View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

brought to you by‘On the Slow Train to Nowhere?’ The
European Union, ‘Enlargement Fatigue’ andthe Western Balkans

CORE

provided by MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library

John O’ BRENNAN*
The EU is seeking to repeat the success of its eastern enlargement in the Western Balkans.The
accession of Croatia on 1 July 2013 provides a template for other Western Balkan states toemulate as they seek to transpose and implement the EU acquis communautaire and advancetheir membership prospects. But the EU’s engagement with the Western Balkans is proving
uneven and unsatisfactory: the enlargement process is now on ‘life support’ and ‘flat lining’ along
a trajectory of ‘frozen negotiating chapters’ and mutual mistrust toward (despite the promise
made at Thessaloniki a decade ago) an increasingly uncertain destination. The main reason forthis is ‘enlargement fatigue’ amongst the Member States of the European Union. This article
explores the underlying causes of this phenomenon and how it is impacting on the EU’s
relationship with the Western Balkans. It demonstrates that there is a symbiotic link between
enlargement fatigue on the EU side of the relationship and the deficit of implementation on thecandidate state side.The extended economic crisis which has so damaged EU solidarity has also
had a knock-on impact on enlargement: the previously successful ‘external incentives model’ has
run aground on the rocks of growing mistrust and pervasive uncertainty about the endpoint of
the process.

1

INTRODUCTION

It has become commonplace to think of the European Union (EU) as a failingpolitical entity.The Eurozone crisis has thrown into doubt the survival of the Euroand simultaneously helped to re-configure power in the EU in potentially
far-reaching ways. The sense of pessimism is pervasive and applies as much tohitherto successful policy domains as to the EMU. Chief amongst these ‘successstories’ has been the economic, political and geopolitical transformation wroughton the continent by successive enlargements of the EU. Eastern enlargement,
through the so-called big bang of 2004 followed by the ‘coda’ accessions of
Bulgaria and Romania brought the number of Member States to twenty-seven.

*John O’Brennan is Lecturer in European Politics and Society at the National University of Ireland
Maynooth (NUIM). He is also Director of the NUIM Centre for the Study of Wider Europe(john.OBrennan@nuim.ie).

O’ Brennan, John. ‘“On the Slow Train to Nowhere?” The European Union, “Enlargement Fatigue”
and the Western Balkans’. European Foreign Affairs Review 19, no. 2 (2014): 221–242.
© 2014 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands

222

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEWThis increased to twenty-eight when Croatia became the first country from theWestern Balkans region to accede to the EU when it joined on 1 July 2013.
Croatia’s accession means that the EU is now not just a direct neighbour of
the Western Balkans but is physically embedded in the region. European
integration constitutes the dominant force in the economic, political andgeopolitical life of South Eastern Europe and membership of the EU remains theultimate aim of every country in the Western Balkans. At the landmark
EU-Western Balkans summit meeting at Thessaloniki in June 2003 it was statedthat ‘the EU reiterates its unequivocal support to the European perspective of theWestern Balkan countries. The future of the Balkans is within the European
Union’. This ‘European Perspective’ is thus intended to lead to membership andfull incorporation in the institutional and policy regimes of the European Union.1
Despite its economic woes, the EU still continues to act as a lodestar for thecountries of the region as they recover from the traumatizing conflicts of the
1990s and seek to integrate with the varieagated architecture of the European
integration process. Indeed, just as the countries of Central and Eastern Europesought to ‘return to Europe’ in the 1990s, the EU’s gravitational pull has been themost important factor in the reconstitution of economic, political and civic life in
the Western Balkans region over the past decade. The European Commission
manages the enlargement process on behalf of the EU, and it is within this policy
domain (and its ‘antechamber’ regime, the Stabilization and Association Process{SAP}) that the EU seeks to both promote and police an intense‘Europeanization’ strategy for enlargement candidate states, intended to‘democratize’, ‘modernize’, ‘pluralize’ and transform the most fragile part ofEurope and progressively connect it to the mainstream landscape of EU politics.
The EU’s deep economic crisis and exhaustive introspection, however, has had
a pronouncedly detrimental impact on the progress of enlargement-related reformin the Western Balkans. The crisis has been felt at both the national level (on theappetite for and capacity to implement EU-related reform measures) and on the
EU level, where ‘enlargement fatigue’ has gone from constituting a mere discursive
presence in the policy-making arena to playing a determinative role inenlargement politics. Indeed the contagion from the Eurozone crisis has reached
so deep that Dimitar Bechev argues that we now have a crisis of the ‘periphery of
the periphery’.The catastrophic experiences of Greece, Portugal and Spain within
the Eurozone have relegated those states to the status of traumatized periphery1

