by Peter Kolossa*

The EU’s commitment is to spend 0.7% of its total GNI on official development assistance by 2015, but only 0.33% in the case of its new member states. Nobody expects the poor Latvians or Hungarians to pay up and run the show in the common European development policy. Can they, then, offer something else of value?

The EU’s new member states have made a miraculous move from tyranny to freedom since 1989. They have built stable democracies and vibrant market economies, and they have gained a wealth of readily available transition experience in the process, which could be adapted and emulated throughout the wide world.

But have they really? The question is timely not only due to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated meticulously throughout the region, but also due to a new EU initiative called the European Transition Compendium (ETC) – inviting much less attention and a lot more misgivings.

The ETC initiative is based on a reference in the 2005 European Consensus on Development to the specific experience of new member states in transition management and the necessity to capitalize on it in EU development efforts. The process aims to create a compendium of knowledge and expertise based on the experience of the EU’s new member states which they gained in their own processes of democratic transition. Supposedly, the ETC will become an important tool in the EU development policy by providing a practical database from which developing countries can choose and select specific expertise on particular transition processes which are useful for them.

The first steps for the construction of this compendium have already taken place: a number of discussions were convened, a questionnaire was sent around for member states to answer, and the exercise’s consultant is currently visiting capitals from Tallinn to Sofia. If done right, the Compendium will expose the reality behind the myth and give us a laundry list of transition experiences that can be used to promote democracy from Cuba to Angola.

The idea was met with a lot of criticism from its very start. Is it technically possible to produce a practically useful compilation of member states’ transition experience? Have the Eastern Europeans done a good job with their transitions, is their experience valuable? If yes, is this experience adaptable and replicable in other countries around the world? (Going further, do we really want to have the Poles telling us what to do in other transition countries?) While the EU insists that the ETC exercise is not expected to be a detailed account or a critical analysis of member states’ transition experiences, it may well bring about an unintended moment of truth and answer some of these long-standing questions.

A few things are certain. Producing such a compilation and shaping it into a marketable product is a technically difficult, but not impossible task. The laundry list thus created will help finally identify and specify what we mean when we talk about transition experience. And while the domestic politics of Europe’s eastern half are plagued by voter apathy and disenchantment, when you look at the big picture, the course that these countries have taken is a success story, especially when you compare it to some other countries outside the EU.

There is also a proven demand for knowledge from countries that share a Communist past. Whenever you plan reforms in your own country, the thing to do first is to look at international examples. For these countries, the examples which are most interesting are not of those that have had working democracies for decades or even centuries; the interesting experience is of those countries that not only underwent a transition process relatively recently, but also started out from a similar baseline position.

The transition experience of new member states is admittedly less relevant in countries outside the former Communist bloc. The assumption, however, is that certain specific elements of the transition experience, like how to set up an ombudsman institution, are relevant and adaptable anywhere in the world. It is an often repeated mantra that the promotion of democracy is not about going to a country and telling them what to do; that governments of developing countries should instead pick and use those specific models which are useful for them, and adaptable to their particular political, social, economic and cultural circumstances.

The compilation of the European Transition Compendium will put the idea of the usefulness of the new member states’ transition experience to a tough reality check. We are going to find out whether those Eastern Europeans, considering that they can’t pay up, can actually offer something of added value to the EU’s development efforts throughout the world. Keep your fingers crossed.

*Peter Kolossa is the Director for Programs and Development at the International Centre for Democratic Transition in Budapest.