EU Conditionality Building and Romanian Minority Rights Policy: Towards the Europeanisation of the Candidate Countries

The present paper deals with the Europeanisation of Romanian minority rights policy within the context of the EU's enlargement process. It restricts itself to a top‐down approach, focusing on both processes of EU conditionality building and domestic reactions towards Europeanisation. Within this approach, the paper proposes a comparative conceptual and theoretical framework. The main contribution of the essay lies in linking the concept of Europeanisation within an encompassing threefold neo‐institu‐tionalist framework for analysis in order to organise the empirical findings of the case studies.