See European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European
Parliament: The Western Balkans and European Integration, COM (2003) 285 (Brussels, 21 May 2003).
The Thessaloniki ‘promise’ was reiterated at the EU-Western Balkans ministerial meeting at Sarajevo
on 2 Jun. 2010 where the EU provided ‘an unequivocal commitment to the European perspective of
the Western Balkans’ and re-iterated that ‘the future of the Western Balkans lies in the EU’.

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

223

within the existing EU constellation. The Western Balkans now constitutes anouter ring of that marginalized and discredited zone of governance failure and isviewed through similar lenses in Brussels and the ‘north’.2
Enlargement cumulatively, from the original six to twenty-eight Member
States, has multiplied the inherent complexities of EU governance and changedsome of the crucial dynamics governing the ‘search for consensus’ on significant
policy issues.Viewed as functionally problematic and increasingly difficult for the
EU prior to 2008, the enlargement process is now on ‘life support’ and ‘flat lining’
along a trajectory of ‘frozen negotiating chapters’ and mutual mistrust toward(despite the promise made at Thessaloniki a decade ago) an increasingly uncertain
destination. ‘Progress reports’ can be just as easily read as ‘stagnation reports’.3 Thisremains the case even after Croatian accession.This article analyses the causes, scaleand significance of EU ‘enlargement fatigue’, and the extent to which it isinfluencing the course of the current accession and SAP negotiations between the
EU and the Western Balkan states. In its 2013 ‘Enlargement Strategy Paper’, theEuropean Commission pointed to the accession of Croatia, the start of accession
negotiations with Montenegro and the April Agreement between Serbia andKosovo as indicative of how the EU delivers on its commitments once themembership conditions are met and indicative of the ‘transformative power andstabilizing effect of the enlargement process and the EU’s soft power’.4 I argue that
this positive assessment of developments within enlargement policy sits very
uneasily with the significant evidence of enlargement fatigue and a clear lack ofmomentum in negotiations. The EU policy toward the Western Balkans is failing,and enlargement fatigue is largely to blame for the impasse in developments.
2

ENLARGEMENT FATIGUE: DEFINING A CONCEPT

Enlargement fatigue is not a new phenomenon even if it has become increasingly
associated with the Western Balkans (and Turkey). Similar patterns and impulses
can be traced back through significantly longer periods of time in EU enlargement
history. From the earliest days of the European Communities, the relationshipbetween potential ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ of the ‘club’ was a matter forsometimes heated debate. In the 1960s, France twice rejected the membership bid
2

3

4

D. Bechev, The Periphery of the Periphery: The Western Balkans and the Euro Crisis, ECFR Policy Brief(European Council on Foreign Relations, 2012), http://ecfr.eu/page/-/ECFR60_WESTERN_BALKANS_BRIEF_AW.pdf.
S. Blockmans, The Prize is More Peace: The EU Should Consolidate Its Enlargement Process, CEPS
Commentary (Ctr. European Policy Stud. 8 Nov. 2012).
European Commission, Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges 2013-14’, Communication from theCommission to the European Parliament and the Council, COM (2013) 700 final, 1 (Brussels, 16 Oct.
2013).

