This book is the result of six years of research. The authors are leading scholars in the field of European integration, especially Frank Schimmelfenning who has authored several leading books and articles in the field of European politics, in particular in the area of European Union enlargement. The study makes an important contribution to the literature on international socialization (see Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp and Katherine Sikkink, eds. The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The authors use therefore a special set of skills to respond to the same problem, the process of “international socialization” in which states, mostly Eastern European states, are induced to adopt the constitutive rules of an international community, in this case, the western European community, represented by a range of “socializing organizations.” There is no confusion in the authors' minds: “International socialization in Europe is about the expansion of the Western international community” (5). The book is striving to be an authoritative response to the Risse and others (1999), although it does not make this aim very clear at the beginning. It is firmly anchored within the rationalism and constructivism, two bodies of literature that deal with transformation in Eastern Europe. The study explains the results of the process of social internationalization by underlying the causal mechanisms and conditions that have produced uneven outcomes and patterns of international socialization in selected countries: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Montenegro, Northern Cyprus, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia.
This work revitalizes the theory of socialization to provide a reading of the transformations occurring in the selected Central and Eastern European countries in the aftermath of the Cold War. It investigates the effectiveness of international socialization in what the authors call the “European transformation countries.” It does so by operationalizing a series of variables used in a comparative research: compliance with “community” rules (dependent variable), the size and the credibility of external incentives costs (independent variables) and legitimacy, identification and resonance (borrowed from constructivist theory as control variables) (57–58). The theory of socialization offers an explanation of how states are “induced” to adopt the constitutive rules in the European context and makes a crucial theoretical and empirical contribution to the field. The term chosen here to define the action of socialization, “inducing,” conveys closeness to a wider range of socialization mechanisms from “coercion” and “bargaining” to “persuasion” and “imitation.” It has enough flexibility to encompass them all or limit its meaning to just one of them.
Based on a large selection of cases, the authors seek to find ways to “generalize” by looking at conditions of compliance that function regardless of particular context and arrive at conclusions about the effectiveness of socialization strategies that are not specific, for example, only to the European Union. Instead, they consider the whole range of socializing agencies in Europe.
Schimmelfenning, Engert and Knobel succeed in identifying three country typologies, or “three domestic constellations,” their impact on the effectiveness of political conditionality and the policy recommendation that follow, in the authors' views, the strongest finding. The three typologies are liberal, which includes the cases of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, antiliberal, with Belarus, Serbia until 2000, Ukraine until 2004, and mixed, that is, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia since 2000, Ukraine since 2004 and Turkey (259), much in line with Vachudova's typology of countries with a “liberal” and “illiberal” states (Milada A Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and also with the typology of Risse and others (1999).
The main conclusions of the book are that the socialization process between socialization agencies and target states is a bargaining process. Its success depends on the size and credibility of tangible political incentives manipulated by the community organization and the size of political cost.
Whereas the conclusions and the set of theories applied are very compelling, there is a point at which the work is not so convincing. The authors say that each observation is constituted by a “constellation of conditions.” Whenever the domestic conditions in a country or international conditions of effective socialization change, according to the identified dependent and independent variables, this constitutes a new observation. This raises the issue of the sustainability of the proposed analysis model, especially when we are told that the authors did not conduct a full process-tracing analysis. The methodology seems nevertheless influential because the authors reassure the reader that the description and process analysis is limited to “what is needed for assessing and distinguishing the causal effects of alternative conditions of compliance” (64).
The useful generalization provides us with valuable tools for looking at the effectiveness of socialization strategies that is not biased by the specificities of some socialization agencies. The authors do not succumb to a focus on the European Union only but consider the whole range of international socialization agencies in Europe, which makes the book even more valuable. All in all, International Socialization in Europe is an indispensable book for understanding recent and future political transformations in Europe.
