This diploma thesis examines with the Dutch attitude towards enlargement of the European Union. In Netherlands the EU enlargement is a politically sensitive issue. Dutch foreign policy is traditionally closely connected with the concept of "merchant and the vicar", reflecting both values of the society and national interests. Interestingly the attitude of the government, reflecting the public opinion, is much more conservative compared to other member states and strictly support the democratic conditionality as the core strategy of the EU to induce candidate states to comply with its human rights and democracy standards. Netherlands gives also special value to the need to give particular regards to the current absorption capacity of EU. The main purpose of the thesis is to evaluate to what extent is the official attitude of the Dutch government towards enlargement shaped by either interests or values of the society as a whole. I put the current Dutch attitude in the context of the current development in Serbia, as the most significant candidate state form the region of Western Balkans and Iceland. The thesis analyses two very similar cases: the cooperation with the ICTY in Hague and the Icesave dispute. Netherlands has long and persistently blocked the accession negotiations with Iceland and...

Tomáš Hach - The Politics of EU Enlargement: Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia Abstract The diploma thesis deals with the topic of the politics of EU enlargement and perspectives of future developments in this area. Its main objectives are to define the politics in theory, to introduce it in the context of the Western Balkans and apply it to the three selected cases - Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. The work considers the historical development since 1990's as an important factor with a huge influence on current negotiation, and therefore the thesis pays high attention to that. Besides the historical excursion, the thesis deals with topics of political development, introduces the status of current negotiations and the relationship between the European Union and certain countries since the establishment of the first official contact. Through the comparative case study, despite differing positions of states within the framework of negotiations, it is highlighted that all countries share common problems. The method of compliance and non-compliance generates common problems as well as underlines the particular specifics. An important contribution is also the comparison of individual countries based on fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria in the context of current affairs.

This dissertation argues that European Union membership conditionality operates as a modality of political-economic governance directed at securing the conditions of possibility for a harmoniously functioning political economy of Europe. I argue that conditionality can best be understood not as a series of requirements for EU membership, a set of incentives for rule adoption, or a vehicle for the transmission of European norms to candidate states, but as an ensemble of discursive and material practices – fragile, dispersed circuits of governmental activity directed at a particular strategic ambition. I argue that existing accounts of EU membership conditionality are informed by predominantly rationalist understandings of political economy which work to conceal various cultural, social, and subjective sources of disharmony in political-economic life. Thinking about the political economy of conditionality through rationalist lenses privileges the study of bargaining and negotiation and institutional reform and overlooks the ways that conditionality targets the transformation of problematic socio-cultural and subjective elements of political economy – among them particular habits of culture, patterns of sociality, and subjective qualities and capacities of the person deemed essential to securing order and abundance. Re-reading canonical works in classical and critical traditions of political economy by James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx makes clear that political economy as a field of knowledge and practice has long been concerned with understanding the political, legislative-legal, institutional, socio-cultural, and subjective conditions of possibility for securing order and abundance and has long reflected on the potential and limits of governance to secure these conditions in a world of shifting circumstance. I argue that a political economy of EU membership conditionality concerned with disharmony should investigate the ways that particular socio-cultural and subjective features of political-economic life are problematized in the discourse of conditionality and subsequently targeted for transformation through the work of instruments and agents of conditionality operating in a variety of institutional contexts. On this basis, I analyze conditionality as practice – tracing the emergence of instruments of conditionality currently at work in the Republic of Macedonia through official documents produced by the EU and the Republic of Macedonia from 2001-2011. I then examine the ambitions and limits of the Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013 (OP-HRD) – a program tasked with translating the aims of conditionality on paper into concrete activities for implementation in the fields of employment, education and training, and social inclusion. I outline some limits to the program derived from personal interviews with officials of the EU and the Republic of Macedonia who work to implement the OP-HRD "on the ground." In reflecting on these limitations, I return to the political economy of disharmony, concluding that constraints on the operation of conditionality in practice are not merely the product of technical and political impediments but are also derived from inherent limits to the old dream of political-economic harmony to which the ambitions of conditionality are ultimately directed. / Ph. D.

