The European Commission argues that clearer bilateral, regional or international rules in the energy sector would
improve predictability for the transit and supply of energy and therefore increase Europes energy security. Yet is
the European Union able to export its own rules and regulations to non-member states and thus expand the
liberalised regulatory regime beyond its own borders?
This book studies the process of exporting rules in the energy sector from the EU to Bulgaria, Serbia and Ukraine
within three different institutional settings: the accession process, the stabilisation and association process, and the
neighbourhood policy. It investigates if and how the EU-regulations for the liberalisation of electricity and gas are
implemented in the relevant non-member states.
The main argument is that in a complex policy field such as energy it needs more than principal willingness of a
non-member state to adopt EU-rules. What is needed is, first, the economic necessity to implement reforms in the
energy sector and - secondly - the active leverage of the EU and the use of its political conditionalities. Only when
the external incentives to restructure the energy sector are higher than the domestic opportunity costs can the
European Union play an active role in the energy sector of a non-member state.