Regional governance in the new CEE member states of the EU

The decision of the ten Central and Eastern European (CEE-10) countries during the early period of transition to join the European common market and the political structure of the European Community (Union) constituted an important set of controls on the developmental path of these countries. In trying to ensure that the structural institutional factors which could limit the economic development of the CEE-10 would be eliminated before these countries’ accession, the EU imposed a series of conditionalities. Only those candidate countries which showed significant progress in complying with the announced conditionalities could advance in the process of accession negotiations. The conditionalities took into account the fact that – besides the economic disparities at the time when the association agreements between the EU-15 and the CEE-10 countries were signed – there were also important disparities in terms of institutional and policy structures. As a result, the main emphasis was put on encouraging or even imposing given institutional and policy reforms in accession countries as a precondition of accession (Grabbe 2001). The logic of influencing institutional choice in the CEE-10 countries through accession conditionalities was supported by the theoretical argument that political institutions are directly linked to economic growth performance through the influence they exercise on economic policy choices and the reduction of volatility risks (Persson and Tabellini 2002;