The advent of polity conditionality as a new form of internal governance in the European Union

While the European Union (EU) has traditionally used conditionality vis-á-vis candidate and third countries, it has more recently begun to deploy it internally, towards its member states. Following the Eurozone crisis, the EU has extended macroeconomic and policy conditionalities as internal governance mechanisms to incentivise domestic reforms. This paper adds to the debate by conceptualising a novel form of conditionality: polity conditionality. Through polity conditionality, the EU seeks to promote reforms of domestic institutions, such as public administrations, anti-corruption institutions, and the judiciary, across its member states to ensure compliance with EU values, particularly the rule of law. We delineate this new type of conditionality from existing conditionalities and illustrate how this polity conditionality unfolds in practice through the Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, the Common Provisions Regulation, and the Recovery and Resilience Facility. We argue that, with polity conditionality, the EU has embarked on a path that breaks with its traditional commitment not to interfere with the institutional set-up of its members and, thus, represents a substantive qualitative change in the EU’s relations with its member states.