The concept of Europeanization is explained as impact of the European Union on the policy transformation within the EU member states. The diffusion of European norms into European Union and the declaration of the Copenhagen Criteria in 1993 marked the respect for minority rights as a condition for EU membership which is defined as part of the “acquis communitaire. of the Union. This study aims to address the impact of Europeanization on the minority policies in Central and Eastern European states of European Union that became members after 2004 and the current candidates. Utilizing different databases for each state starting from the year of official candidacy to accession/current situation, I explore how Europeanization process affected rights of ethnic minorities such as the linguistic rights, political participation, freedom of expression, education, and media in these states. Although, Europeanization has both top-down and bottom-up policy transfer features, I take the Europeanization as a top-down process here. In this regard, we consider “compliance with EU laws on minorities” as the dependent variable which is conceptualized as the transfer of EU rules into national institutions or restructuring of domestic institutions to adopt EU standards to explain under which circumstances states are more likely to “comply with” EU. With this cross-country analysis, I expect to see why some states fulfilled the minority policy requirements of EU easily compared to other states that keep having considerable gap between the EU norms and their minority policies which slows down their accession process.
