External influence on domestic developments: The EU political conditionality and democratic revival in Slovakia
External influence on domestic developments: The EU political conditionality and democratic revival in Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: This paper attempts to understand the workings of the European Union’s political conditionality with respect to political development in Slovakia. The author tries to define EU political conditionality and to specify under what circumstances it can have lasting influence upon actual behavior of the key domestic political actors. The key argument of the paper is that EU political conditionality is unlikely to have a democratizing impact in a situation where it is exercised in an exclusively EU-candidate country bilateral framework. Instead, EU political conditionality can be successful if there is a credible domestic alternative to political incumbents, thus creating a trilateral dynamics in which the political opposition can use the external criticism as a political weapon against its domestic competitors.

• Details
• Contents