Democratizing the Western Balkans: Challenges and Burdens for the European Union
Democratizing the Western Balkans: Challenges and Burdens for the European Union

Summary/Abstract: The European Union faces unprecedented difficulties in its integration of the Western Balkans. In particular, this applies to the requirements for political change by countries in that region wishing to join. In confronting the Western Balkans, the EU’s political conditionality has moved significantly beyond its demands made on the post-Communist entrants of 2004 and 2007. But serious questions are now being asked about the EU’s capacity for promoting such political change in a region still facing fundamental problems and persistent historical legacies. Brussels is encountering real difficulties in dealing on the one hand with a fragile political will in these countries for instigating meaningful change while on the other being constrained by ‘enlargement fatigue’ among member states. Both uncertainties – about the prospects for European modernization and about the commitment to further accession – mean that the dynamic behind enlargement to the Western Balkans is not very comparable with the historic drive that impelled the enlargement of 2004 to East-Central Europe. At the same time, rather in conflict with this complicated process are strong and longer-term geopolitical arguments that stabilizing the Western Balkans dictates integrating this region into the European mainstream.

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