Open AccessInternational Negotiations and Domestic Change in the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood: Deconstructing Antidiscrimination Reforms in Moldova
Author(s) -
Vera Axyonova,
Denis Cenușă,
Andrea Gawrich
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
eastern european politics and societies/east european politics and societies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1533-8371
pISSN - 0888-3254
DOI - 10.1177/0888325420968911
Subject(s) - negotiation , democracy , european union , political science , politics , political economy , foreign policy , context (archaeology) , general partnership , agency (philosophy) , norm (philosophy) , sociology , public administration , economics , law , international trade , social science , paleontology , biology
Democratic reforms, or lack thereof, in countries addressed by the European Union’s (EU’s) Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Yet many studies approach these countries’ political and policy developments through the lens of external actors’ (especially the EU and Russia’s) engagements. While accounting for international influences, this article lends agency to the domestic actors by scrutinizing the antidiscrimination reform process in Moldova, one of the EaP countries with closer relations to the EU, against the background of their negotiations. In doing so, the article explains the outcome of the reform and makes a case for applying Robert Putnam’s (1988) Two-Level-Game approach to an analysis of a controversial reform process surrounded by international and domestic pressures in a nonconsolidated democracy. In addition to its empirical contribution, the article seeks to advance the applicability boundaries of the Two-Level-Game theory beyond classical Foreign Policy Analysis in a democratic context and enhance the scholarly debate on the external–domestic interplay in policy change and norm adoption.