224

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEWof the United Kingdom; De Gaulle worried not just about the geopoliticalre-configuration implied by British accession to the Communities but about the
finalité of the European integration process itself in the wake of an expansion of
the original club of six. In 1977, Francois Mitterand explicitly expressed his
reluctance towards the idea of Greek and Spanish membership, just as the EEC wasconsolidating its first enlargement.5 Doubts about the desirability of an easternenlargement and in particular its potentially destabilizing impact on existing
integration patterns and the institutional balance were frequently aired in the
1990s and early 2000s.6
Enlargement fatigue only properly entered the European political lexicon,
however, in the wake of the dramatic failures of the French and Dutch
referendums on the Constitutional Treaty in 2005.7 The seismic shock represented
by the rejection of these twin referendums called out for scapegoats, and therecently completed ‘big bang’ enlargement – symbolized by the ubiquitouspresence in ‘old’ Member States of the ‘Polish Plumber’ – seemed a good place formany to begin in explaining the public rejection of the European project. Similararguments were proffered in Ireland after the defeat of the Lisbon treaty
referendum there in 2008. But in all three cases, post-referendum opinion pollingdemonstrated conclusively that enlargement hardly featured in the voting calculusof citizens.8 Even so concerns about the EU’s ‘absorption capacity’ (defined as theEU’s ability to absorb new members whilst maintaining the momentum of theEuropean integration process) began to feature regularly in debate about future
expansion, especially after the European Council requested the Commission to
re-visit the Copenhagen Criteria and re-evaluate the Union’s ‘absorption capacity’against future commitments.9 The various issues connected to fatigue gained
increasing prominence in media coverage of the EU, and this gradually began toseep through into real world political assessments of the merits of further
expansion.
5

6

7

8

9

A. Szoulcha, The EU and Enlargement Fatigue: Why Has the European Union Not Been Able to Counter
Enlargement Fatigue, 6 J. Contemporary European Research 6 (2010).
See, for example, Eastern Europe threatens to destabilise EC, Fin. Times (7 Nov. 1990); Brussels Keeps theGates to the East Shut, Fin. Times, 16 Nov. 1995; EU Braced for Enlargement War, Fin. Times (14 Jul.
1997); Dutch Raise Doubts over Candidates’ Fitness to Join EU, Fin.Times (15 Oct. 2002); Divisions Widen
over Costs of Enlargement, Fin. Times (11 Jun. 2002); War of Words Erupts over Enlargement, European
Voice (23–29 Mar. 2000).
See D. Phinnemore, Beyond 25- the Changing Face of EU Enlargement: Commitment, Conditionality and theConstitutional Treaty, 8 J. S. Eur. & the Balkans 7–26 (2006).
See, for example, Special Eurobarometer Survey (2005) which found that only 6% of Dutch votersand only 3% of the French voters cited enlargement as a reason to reject the Constitutional Treaty.The
Flash Eurobarometer survey of Irish voters in June 2008 similarly ranked enlargement near the bottomof voters’ concerns.
See M. Emerson et al., Just What is the Absorption Capacity of the European Union, CEPS Policy Brief 113(Ctr. European Policy Stud. 2006).

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

225

Anna Szolucha defines the phenomenon as ‘hesitance or unwillingness togrant EU membership to new states as expressed in the interplay of “wideners”
and “deepeners” in the context of an upcoming or just finalized enlargement
round’.10 Whether invoked within the Member States or at EU level, andpertaining to a desire either to slow down or completely halt EU enlargement, theopinion usually expresses wholly negative views of expansion and alleges afundamentally negative correlation between the widening and deepening
impulses. Scepticism and suspicion confront aspiring Member States as they seek
to transpose and implement the corpus of EU legislation (now running to almost
140,000 pages) in advance of membership. Whilst divisions between ‘drivers’ and‘brakemen’ also emerged during the eastern enlargement round, these tended to
revolve around short-term cost-benefit calculations by incumbent states. We canre-define Szoulcha’s approach by acknowledging that there is now a qualitatively
different dimension to the nature of the objections raised by those EU actors whoseek to defer, discourage or obstruct enlargement to the Western Balkans. It
includes normative as well as interest-based objections and, in particular, the sensethat the EU has already reached its optimum absorption capacity and institutional
limits. The depth and severity of the economic crisis experienced across the EU
since 2008 has undoubtedly contributed to this change in perspective.
Retrospective assessments of Bulgaria and Romania’s governance capacity
conclude that ‘they were not ready’ to join in 2007, that the gap between
transposition and implementation of EU commitments in those states is too large,
and that the EU should not have admitted them as members. The ‘backsliding’ on
democratic reform in the Czech Republic and Hungary also add a further layer ofsuspicion about the extent to which accession preparations help ‘lock in’ EU
standards in candidate states. Applied to the Western Balkans enlargement, fatigue
now constitutes a reflex toward outright obstruction of further EU expansion
based on retrospective doubts about the EU’s ‘transformative capacity’ and fear of
weakening the internal integration trajectory of the existing Union.This tendency
toward obstruction is less likely to materialize in formal and stated positions in EU
discussion but rather in an insistence on placing an ever-increasing burden ofasymmetric adjustment on candidate states and much more frequent interventions
by EU Member States to ‘protect the integrity’ of the accession process. It results
in a much more overt politicization of enlargement at Member State level.
Commentators seeking to explain why the EU ‘turned cold’ on enlargement
to the Western Balkans, emphasize the extent to which Brussels needed sufficient
time and space after 2004 to properly internalize what had been an intensive andcumulatively significant process of expansion which had ‘stretched the EU
10

