie Bunce, Professor and Chair of Government, Aaron Binenkorb Chair of International Studies, Cornell University
"A scrupulous, clearly organized, and highly informative analysis of one of the great success stories of our time. Vachudova combines the methods of comparative politics and international relations to explore the very direct connections between political change in Central and Eastern Europe and the influence of the European Union over the fifteen years from the velvet revolutions of 1989 to the eastward enlargement of the EU in 2004."
Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
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Global Europe Program
The Global Europe Program is focused on Europe’s capabilities, and how it engages on critical global issues. We investigate European approaches to critical global issues. We examine Europe’s relations with Russia and Eurasia, China and the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Our initiatives include “Ukraine in Europe” – an examination of what it will take to make Ukraine’s European future a reality. But we also examine the role of NATO, the European Union and the OSCE, Europe’s energy security, transatlantic trade disputes, and challenges to democracy. The Global Europe Program’s staff, scholars-in-residence, and Global Fellows participate in seminars, policy study groups, and international conferences to provide analytical recommendations to policy makers and the media. Read more
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