Ce mémoire vise à comprendre la détermination des droits et des obligations relatifs aux individus seuls aptes à l’emploi bénéficiant de l’aide sociale allemande entre 1990 et 2012. Tout d’abord, il passe en revue les principaux mécanismes formels de fixation et d’actualisation des droits monétaires présents dans la plupart des pays de l’OCDE et montre par quels moyens l’Allemagne détermine la générosité des revenus de l’aide sociale. Soulevant le caractère plutôt arbitraire de ces mécanismes, il poursuit en soutenant que la générosité relative des droits et des obligations des individus seuls aptes à l’emploi peut principalement s’expliquer en des termes de conditionnalité et de mérite. Par le biais d’une revue de la littérature sur le sujet, le mémoire illustre comment les dynamiques catégorielles et la construction des programmes de dernier recours allemands en viennent à refléter une hiérarchie implicite du mérite expliquant à la fois la générosité plus faible des droits monétaires et la plus grande conditionnalité des droits sociaux visant les bénéficiaires seuls aptes à l’emploi. Finalement, il soutient que la construction du régime concernant les individus aptes à l’emploi en Allemagne doit se comprendre selon l’utilisation des droits et des obligations en tant que levier de régulation de l’individu et du marché du travail. Dans cette optique, le mémoire montre que les réformes Hartz du marché du travail ont non seulement formalisé le tournant pris vers l’activation du sans-emploi en Allemagne, mais que la construction particulière du nouveau régime de droits et d’obligations visant les individus aptes reflète ultimement l’objectif de diminution du chômage via la création d’emplois dans le secteur des bas salaires. / This thesis aims to understand the determination of rights and obligations related to single unemployed able-bodied individuals benefiting from the German social assistance between 1990 and 2012. To do so, the thesis reviews the main formal benchmark and actualization mechanisms of monetary rights present in most OECD countries and shows how Germany determines the generosity of social assistance benefits. Raising the somewhat arbitrary nature of these mechanisms, it goes on to argue that the relative generosity of the rights and obligations of unemployed able-bodied individuals can be explained mainly in terms of conditionality and deservingness. Through a literature review on the topic, the thesis illustrates how the categorical differentiation and the particular construction of last resort programs in Germany come to reflect an implicit hierarchy based on deservingness, explaining both the lowest generosity of monetary rights and the greater conditionality attached to social rights concerning single able-bodied individuals. Finally, it argues that the construction of the rights and obligations for these citizens must be understood as a control lever allowing the regulation of both the individual and the labour market. From this perspective, the thesis shows that the Hartz reforms have not only formalized the activation paradigm regulating unemployment in Germany, but that the particular construction of the new scheme for able- bodied individuals ultimately reflects the objective of reducing unemployment by creating jobs in the low-wage sector.

Previous literature on the Europeanization of candidate countries has lacked careful empirical investigations into how the process drives domestic policies to change in line with the EU acquis. Selecting on the least-likely case of Turkey and its refugee and asylum policy, I identify that previous work has assumed that Turkey’s policy shifts have been driven by rationalist cost- benefit calculations of its government. The purpose of this study has been to empirically investigate and trace the mechanisms of Europeanization in the selected case, in order to thereby contribute to knowledge on the process of Europeanization in candidate countries in general, and address to the previous research gap. Given this purpose, I have aimed to produce answers to the research question: how has the EU affected Turkey’s asylum and refugee policy after the declaration of candidacy status? I hypothesize that a rationalist model driven by the EU’s conditionality can indeed explain domestic policy changes in Turkey, but also that an alternative mechanism of socialization has been at play. Tracing the process of Europeanization through secondary sources, the results show that what started with behavioral-adaptation of domestic policy change in alignment with the EU’s laws, norms and demands between 1999 and 2010, between 2011 and 2018 the Turkish asylum and refugee policies started to step away from the push power of the external incentives. Nonetheless, significant domestic policy changes continued, suggesting evidence against the rationalist conditionality model of Europeanization in this period. However, I argue that the results are not strong enough to make the claim Turkey’s domestic policy change was driven by a mechanism of socialization, but rather suggest there has been initiation of a switch between the mechanisms.