Szoulcha, supra n. 5, at 6.

226

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

resources and institutions’ considerably.11 Enlargement reluctance was in evidence
long before the EU’s economic crisis set in and EU policy demonstrated ‘neither avision, nor the motivating force’ which had made the eastern enlargement
possible.12 Other commentators asserted that for the sake of its own institutional
stability and external coherence, the EU simply could not afford the accession ofany more institutionally weak ex-Communist East European States.13 Within the‘old’ Member States, there were increasing calls to limit further enlargement, atleast until the Lisbon treaty provided the institutional means to cope withadditional members. Another manifestation of the phenomenon could be seen in
the increased moves to ‘protect’ the national interest by introducing the possibilityof future referendums on further accessions to the EU. Taken together, thesedifferent elements fused into an increasingly persuasive and influential argument
for placing the Western Balkan states on the ‘slow track to accession’.
3‘FROM THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT’: CREEPING
NATIONALIZATION AND POLITICIZATION OF ENLARGEMENT

The Western Balkan applicants have had to contend with an accession process
which is now managed more on an inter-governmental basis from Brussels thanthe eastern enlargement and which has, at times, been held hostage to theparticularistic bilateral demands of incumbent states. Enlargement politics has beencharacterized over time by a complex division of labour (internally) between the
EU institutions: although the Commission plays a central bureaucratic role in
the accession negotiations, this is balanced by the (territorial) input of both theCouncil and the (representative) functions of the European Parliament. The
Commission had, however, undoubtedly been the pre-eminent actor within
enlargement politics since taking on responsibility for the newly democratizing
states from Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.14 The economic crisis
has significantly weakened the European Commission’s relative power within the
EU institutional system and boosted the European Council and the Member
States. Enlargement has traditionally been viewed as a space where national
interests would be more readily set aside than in conventional EU settings: thenormative dimension of the process laid claim to a more community-oriented andsolidaristic approach to decision-making. But that approach now has to contend
with a much more assertive and muscular intergovernmentalism and the somtimes
11

12
13

14

O. Anastasakis, From Fatigue to Insignificance: Eurozone Crisis and Enlargement, Paper presented at
ELIAMEP’s 9th European Seminar (Poros 21-4 Jun. 2012).
Ibid.
See, for example, Romania, Bulgaria and the European Union: We’re off on a European Odyssey, theEconomist (28 Sep. 2006); Post-Enlargement Stress, the Economist (8 Nov. 2007).
J.O’ Brennan, The Eastern Enlargement of the European Union (London 2006).

