The aim of my thesis is to investigate the reasons behind the mixed effectiveness of the EU pre-accession conditionality applied to the Central Eastern European candidates for membership. The process of enlargement to the East, concluded in 2004 with the accession of ten new countries, involved an unprecedented scope of EU conditionality applied to the prospective members. However, as the findings of this research demonstrate, the results of the grand European project of policy transfer to its new members have been mixed. Using a one-country cross-policy framework, I try to answer some open questions arising from the empirical analysis that the literature on conditionality has not thus far answered. The study draws on Putnam's two-level game model (Putnam 1988), analyzing international negotiations in their dual, domestic and international context. In theoretical terms, the interest of the research is in the entanglement between domestic and international policy processes. The key claim is that external pressures must be matched with the specific domestic context since none of these variables alone can explain the dynamics of adaptation. The effectiveness of EU conditionality is contingent on the type of acquis communautaire and the presence or absence of opposition to the reforms. The project aims to identify which properties of this framework or their combinations facilitate adaptation and which, to the contrary, impede prompt adjustments. The findings from the case studies challenge the conventional static approach to conditionality and demonstrate how instrumentalization of the international (EU) level of the bargain at the national level may lead to endogenous changes of the latter, namely mobilization of the social interests. This effect could explain why conditionality has not been as effective as the asymmetric bargaining power and the material advantages of compliance would lead one to expect.

This thesis examines the unclear political nature of the European Union and current academic theories on how to understand and classify the EU. Placing the EU in the macrohistorical context from which it emerged, the project first critiques competing definitions of “empire” before examining the etymological and philosophical genealogy of imperium. It then uses textual analysis to trace how evolving interpretations of imperium and “empire” have influenced European historiography and political philosophy. This analysis demonstrates that “empire” is not a descriptive taxonomy but a normative discourse, expressing an imagination of power, legitimacy and sole sovereignty, used to validate the inherent inequality and manifest destiny of an imagined European community. This discourse must be publicly expressed in order to have validity, and it is most effectively conveyed in visual language. The study demonstrates that of the many forms of visual language, by far the most powerful is cartography. But while maps represent the world rather than reflect it, map-readers ascribe to maps an authority that is rarely questioned, accepting maps’ portrayals as truthful. Having established and justified a methodology based in semiotics and semantics, the project moves into an analytical focus by semiotically deconstructing the most publicly-accessible EU maps in print and virtual form and on Euro currency. These analyses demonstrate that EU maps intersect with EU iconography and inadvertently construct an imagined community defined by the discourse of empire. Such maps show the Union not as it is but as it should be – the sole sovereign of European civilisation, with supreme power, exclusive legitimacy, a manifest destiny to unite the Europeans, and inhabited by an imagined community whose imagined history partly masks an inherent, yet acknowledged, inequality. This dissertation concludes that the EU is not a sui generis construct but instead embodies a familiar historical discourse – the European Union as Empire. Unless specified, all images have been digitally photographed by the author from the cited books or copied from the cited websites, in accordance with the Copyright Licensing Act (2006) of UUK/SCOP Higher Education institutions. All websites referenced in the text were last accessed on the date of binding, 1st October 2013. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain the author’s own.

Since 1993, the European Union has dramatically increased the scope and volume of its procurement regulation; particular increases have been made in terms of the procurement procedures made available, and the obligations that national contracting authorities have in light of EU law. This thesis examines the influence that recent developments in EU public procurement law have had on national procurement regulation in the UK, the Netherlands, and France. To assess this influence, three 'case study' areas were selected for investigation: the new procurement procedure 'competitive dialogue', made available for the procurement of complex contracts; the ability to repeat purchase using 'framework agreements', recently made available for purchasing in non-utilities sectors; and the Court of Justice's use of 'general principles of equal treatment and transparency', which has created new obligations for national contracting authorities. The thesis found that, in the areas examined, the influence of EU secondary legislation is substantial and-in two of the three countries examined-also plays a visible role in national regulation where EU law is not mandatory. The Court of Justice jurisprudence evaluated has had its most significant impact on the national judiciary: courts were found to reinforce the Court's judgments in all countries. Soft law issued by the European Commission had little perceivable influence on the formal legal regulation of the Member States examined, but may have influenced approaches taken to guidance or legislation more generally. The thesis also observed that harmonization of national laws, despite not being an objective of the EU rules, has increased in recent years-but even now, national differences (usually reflective of historical approaches taken to procurement regulation) are visible in those areas where the EU rules are optional, rather than mandatory.

