Business, Government, and EU Accession

Book excerpt: Business, Government, and EU Accession is a detailed study of how EU accession impacts the relationship between business and government in the acceding country. Iankova identifies three major mechanisms by which the EU has affected business-government interactions: first, the legal conditionalities and harmonization efforts for EU entry; second, the pre-accession and anticipated postaccession financial assistance with its specific priorities and requirements; and third, the capacity building and learning that arises from efforts to adapt to the EU conditionalities of membership. Through addressing the question of EU influence on in-country institutional relationships, Iankova is able to highlight patterns of Europeanization that develop in those relationships a result of the adaptational pressures of EU accession, and to trace the effectiveness of these adaptive relationship in facilitating the preparedness of an EU-acceding country for EU entry Using Bulgaria as a case study, she examines the mechanisms of these interactions and interrogates the effectiveness of existing models in facilitating national goals of EU accession, revealing difficulties with and resistances to applying an EU-designed model of institutional change in postcommunist regions.