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It is common knowledge that European Union (EU) and its accession conditionality has reshaped governance in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). But what mechanisms really explain how this has happened? The mechanism presented here is original and features two explanatory variables – the degree of domestic accession uncertainty and the availability to domestic actors of transnational networking – which when combined explain non-compliance no less than compliance with accession conditionality. Until now uncertainty (or information asymmetry) has been theorized as affecting mainly the EU, which is supposed to be insufficiently informed about the real extent of candidates’ compliance. This monograph demonstrates that uncertainty can affect accession governments too, and can be exploited by networks of domestic and external actors to induce Executive behaviour that otherwise might not be possible. This theoretisation draws on exceptionally rich empirical evidence from the accession country of Romania during its negotiations with the European Commission. The prospect of further enlargement makes opportune this investigation into what works and what does not work to elicit desirable behaviour – given uppermost problem of Eastern enlargement so far, which has been to induce East Europeans, who differ from their Western counterparts in their perceptions of and respect for law, to conform to the norms that the EU is committed to. The theory presented here will thus be of interest to all Europeanization scholars, notwithstanding the localised provenance of the empirical data.