Post-Accession Effects of Conditionality: New Member States and the Implementation of the EU Competition Policy

This article looks at the post-accession difficulties of new member states to fulfill the demands of EU membership and considers the degree of Europeanization in the area of competition policy. The article takes a comparative approach and looks at seven of the new Central and Eastern European member states. It analyzes the capacity of their national implementing actors to apply and enforce the EU legislation in area of competition policy. This article builds on theories of Europeanization and conditionality, and rational institutionalism to explain the problems of domestic adaptation to EU requirements in the context of the Eastern enlargement. By applying Fuzzy Sets Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the article examines the domestic causal factors conditioning the implementation process and how they interact in affecting it. The findings show that implementation is country specific and consequently no general path that generates efficient implementation can be derived, but only partial explanations based on various combinations of domestic factors. These observations are also relevant in the current 'EU in crisis' context. Specifically, they offer an indication of the areas vulnerable to the temporary deregulation of competition due to the Commission's flexible approach to implementation in support of governments' efforts to handle the crisis.