EU3D. Voluntary submission in CEE Enlargement

Within the project EU3D. Differentiation, Dominance Democracy is financed by the European Commission within the program Horizon 2020 (Societal Challenges 6: Europe in a changing world – Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies) under Grant Agreement no. 822419 in research task within Work Package 3 researchers analysed the Fifth EU Enlargement offering a historical account of the process of EU accession analyzed through the prism of Poland. It was mostly an empirical study, which aimed to contribute to the debate on differentiated integration paradigm trying to test the validity of the one of the key umbrella questions of WP3, i.e. whether the voluntary submission to the EU rules as it occurred during the accession of CEE to the EU can be seen as a form of dominance. The study’s primary focus is on conditionality and legitimization of dominance within the EU setting. By investigating the case of Poland, researchers take the perspective of a candidate-turn-member state, shedding light on the perception on the imbalances of power between the candidate country and the EU. The empirical material derives from Polish parliamentary plenary debates (1991-2004) on the EC association and the EU accession. Through qualitative inductive framing we analyze how the imbalance of power between Poland and the EC/EU was presented, interpreted and communicated. The study systematizes those interpretations through the matrix of ten interpretative frame packages on dominance pointing towards two divergent types of legitimization of dominance: the instrumental and the autotelic legitimization.