This paper sheds light on the EU’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) for Bulgaria and Romania. While the CVM serves as a policy tool for strengthening state institutions and consolidating democracy, little is known about the legitimizing discourses which have sustained it, its relationship to the Lisbon Treaty and EU policies, and the ways in which it improves the quality of the domestic political systems. The paper examines these issues based on evaluation criteria, such as effectiveness, autonomy, linkages, and legitimacy. It studies the possible link between the CVM and EU policies, as well as between its state-building and democracy consolidation dimensions. Based on the academic literature on conditionality and policy making, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews, the paper examines three case studies of the CVM’s implementation: the gradual decline of the mechanism as an effective instrument of domestic reform, the deliberation of Bulgaria’s and Romania’s entry into the Schengen zone, and its external implications for the accession negotiations of the current candidate countries. The paper concludes that while the direct policy effects of the mechanism are minimal, its political and institutional effects in reshaping the EU accession process and the meaning of membership are significant. The mechanism has redefined the meaning of membership by focusing attention on the domestic politics of the new members. With regard to the candidate countries, the CVM has reoriented the accession towards a fine-grained sector-specific policy conditionality which has replaced the holistic construct of membership conditionality and increased the ambiguity of the accession process.
