Paper Titles & Abstracts

A recurrent theme that one may identify in the EU institutions' discourse with respect to the Official Development Aid (ODA) policies of the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the organization in 2004 and 2007 is that their specificity as emerging international development donors would be their authoritarian/totalitarian past and subsequent democratization experience. This specific context would place these states in a privileged position in relation to the developing countries because it would provide a background more similar to that of the potential aid recipients and could help them follow the same path. Further more, the relation would lack the usual colonial component and this would be another factor for success in making positive changes in the developing world as emerging donors. Using a large set of first hand data, including interviews with major stakeholders, as well as discourse analysis tools, this study explores how this argument of the "democratization experience" export has permeated the design of the international development policies of the Central and East European states after they became EU members, as well as to what extent there are significant differences among the various categories of stakeholders in internalizing discursively this argument.