The conclusions of this book presented in Chapter 8 include a criticism of EU-driven anti-corruption measures to date and a summary of choices that the EU has for the future. Besides the too-great ambition of the task and the absence of domestic agency in favor of change, the study finds several causes internal to the EU that could be remedied. Perhaps the most important is the excessive formality in the EU’s bureaucratic approach to anti-corruption, and its absence of a realistic theory of change. On the contrary, extensive European interventions seem actually to disincentivize a more political, domestically driven approach to governance transformation as in the likes of Estonia and Georgia, two reform champions praised in this book. Europe’s choices should be modeled on the different contexts of the countries, primarily on the rule of law situation, and its instruments should be reformed by investing in what seems to work and cutting what does not.

Europeanization is a specific type of external intervention in the governance of a nation, and Chapter 4 deciphers the many meanings of “Europeanization,” applied in particular to the “modernization” of government and promotion of good governance. Specific theories of change related to Europeanization are then empirically checked against evidence from over 120 countries where EU offers aid, producing little evidence of any impact of EU aid on governance improvement.