The Transplantation and Adaptation Types of Political Integration: The Case of the German Unification in Parallel with the Eastern Enlargement of EU
The Transplantation and Adaptation Types of Political Integration: The Case of the German Unification in Parallel with the Eastern Enlargement of EU

Summary/Abstract: The article argues that the German unification and the Eastern enlargement of the EU match with two types of democratization through common polity building that occurred after 1989 – the Transplantation and the Adaptation Type of Integration. The Transplantation exemplar stands for an immediate integration with no preconditions and no preceding reforms on either part but, instead, employing a simple transfer principle and economic backing of the ‘accepting’ entity. The Adaptation Type is a model for the opposite process – a gradual, long-termintegration through ‘political conditionality’ until the candidate states reach a political and economic level comparable to the level of the accepting unit. Since both of these ways towards integration are diverse, case studies of the actual processes, the German unification and the Eastern enlargement differ in their results as well.While the Eastern enlargement is successful in terms of economics and political stabilization in the new EU member states that are, however, skeptical towards any deepening of European integration, the unified Germany suffers from economic difficulties and, in the Eastern parts, from the rise of political discontent with the unification and post-communist nostalgia. The author elaborates on how such diverging outcomes came about and what the driving forces behind both of the processes were. To illustrate the Eastern enlargement, the author alludes particularly to the Czech Republic and its accession to the EU.

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