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Given that the EU indirectly affects its member states' social policy, there is a long-standing debate about the direct causal effect of the EU on its member states regarding non-economic matters. This paper analyzes how the governments of new postcommunist Central and Eastern European EU members and candidates reacted to pressures from the European Commission, while acknowledging that the broader context of various other global, regional, and domestic actors also affects the establishment of new laws and norms related to domestic violence. The EU's influence is controversial and manifold in the postcommunist Central and East European context: while it has rhetorically endorsed gender equality, it has only recently and selectively started to pressure members and candidates into implementing changes and monitor progress. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists been paying special attention to domestic violence. As global feminist activism found common ground in protecting women from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, this framework traveled to Eastern Europe with the advent of regime changes there. In post-communist Europe, it took only a decade and half for the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments to react to domestic and global pressures and establish new domestic violence norms. However, the feminist NGOs' definitions and policy recommendations met with limited success. International norms related to domestic violence diffused and cascaded to a mediocre level of half-hearted official responses in Central and Eastern Europe, because there is little if any global agreement or oversight concerning this fundamental and still deeply challenging right of women to physical safety. On both the domestic and the international levels, the conflicts and co-operations of Central and Eastern European NGOs and governments precipitate a complex set of interactions that involve various types of engagement, such as lobbying, monitoring, creation of organizations, and financing. Analyzing the process of these multiple-level and manifold interactions sheds light on how norm development, such as norm diffusion and norm cascades in domestic violence can direct us toward determining how Central and Eastern Europe has interacted with global forces concerning such a culturally and politically sensitive question. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]