Двуликият Янус: европейски правила в посткомунистическа среда. Случаят САПАРД
The Two-Faced Janus: European Rules in Postcommunist Context. The Case of SAPARD

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents results of a comparative study, done in the frame of DIOSCURI project, of the institutionalization and implementation of the EU program SAPARD (Special Accession Programme for Agriculture & Rural Development) in six post-communist European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. Although the particular object of research is SAPARD, the subject of the paper concerns the specificity of institutional change in the sphere of governance in the (then) candidate countries and the outcomes of that change. The field of research is related to the Europeanization studies; the approach applied is that of new institutionalism: the paper is focused on the tensions between the newly adopted organization structures and rules, demanded by the EU and the embedded institutional cultures. The analysis shows that in spite of the common for all the countries EU requirements for SAPARD implementation, the outcomes are different, depending on the negotiation of those requirements by the accession countries, as well as to resistances (conscious and cultural) towards them. In Czech Republic and Poland the final result could be defined as transformation (in the terms of Europeanization studies), because the new rules are renegotiated and consciously adopted to the context. In the other four countries the outcomes could be defined as institutional hybrids. In Romania the system has become ‘more European than the European one’(meaning more bureaucratic) in the effort to avoid as much as possible the pitfalls of the local context; in Hungary and Bulgaria the resistance of the postcommunist institutional culture replaces an innovative model (in Hungary) and in Bulgaria the hybrid could be defined as old content in new form.

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