Bureaucratization or Strengthening of the Political?
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836702037002974 |
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| Author | KRISTI RAIK |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Bureaucratization or Strengthening of
the Political?
Estonian Institutions and Integration into
the European Union
KRISTI RAIK
ABSTRACT
Along with accession negotiations, integration into the European
Union (EU) has become a central dimension of Estonian politics,
creating new institutional practices and shaping domestic political pro-
cesses.This article explores how the positions of and relations between
the Estonian government, civil servants, parliament and civil society
have been constructed in the course of preparations for EU member-
ship, and discusses the findings from the viewpoint of democratic poli-
tics. With the help of different concepts of discursive power, it is
highlighted that although parliament and civil society have acquired
increasing power in the discourses of integration and there have been
attempts to increase their involvement, power over these discourses is
still predominantly exercised by civil servants and the government.This
reflects the tensions built into the logic of integration that, on the one
hand, is dominated by the principles of speed, efficiency, expertise and
inevitability, but on the other has placed increasing emphasis on the
democratic aspect. Altogether,integration tends to limit democracy to
a minimal model, reinforcing some general weaknesses of democracy
that are common in the post-communist countries, and intertwining
these with the technocratic, elite-centred tradition of the EU that is
being adopted by the applicant states.
Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe;democracy; discourse analysis;
EU Eastern enlargement
Integration into the European Union (EU) has gradually become a central
dimension of virtually all Estonian domestic politics. This process has
entailed changes in the institutional structure and the emergence of new
institutional practices. The experiences of EU member states show that
European integration in its present form places governments and civil ser-
vants in a central position in political processes, and that this takes place at
the cost of national parliaments as well as various social and political
groups organized on the national level.1This article studies the extent to
Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association
Vol.37(2): 137–156. Copyright ©2002 NISA
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
0010-8367[200206]37:2;137–156;023974
which the same tendency characterizes Estonia’s integration into the EU:
Does integration strengthen the position of the government and civil ser-
vants in domestic politics, making it difficult for other actors not just to
influence, but even to follow the process? Approaching these dynamics
from a discourse theoretical perspective, I ask what kind of power relations
have been constructed in the course of integration, and how these power
relations are framed and made possible by the discourses of Eastern
enlargement and Estonian EU politics. These questions are illuminated
through different concepts of discursive power in order to highlight the ten-
sions built into the process of enlargement, where different ideals and aims,
formal arrangements and actual practices, do not link well together.
These questions are closely related to the democratic aspect of Eastern
enlargement of the EU. There is very little research on this topic, but it
is usually taken for granted that EU Eastern enlargement strengthens
democracy in post-communist countries.2Accepting that integration within
the EU does give an additional guarantee against reversion to authoritari-
anism, my aim is to highlight some of the limits that integration imposes on
the functioning of democracy in the applicant countries.Although focusing
on the aspect of democratic institutions, I raise broader questions, such as
the kind of democracy that is made possible by integration within the EU,
and how democratic the process of integration itself is.3
Institutions are normally considered to play a central role in the func-
tioning of democracy. Often, democratic institutions are seen primarily as
formal sets of rules and norms, fixed by official decisions that condition and
organize political action. I argue that it is at least as important to study the
discourses, or systems of meaning, that on the one hand pre-exist and
underlie formal rules, and, on the other, are shaped and possibly trans-
formed by the discursive practices that reproduce institutions.This concep-
tion of institutions is similar to John S. Dryzek’s distinction between
institutional ‘hardware’ and ‘software’, that is, between a formal framework
and an ‘associated and supportive discourse’ (1996: 104).As he points out,
a contradiction between a dominant, usually taken-for-granted, discourse
and a set of formal rules prevents the smooth functioning of institutions —
just as the difficulties in transforming the political and economic systems in
Eastern Europe have proven. In the post-communist EU applicant coun-
tries,democratic institutions in the sense of established rules and norms are
still in flux because of the transition process which enhances the constitu-
tive effect of integration into the EU.
First, I briefly present the theoretical ideas that the article builds on.Then
I proceed to introduce Estonia’s integration process and two closely
related, partly overlapping discourses that frame and underlie the institu-
tional setting of Estonian EU politics: firstly, the Estonian discourse on EU
integration, and, secondly, the broader discourse of Eastern enlargement,
primarily generated by the European Commission. That serves as a basis
for analysing how the positions of and relations between institutions have
been constructed in the course of Estonia’s preparations for EU member-
ship. A tension will be found between, on the one hand, an emphasis on
speed, efficiency, expertise and inevitability, and, on the other, ideals of
138 COOPERATION AND CONFLICT 37(2)
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