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

227

naked pursuit of national interests by self-regarding national actors within theCouncil. Enlargement is now more easily politicized in the domestic arena where
political parties of populist, Euro-sceptict bent can harness otherwise incohate
discontent to ‘strengthen European citizens’ uneasiness about the potential
consequences of further EU widening’.15 The chauvinist, particulalistic andhyper-nationalist sentiments now sweeping through much of the European Union
have an easy target in the Western Balkans: enlargement would result in many
more immigrants who are poorer and more difficult to integrate into a Union thatis already ‘too full’ and too economically challenged to cope with new entrants,
whilst the uncertain constitutional status of Bosnia and Kosovo would potentially
import into the Union an unwelcome new set of inter-ethnic disputes.
The multilateral and more or less pluralist framework of enlargement
conditionality championed by the Commission now has to contend withsometimes uncompromising nationalist Member State demands. The weakened
influence of the Commission has carried through from the larger integration
process to the enlargement domain and encouraged some Member States to insert
bilateral conditions where previously this approach would have been deemed
inappropriate behaviour.The Council, rather than the Commission, is increasingly
setting the ‘benchmarks’ for delineating progress in accession talks, thus largely
determining the pace at which negotiations proceed.16 Creeping nationalization
constitutes both a cause and an effect of enlargement fatigue. This more latentintergovernmentalist and politicized mode of enlargement decision-making was
already evident as Slovenia made maritime territorial demands of Croatia. It canalso be evinced in the continuing Greek objections to FYROM’s name, theFrench posture toward Turkey on the Armenian genocide, Hungarian andRomanian demarches against Serbia and the Cypriot refusal to allow the EU open
up further chapters with Turkey after 2006. In 2009, when Albania submitted its
membership application, Germany indicated that it would wait for the formal
approval of the Bundestag before asking the Commission to formulate an opinion
on Albania’s application. In December 2011, the Council delayed its response to
Serbia’s membership application until March 2012, requesting Serbia to further
substantiate and fulfil the conditions set for it.17 In 2013, once again the Bundestag
insisted on the opportunity to make further assessments of Serbia’s cooperation
with Kosovo before negotiations with Belgrade could be formally instituted in
January 2014. All these examples indicate the extent to which the enlargement
15

16
17

R. Balfour & C. Stratulat, The Enlargement of the European Union, EPC Discussion Paper (10 Dec.
2012). See also C. Hillion, The Creeping Nationalization of the EU Enlargement Policy, SIEPS paper 6(Swedish Inst. European Policy Stud. 2010).
Ibid.
Ibid.

228

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

process has been removed from its own internal rational and normativedecision-making space and subjected to overt and dangerous politicization.
4

THE SHADOW OF ACCESSIONS PAST AND THE EROSION OF THE‘CONVERGENCE NARRATIVE’

Enlargement fatigue moved from the shadows to the mainstream of expansion
debates after the 2007 accessions of Bulgaria and Romania. The most common
charge presented is that neither country had been adequately prepared formembership on accession to the Union, and that membership has done little tochange the fundamental problems of governance and state capacity. The EU
leverage has produced significantly less reform than in other jurisdictions and theimpulse toward reform has, in some spheres, actually gone into reverse; this despite
six years of post-accession ‘supervision’ via the so-called Cooperation andVerification Mechanism (CVM). The CVM represents a novel instrument inenlargement governance, and has extended EU oversight of reform measures wellbeyond the accession date.18 But the reality is that after accession the motivation
to observe democratic rules and continue processes of reform has weakened
considerably and so has the nature of the external monitoring from Brussels.19
Western Balkan states suffer from geographical proximity to Bulgaria andRomania and an intellectual understanding of the Balkans as a unified region
which is assumed to have a distinct ‘cultural mentality’, one that demonstrates anuncommon attachment to corruption and rent-seeking behaviour amongst highly
clientelistic networks of local power.20 Formal democratic institutions havecontinued to function but in a context where real power is alleged to be wieldedby informal oligarchic networks, some with strong links to organized crime.21 In
the aftermath of the collapse of communism and the power vacuum it generated,
Bulgaria and Romania became associated with discernible patterns of state capture
as ‘criminal groups managed to suborn political, social, and judicial processes,
hampering much-needed reforms, and depriving citizens of an impartial rule oflaw’. Smuggling and cross-border crime ‘were not a part of the hidden agenda of
the governments, but were organized and conducted by individuals and groups

18

19

20

21

See A.B. Spendzharova & M.A Vachudova, Catching Up? Consolidating Liberal Democracy in Bulgaria andRomania after Accession, 35 W. European Pol. 39–58 (2012).
J. Rupnik & J. Zielonka, Introduction:The State of Democracy 20Years on: Domestic and External Factors, 27
E. European Pol. & Soc. (2013).
See T.A. Börzel, When Europeanisation Hits Limited Statehood: The Western Balkans as a Testcase for THE
Transformative Power of Europe, KFG Working Paper 30 (September 2011), http://userpage.fuberlin.de/kfgeu/kfgwp/wpseries/WorkingPaperKFG_30.pdf.
Rupnik & Zielonka, supra n. 18.