The thesis characterises European Community (EC) regulation in terms of three levels of ideas, namely that: (a) the EC regulatory process is best understood by particular styles or processes of regulation that the thesis terms emulation, innovation and re-regulation; (b) there are particular determinants or causes of regulation that are best understood as regulatory competition, consensus and co-operation; and (c) a hypothesis can be derived from the review of associated literature to the effect that diffusion of ideas and policy learning leading to consensus and co-operation are often of greater significance than regulatory competition in the EC regulatory process. To this end, taking as a frame of reference the characterisation of styles or processes of regulation as emulation, innovation and re-regulation, the thesis challenges the assumption, prevalent in much of the literature, that the main determinant or cause of EC regulation is regulatory competition among member states seeking to enhance their own competitive position in the European market and reduce the costs associated with legal adjustment. Using evidence from case study material relating to EC regulation of insurance services and drinking water quality the thesis tests the hypothesis that, although the literature has stressed regulatory competition as the main determinant or cause of EC regulation, in practice diffusion of ideas and policy learning are likely to occur, leading to co-operation between actors in a manner that ensures the emergence of a broad consensus on the preferred EC regulatory approach without recourse to regulatory competition at all. The thesis finds that regulatory competition is not, in fact, the only determinant or cause of EC regulation. Instead, diffusion of ideas and policy learning leading to consensus and co-operation are of crucial importance and should be accorded greater significance in the literature than has been the case in the past.

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Critical geopolitics, a platform on the interface between International Relations and Political Geography, has privileged the spatial over the temporal dimension in its understanding of geopolitics. This has entailed the neglect of the politics of time (chronopolitics) and thereby inhibited a full understanding of the functioning of geopolitical texts. On the few occasions when critical geopolitics has addressed the issue of time, it has either problematically equated it with ‘speed’ or approached it through a useful but incomplete focus on the ‘modern’ temporality at work in geopolitics. This thesis argues for the fourfold departure from this literature. After suggesting a conception of time as constituted not outside but through narrative, it traverses the dichotomous understanding of space and time found in critical geopolitics. Furthermore, it urges the theoretical platform to take account of the hetero-temporality and micro-temporality of modern geopolitical discourse. With the help of this improved theoretical toolbox, it is possible better to distinguish between different geopolitical narratives and unpack the relationship between spatiality, temporality and security. A number of case studies, all investigating the relationship between the European Union and the post-Soviet space, will illustrate these changes. The study will zoom in specifically on the discourse in and around Brussels on Russia, German narratives of Russian gas and Belarusian geopolitical constructions of Europe. What emerges is an image of the boundary between Europe and its East that is inscribed by a number of conflicting spatiotemporalities and patterns of security interaction.

This thesis examines the transposition of the European Community legislation in Poland prior to accession. The principal research question is: What were the factors that facilitated and inhibited transposition over time. The key argument is that the Polish government's transposition record was decisively influenced by the configuration of rules that the domestic core executive could use to extend selective incentives and monitoring to ministers and ministerial departments. The thesis starts by showing that the adoption of transposing legislation during pre-accession was likely to have been complicated by significant collective action problems that discouraged ministers and their staff from contributing to the transposition record. It develops an explanatory hypothesis that focuses on selective incentives and monitoring extended by the core executive vis-a-vis line ministries. The central part of the thesis presents original empirical data on cross-temporal changes in both core executive rules and the transposition record. In two concluding chapters the thesis brings together the data on core executive institutions and transposition to show that the institutionalization of stricter core executive constraints vis-a-vis line ministries led to a marked improvement of Poland's transposition record. It further finds that the effect of the core executive variable was influenced by EU incentives and party political constellations. These findings hold interesting implications for the study of Europeanization of public policy in the new and old EU member states and, more broadly, for further research on national executives and transposition.

