After a relatively long period of neglect, the EU finally put minority protection policy on its agenda in the early 1990s, as the CEECs were now making their way towards accession and minority issues could therefore have posed a destabilizing threat to the Union as a whole. The importance of ethnic conflicts and their devastating potential for violence became all the more clear during the years of the Balkan Wars, making a commitment to protection and non-discrimination of minorities a vital security interest. The EU therefore made the protection of minorities part of its Copenhagen accession criteria, creating a gap between “old” member states (who often had very neglectful minority policies, e.g. France and Greece), and new members and candidates, who were now under pressure to change their approach in order not to endanger their accession. This paper therefore argues – in accordance with Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier's External Incentives Model – that accession conditionality and the promised advantages are what entices states to comply, and that candidates make a rational cost-benefit calculation, in which they often decide to accept the EU's desired policies to profit from the assets of membership. Social learning processes offer much less explanatory capacity – if the adoption of the most appropriate rules was the case, the neglectful “old” member states would have adapted their policies to those publicly endorsed by the EU by now. In order to illustrate these hypotheses, a short comparison between Greece as a long-time member and Croatia as a candidate and their respective policy development will be drawn.
