Authority and identity: Political conditionality and ethno-national contention in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, 1993--2002

This dissertation challenges the common view that political conditionality promoted minority policy liberalization as well as democratization in the Central and East European countries by raising the quality of political competition and culture, promoting "fair" rules and "civic" norms. Instead, I argue that conditionality facilitated these outcomes in the Czech and Slovak states by altering not the quality but the dynamics of political competition. It worked by altering power relations, by empowering pro-Western political parties against nationalist ones. I argue that conditionality worked to effect liberal minority policy changes in the Czech and Slovak states in two broadly dissimilar ways: by promoting nationalist marginalization in the Czech Republic and nationalist-internationalist polarization in Slovakia.; Relations with international institutions had critical effects on policies, political identities, and citizenship in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but their effects were dynamic, not linear, indirect as well as direct. These effects are undetectable from the perspectives of leading liberal institutionalist and socialization theories. Political claims analysis, by contrast, uncovers the unintended consequences of conditionality. When analytic attention expands from institutional rules and norms to cover claim making interaction among international authorities and multiple domestic political actors, the mechanisms of political conditionality come into view. The EU and NATO, as well as its unofficial leading representative, the United States, facilitated liberal policy change chiefly through public claims of certification and decertification. Certification entails the validation of political actors, performances and claims by external authorities and decertification is the withdrawal of such validation.; Politicized in both states, conditionality was not uniformly welcomed as an opportunity for rewards. Political parties often attributed threat to conditionality, its agents, and alleged beneficiaries, claiming it constituted encroachment on national sovereignty. External demands for extensions in minority protection sometimes provoked escalations of anti-minority claim making and encouraged the mobilization of minority nationalists and their advocates abroad. Differences in the timing and content of external certification/decertification resulted in varied patterns of domestic opportunity/threat attribution, and thus varied trajectories of minority policy liberalization: nationalist marginalization in the Czech Republic resulted in gradual, halting policy change while nationalist-internationalist polarization produced belated, rapid liberalization.