The policy of conditionality towards the EU candidate countries has received a positive assessment from both the European Commission and academic literature, implying that formulating specific demands in addition to the formal acquis communautaire indeed helped the acceding countries to build solid democracies, namely in the areas of human rights and protection of minorities. Scholars working on this subject have found evidence that the EU discourse, particularly, the way the requirements were formulated influences the success of conditionality. Hence, determinate, explicit, recurrent, concrete, legitimate, intense and resonant requirements appear more efficient (Steunenberg & Dimitrova, 2007; Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2005; Schwellnus, 2004; Grabbe, 2006). Still, the definition of these characteristics has remained rather vague and has not been based on a rigorous discursive approach and text analysis. It is this gap that we intend to fill with our text-based study of accession documents authored by the European Commission. Adding to the existing research, we 1) approach more systematically the characteristics of the requests, and 2) revisit the link between these characteristics and the “success” of conditionality. By operationalizing and measuring coherence and consistency of requirements, we aim at revealing the contingent nature of conditionality success in bringing about change in the domain of national minority protection policy on the example of four countries (Estonia, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia). Our findings corroborate the hypothesis that the ‘double standard’ nature of demands in this domain and the late elaboration of the principle of conditionality both contribute to considerable incoherence and some inconsistency in the European Commission’s requirements.