This thesis presents a model of EU legislative politics. The model sees national political parties as actors, rather than institutions, countries or trans-national party groups. The empirical focus is on the Codecision procedure after the Amsterdam reform came into effect in 1999. In essence, the thesis argues that governing parties dominate EU legislative politics. The governing parties' advantage stems from two factors. First, they are represented in the Upper House, the Council of Ministers, while opposition parties are not. Second, the shifting majority requirements in the European Parliament (EP) mean that a qualified majority in the Council can impose its preferences on the EP if the Council has the support from a blocking minority in the EP. Nevertheless, the qualified majority requirement in the Council also means that most governing parties would like to see a larger change in policy than what the Council can agree to in their common position. This has implications for the legislative strategy of both governing and opposition parties. Three hypotheses are tested. Hypothesis 1: Governing parties are more active as Codecision agenda- setters (rapporteurs) than opposition parties. Hypothesis 2: Rapporteurs from governing parties are more likely to see their initial legislative proposal being accepted by the Council of Ministers in the first reading. Hypothesis 3: The majority of governing parties and ideologically close opposition parties are more likely to support second reading amendments than other parties. The empirical evidence supports the hypotheses. Thus, there are empirical grounds for arguing that government and opposition exist in EU legislative politics. The governing coalition is the qualified majority of the governing parties and its ideologically close parties in the EP. The opposition is the losing minority in the Council and its ideologically close parties in the EP. The opposition also includes those parties that are neither ideologically close to the minority nor close to the majority of the governing parties. The evidence shows that behaviour differences are more evident between governing and opposition parties from adversarial member states. In non-adversarial states, which often have minority or oversized coalition government, the difference between governing and opposition parties is smaller.

The developments in trade and political relations between Poland and the European Union during the period of association is used to conduct an analysis of policy-making in transition and an investigation into the relationship between economic reform and social/ political factors, on both national and international levels. Internal and external impediments to policy reform are discussed, with emphasis on issues of credibility and reciprocity in inter- state cooperation, as well as domestic path- dependencies, legacies, political cultures and social pre-dispositions. The focus is on the role of international leverage in affecting domestic change and stabilising reform. Drawing on the complexity of multiple disciplines, the author challenges the main neoliberal institutionalist assumptions about 'anchoring' policies in international regimes to increase their credibility. By assessing the effectiveness of the Europe Agreement as an 'anchor' for Polish trade policy and a supportive instrument for the transition, the author argues that, in contrast to neoliberal expectations, an international regime, can, if it does not fulfill certain conditions, impede reform, reducing its viability and long-term sustainability. Because the EU has failed to carry through its declared promises of assistance for the transition or consistently pursue the liberal policies advocated to Poland as a condition for association, it has, collectively, fallen short of fulfilling these conditions. In addition, the technocratic, elitist style of decision-making necessary for the fulfilment of the EU's compulsory targets, combined with rigid conditionality and an institutional framework for association not adapted to national particularities, have, in the Polish case, multiplied domestic policy dilemmas, undermining the credibility of the liberal reforms initially pursued, and ultimately weakening the capacity of the 'state' to provide the public goods necessary for the consolidation and institutionalisation of the systemic changes. Finally, the author asserts that the fundamental legitimisation dimension has been neglected in the policy debate over the Polish transformation. Accordingly, the thesis investigates the evolution of the state/societal relationship in Poland, as it emerges in response to external and internal developments, and analyses the Polish specificities that have made the consolidation of a market-democracy problematic.