Anticorruption: Outsourcing Responsibility

Abstract

Anticorruption is a regulatory policy, and accordingly during the pre-accession phase the Commission focused on monitoring the candidate states and exerted pressure to pass and implement legislation to fight corruption. To this end, standards and benchmarks were established in the Copenhagen framework. At the EU level some related binding legislation existed, in particular on the protection of the Union’s financial interests. As for the fight of corruption inside the member states, international instruments were launched parallel to the EU’s efforts during the pre-accession phase. These international agreements established outside the EU framework took up the political problems for which the Commission had for considerable time tried to acquire Community competences. The pre-existing acquis and the creation and implementation of wider standards in the Copenhagen framework increased the pressure for spill-in in the form of harmonization with little scope for framing pre-accession competences as further nonbinding EU rules.