DRAFT: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM
THE AUTHOR
EU Accession, State Building, and the Limits of Good
Governance in Central and Eastern Europe
International Studies Association Conference
Hawaii, 3 March 2005
Chris Bickerton
St Johns College
University of Oxford,
OX1 3JP, UK
Christopher.## email not listed ##
Abstract: This paper argues that the process of European Union (EU) accession shares a
number of features with state-building missions carried out by the international
community in Kosovo, East Timor and elsewhere. As a result, accession illustrates
trends that go beyond the sui generis features of European expansion, and which tie in
with the broader dynamics of contemporary global politics. What both state-building
and EU accession have in common is their attempt to refashion the state and the political
sphere in the name of autonomy and empowerment. However, the attempt to ‘enforce
autonomy’, through conditionality in the EU’s case and through international
administration in the case of state-building, tends to undermine the very autonomy which
the EU and international administrations are seeking to construct. It follows that neither
state-building nor EU accession are particularly useful as models for ‘good governance’
in the wider world. It also follows that the solution to the protectorates in Bosnia and
Kosovo are not, as is often supposed, the prospect of EU membership. This paper brings
together the literatures of EU enlargement, post-communist transition, and state-
building, with the aim of generating new insights on the limits of outside intervention
both in Europe and beyond.