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

229

within or closely connected to the ruling class’. 22 These networks succeeded in
instrumentalizing local and national political actors with the result that organizedcrime ‘seeped into every aspect of public life’, bearing significant influence overpolitical stability, rule of law, legality, and social and economic development.23
Stephen Holmes argues that the disappearance of the Communist Party machinery
left behind various ‘orphans’ or ‘highly developed fragments of a highly developed
state’. These corporate organizations survived as ‘subsidiaries spun off from theirparent organization’, including state security and secret service affiliates.24 These
groupings are now closely associated in Bulgaria and Romania with an ‘informal
politics’ and oligarchical power where actors without any democratic legitimacy
secure ‘unjust, disproportional, or even illegal advantages on behalf of particularistic
interests’.25
Venelin I. Ganev goes so far as to describe the post 2007 period in Bulgaria
and Romania as one of ‘post-accession hooliganism’. He points to the prediction
made by leading scholar Alina Mungiu-Pippidi that ‘the day after accession, whenconditionality has faded, the influence of the EU will vanish like a short-term
anaesthetic’.26 The breath and scale of corruption increased markedly after
Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, as ‘corrupt decision-makers rerouted
flows of resources toward businesses owned by their own families’. The mostoutrageous case Ganev cites is that of Vesselin Georgiev, who was in charge ofdistributing European funding for the upgrade of Bulgaria’s transportation
infrastructure after accession. In 2007 and 2008, he channelled hundreds ofmillions of euros into bank accounts owned by his brother.27 This blatant
extraction of rents from the Bulgarian state forced the EU to withdraw more than
EUR 200 million in grants and supports in 2008. Ganev asserts that virtually theentire Bulgarian political class was ‘privately complicit in the embezzlement of theEuropean funds’. Rather than structural and cohesion funds being spent according
to rational and efficiency-enhancing universal criteria, Bulgarian politicians have
openly boasted of their capacity to divert resources to their own supporters inarbitrary fashion. For Ganev, European officials emerge as ‘little more than suckers’
who supply Bulgarian political factions with resources they use to magnify their

22

23

24

25
26

27

E. Giatzdis, The Challenge of Organized Crime in the Balkans and the Political and Economic Implications, 23
J. Communist Stud. & Transition Pol. 337 (2007).
D. Irrera, The Balkanization of Politics: Crime and Corruption in Albania, EUI-RSCAS Working Papers 18(2006).
S. Holmes, Goodbye Future? Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-11-21-holmes-en.html(2012).
Rupnik & Zielonka, supra n. 18, at 13.
V.I. Ganev, Post-accession Hooliganism: Democratic Governance in Bulgaria and Romania after 2007, 27
E. European Pol. & Soc. 26 (2013).
Ibid.

230

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

local influence. 28 The mass protests which took place in Bulgaria in 2013 were inlarge part a reflection of frustration at the failure to improve Bulgaria’s governanceand regulatory capacity and at the vice-like grip on state offices allegedly held byshadowy oligarchical networks (although the February protests were undoubtedly
also about the persistence of rising electricity prices and chronic poverty).29
In Romania, the democratic process has been tested to the limit by attempts
to impeach President Bašescu (in 2007 and 2012) and to curb the power andindependence of the Romanian Constitutional Court.30 From 1997 until 2006,
Romania received EU grants of approximately EUR 12 billion, a large part ofwhich was devoted to strengthening administrative and institutional capacity but
in actuality completely failed to reign in corrupt practices.31 Ristei Gufiu’s
conclusions is that the decision to grant Romania EU membership on the promiseof change rather than on actual results in curbing corruption’ curtailed the impact
of EU conditionality.32 This confirms Tom Gallagher’s contention that the EU waspremature in judging Romania ready for membership and should have devoted
much more time to assessing preparation. Despite the huge asymmetric power
wielded by the EU, it failed to press home its advantage and failed to successfully
mobilize ‘counter-elites committed to delivering effective reform’.33 Since
accession in 2007, there has been no effective deployment of EU leverage.
Domestic momentum towards reform which seemed strong from 2005 to 2007
has diminished as major political players have continually opposed reform.34 The
treatment of reform-minded minister Monica Macovei is indicative of the change.
In February 2007, she was censured by the Romanian Senate, and in April she wasdismissed by Prime Minister Popescu-Tă riceanu.35
Recent developments in Hungary, in particular the systematic weakening of
the courts and attacks on the freedom of the press, under Victor Orban’s Fidesz
government, similarly challenge some of the fundamental norms of democratic
governance in the EU. One of the most taken for granted ‘truths’ about theenlargement process has been that EU conditionality would drive state-building
and prove decisive in the consolidation of liberal democratic norms andinstitutions in acceding Member States; there would be no post-accession‘backsliding’ toward arbitrary and illiberal rule. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania all
28
29
30
31