La tesi si incentra sulle questioni legate alla distribuzione degli aiuti multilaterali allo sviluppo; in particolare due temi sono affrontati: la selettività degli aiuti e la qualità della governance. L’elaborato si basa sulla letteratura concernente l’efficacia e la distribuzione degli aiuti ed unisce quest’ultima alla letteratura sulla political economy delle organizzazioni internazionali e sulla good governance. Attraverso un’analisi econometrica si intende capire se le organizzazioni multilaterali hanno a cuore la qualità della governance del paese ricevente al momento dell’allocazione degli aiuti. Con un modello GMM-Diff che adopera sia strumenti interni che esterni, si evidenzia come l’interesse per la governance da parte delle istituzioni multilaterali non sia solo retorica, come invece appare da uno studio preliminare. Inoltre, attraverso l’analisi di un panel a tre dimensioni, la tesi monitora l’applicazione della selettività degli aiuti. Viene rigettata l’ipotesi di un aumento della selettività e si evidenziano margini per un miglioramento dell’efficacia allocativa degli aiuti. Le agenzie multilaterali devono cercare di distribuire gli aiuti con criteri diversi da quelli di natura geopolitica. / The thesis examines the allocation of multilateral aid flows with respect to two current issues of the development agenda: the selectivity of aid and the quality of governance. The dissertation brings together three strands of the relevant literature: firstly, the reference literature relating to aid effectiveness and aid allocation, which is then followed by the literature on good governance and, lastly, on the political economy of international organizations. We carry out an econometric study to understand whether international organizations care about the recipients’ performance on governance. With a GMM-Diff methodology using both internal and external instruments we show that the focus on governance by multilateral bodies is not only rhetoric, as it appears at first glance. Moreover, we explore how the selectivity of multilateral aid varies over time by employing a three-dimensional panel. Our analysis rejects the hypothesis of increasing selectivity and confirms that there is room to improve on the allocation of aid. Multilateral institutions need to strengthen their efforts to allocate aid on criteria other than political-strategic ones.

Part I comprises three chapters (2-4) that analyse the optimal combination of a universal benefit (B≥0) and categorical benefit (C≥0) for an economy where individuals differ in both their ability to work and, if able to work, their productivity. C is ex-ante conditioned on applicants being unable to work, and ex-post conditioned on recipients not working. In Chapter 2 the benefit budget is fixed but the test awarding C makes Type I and Type II errors. Type I errors guarantee B > 0 at the optimum to ensure all unable individuals have positive consumption. The analysis with Type II errors depends on the enforcement of the ex-post condition. Under No Enforcement C > 0 at the optimum conditional on the awards test having some discriminatory power; whilst maximum welfare falls with both error propensities. Under Full Enforcement C > 0 at the optimum always; and whilst maximum welfare falls with the Type I error propensity it may increase with the Type II error propensity. Chapters 3 and 4 generalise the analysis to a linear-income tax framework. In Chapter 3 categorical status is perfectly observable. Optimal linear and piecewise-linear tax expressions are written more generally to capture cases where it is suboptimal to finance categorical transfers to eliminate inequality in the average social marginal value of income. Chapter 4 then derives the optimal linear income tax for the case with classification errors and Full Enforcement. Both equity and efficiency considerations capture the incentives an increase in the tax rate generates for able individuals to apply for C. Part II (Chapter 5) focuses on the decisions of individuals to work when receiving C, given a risk of being detected and fined proportional to C. Under CARA preferences the risk premium associated with the variance in benefit income is convex-increasing in C, thus giving C a role in enforcement.

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In the last few decades the European Union (EU) and its members have emphasized the importance of human rights and the need to improve human rights conditions in Third World countries. In this research project, I attempted to find out whether the European Union and its members practice what they preach by giving precedence to countries that respect human rights through their Official Development Assistance (ODA) program. Furthermore, I tried to analyze whether European integration occurs at the foreign policy level through aid allocation. Based on the literatures on political conditionality and on the relationship between human rights and foreign aid allocation, I expected that all EU members promote principles of good governance by rewarding countries that protect the human rights of their citizens. I conducted a cross-sectional time-series selection model over all recipients of ODA for each of the twelve members for which I have data, the European Commission, and the aggregate EU disbursements from 1979 to 1998.

Many developing countries depend on the World Bank for development assistance, which the Bank often provides with policy reform conditions. Resistance to World Bank’s conditionality caused the Bank to posit “ownership” as a country’s real assent to its development policies. The combination of ownership and conditionality invalidates the neocolonial, false-paradigm and dualism theses in explaining the international dependence development model. This study explains this model by investigating how the relationship between conditionality and ownership in the context of this model impacts forest management in Cameroon. Integrating theoretical and methodological insights mainly from political science, economics, geosciences, and sociology, the study finds that in this model, conditionality and ownership have a hybrid relationship that fosters and hinders effective forest management in Cameroon. This finding positions policy hybridity within this model. It proposes a nouvelle way to understand international development policies’ interactions, and the effects of the interactions on natural resource management.