Return to ‘Normal Politics’: Desecuritisation and Conditionality after Enlargement in the EU’s New Member States

The promise of membership was the strongest possible incentive of EU conditionality. Moreover, the process of EU enlargement in CEE countries was securitised, and led to the suspension of ‘normal politics’. Once membership was obtained, to a large extent this mechanism ceased to work. The question then arises of what happens when the compulsory impact of the EU is released. In the paper we analyse how the political actors in CEE (based on a Polish example) frame the post-enlargement demands for further Europeanisation. We focus on two different areas of European integration: gender equality, which is perceived as value-based and strongly contested in the domestic setting; and European foreign policy, which is value-free and much less controversial. The analysis will cover parliamentary debates and allow us to analyse what, if anything, has changed in the discursive practices of justifying the necessity of further domestic change in line with EU requirements.