32
33

34
35

Ibid.
See J.O’ Brennan, Bulgarians Confront the Oligarchs, Open Democracy 26 (2013).
Rupnik & Zielonka, supra n. 18, at 7.
M.R. Gugiu, EU Enlargement and Anti-corruption: Lessons Learned from Romania, 34 J. European
Integration, 443 (2012).
Ibid., p. 444.
T. Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong, 110, 128(Manchester U. Press 2009).
Spendzharova & Vachudova, supra n. 17, at 55.
Ganev, supra n. 26, at 37.

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

231

challenge this apparent logic and in doing so throw into doubt one of thefundamental nostrums underpinning enlargement policy. Their non-compliancewith EU norms and evident nonchalance about potential sanctioning by Brussels
also presents serious challenges to the credibility of EU ‘integration through law’,as Gerda Falkner puts it.36
5

THE SHADOW OF THE PRESENT: ENLARGEMENT AND THE
CRISIS OF THE EU ECONOMY

Since 2008, the European Union has been buffeted by successive waves of financial
and economic turmoil. The crisis has revealed the deep inter-connectedness ofEuropean banking and financial structures, both those within the Eurozone andoutside, and within the EU and outside. The contagion from the sovereign debt
crises has enmeshed external states as much as EU incumbents and in the process
helped to undermine further the case for EU enlargement.The crisis has not only
imposed severe economic contraction and social hardship but also broken theestablished consensus on enlargement as both a normative goal and a demonstrable
success story for the European Union. The Western Balkans is already highly
integrated into the EU economy. Indeed during the decade prior to 2009, theregion experienced a considerable rise in living standards as it recovered from thecatastrophic conflicts of the 1990s and rode the broader European economic
boom. Much of this advance, however, was consumption-based as credit expanded
annually by as much as 25%; inward investment was concentrated in the real estate
and tourism sectors in particular. Credit increased significantly as EU-based banks
channelled funds through local subsidiaries. Although the region’s more open
economies such as Croatia were first to experience difficulty, by 2010 the whole ofthe Western Balkans was experiencing profound problems of economic
management. The EU austerity policies led to deleveraging and compounded
domestic stagnation in the ‘periphery of the periphery’37 This is in a context
where the historic legacy of underdevelopment, deindustrialization and poverty
already provided unique challenges for economic development and for the EU
accession process.
The Western Balkans region demonstrates particularly strong interdependencewith Greece and, as Ritsa Panagiotou demonstrates, the impact of the Greek crisis
can be seen in multiple dimensions.38 The Western Balkan countries ‘have been
36

37
38

Falkner, The JCMS Annual Review Lecture: Is the EU Losing its Credibility? 51 J. Com. Mkt, Stud. 13–30(2013).
Bechev, supra n. 2.
R. Panagiotou, The Greek Crisis as a Crisis of EU Enlargement: How Will the Western Balkans Be
Affected?,13 J. S.E. European & Blacksea Stud. 89–108 (2013).

