Strategies of Regulatory Integration Via Development The Integration of the Polish and Romanian Dairy Industries into the EU Single Market

This chapter examines the developmental effects of EU strategies of regulatory integration during the Eastern enlargement. The EU, unlike other regional integration regimes, closely linked the issue of how to attain sustainable rule compliance to issues of development by targeting and potentially increasing the capacity of rule takers to benefit from regulatory integration. The effects of EU strategies were, however, uneven. While in some countries, even with considerable EU involvement, only narrower groups of economic actors could benefit from regulatory integration, others managed regional regulatory integration through increased competitiveness combined with more inclusive institutional development. To explain this puzzle, we argue that the quality of domestic organization shaped the way EU strategies of regulatory integration adjusted to different domestic institutional contexts. By examining compliance towards European food safety standards in the Polish and Romanian dairy industries, we show that well organized sectors in developmental alliance with domestic state authorities could use the EU in a proactive way. By contrast, weakly organized, fragmented economic sectors and an insulated state were not capable of either formulating an inclusive development strategy and could not play an active developmental role in using EU assistance. In the latter case, the EU had to create basic elements of sectoral state organization and it could address the distributive aspects of market integration to a much lesser degree, resulting in the dissociation of large parts of the domestic producers from the market in the process of integrating the sector