Paper Titles & Abstracts

The elevation of labor standards in EU-acceding and neighboring countries is in the EU's economic and normative interest. Labor standards accession criteria, as part of the EU's normative core, have stemmed both from the requirement to adopt the social-acquis and from the requirement to maintain democracy and human rights. Yet research has shown that the EU admitted CEEC despite recognized weaknesses in this field, and data on post-accession tendencies were not available hitherto. The proposed paper will present new data on the pre-accession and post-accession labor standards trends in CEEC. The data, gathered on an annual basis for the period of 1998-2009, on 45 European countries, show an exceptional trend of improvement of labor standards in 2004-enlargement countries while labor standards have deteriorated in all other European countries (Western member countries, western non member countries, FSU non members and current candidate countries). The paper proposes a unique conceptualization of these pre-accession and post-accession trends as the results of norm-diffusion. Assuming a discursive-institutionalist approach to norm diffusion the paper will explain how labor standards diffused through the CEEC via conditionality and via post-accession identity shifts. These mechanisms of diffusion were not present in non-acceding countries. The paper will also present results of a quantitative analysis of the respective effects of the EU's and the ILO's labor standards promotion in Europe. The results of the analysis show that the methods and instruments adopted by the EU have been more effective than those adopted by the ILO. The paper will then argue that the EU's effectiveness in this field results from the EU's unique combination of material and symbolic capabilities.