1. This instrument of soft control is designed to help change certain structures or behavioural patterns of a given social actor, for example a national state collective, and, moreover, in an asymmetric transnational process of interaction. The EU developed this new instrument in the course of its eastward enlargement; it differs significantly from analogous attempts by the US in the Greater Middle East, functioning through a system of positive incentives and rewards: the more deeply the Copenhagen Criteria are internalized, the more likely it will be that the reform process runs of its own accord.

Dieser Einfluss war im Zuge der Beitrittsverhandlungen als "Politische Konditionalität" (Giesendorf 2008) gegeben, die als transnationale Strategie der Förderung und Implementierung von Demokratie durch positive Anreize definiert werden kann.