232

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

sucked into the vortex of Greece’s unravelling economy’ with ‘far-reaching socialand geopolitical implications’ which impact the entire region. After fiveconsecutive years of recession, Greek GDP had collapsed by more than 20% andofficial unemployment reached 27% in 2013 with youth unemployment runningat almost twice that figure. Panagiotou points out that, even prior to the 2011
Greek meltdown, the Western Balkans had been weakened by contagion from theglobal economic crisis. Between 2008 and 2011, all countries in the region
experienced contracting GDP, falling industrial output, rising unemployment,
declining (but volatile) rates of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), growing current
account and trade deficits and a significant decline in diaspora remittances.39
Albania, Montenegro and Serbia are burdened with high levels of public debt;
sizeable budget deficits and large current account deficits also bedevil the region’s
economies.40 The number of IMF programmes in the region had declined fromtwelve during the period 1994 to 1997 to only three in 2007; by 2008 only
Albania was still dependent on IMF aid, and that programme finished at the end of
2008.The crisis, however, has brought the IMF back to the region in no uncertainstyle. Serbia, FYROM and BiH were all forced to ask for assistance in their turn.41
Unemployment has continued to rise, averaging 21% across the Western Balkans,but much higher in BiH, Serbia, FYROM and Kosovo.42 The social impact of thistidal wave of crisis has been deep-seated and profound.
The contagion from the Greek imbroglio has impacted in three particularareas: trade, banking and remittances. Almost 4,000 Greek companies invested in
the region, helping create about 200,000 jobs. By 2008 Greek FDI accounted for
34% of total investments in Albania, about 17% in FYROM and 15% in Serbia.43
Greek investments were made in a wide variety of areas including banking andfinancial services, telecommunications, food and beverage, banking, andpharmaceuticals. Greek FDI began to decline somewhat before 2011: Greek
investment in Serbia, for example, in 2009 amounted to EUR 46 million, well
below the total of EUR 336 million for 2007. Overall, even by 2010, Greek
dis-investment had cost the region around EUR 1.6 billion.44 A second effect of
the Greek crisis has been to drastically reduce the amount of remittances flowing
back to the countries of the Western Balkans from their diaspora communities.
The Greek unemployment catastrophe has placed migrant workers in great
jeopardy and Albanian, Bulgarian and other Balkan workers have been ready
39
40
41
42
43
44

Ibid., p. 91.
Bechev, supra n. 2, at 4.
Ibid., pp. 91–92.
European Commission, supra n. 4.
Pangiotou, supra n. 37, at 93.
Ibid., p. 93, citing paper by Bitzens and Vlachos (2011).

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

233

casualties of the economic collapse. Clearly a large number of such migrant
workers have returned to their home countries causing further increases inunemployment rates, placing unwelcome new pressure on fragile social systems
already struggling to cope after the fall in domestic demand. A decline inremittances also has a ‘negative effect on the countries’ foreign currency holdings,
medium-term budgetary planning and the financing of their current accountdeficit’.45 The Albanian economy has been, for most of its post-Communist
history, the singularly most dependent in the region on remittances by its diaspora
communities. Prior to the crisis it was estimated that some 600,000 Albanians lived
and worked in Greece and in 2009 remittances originating from Greece amounted
to about EUR 650 million or about 8% of GDP. The collapse in the Greek
construction sector in which a large number of Albanians were employed has thus
had a particularly striking impact at both the micros level (on family budgets) andthe macro level (Albanian government revenues). A final area in which the Greek
crisis has produced negative effects on the Western Balkans is in the area ofbanking and financial services. Prior to the crisis, the Greek banking sector was theleading EU player in the Western Balkans with a market share of around 30% in
Bulgaria and FYROM, 25% in Albania and 15% in Serbia. Together with Italianbanks, they control little under half of the sector in the Western Balkans.46 The
seven major Greek banks including National Bank of Greece, EFG Eurobank,Pireaus and Alpha Bank established a network of around twenty subsidiaries in theregion and employ approximately 23,500 people. Greek banks which benefitted
from a EUR 28 million bailout in 2009 were instructed to use the money tosupport exclusively domestic lending thus leaving the subsidiary regional branches
without a vital lifeline as credit dried up.47
It should also be acknowledged that the weakening of Greece within the EU
has led to the loss of the most effective advocate on behalf of Western Balkan
accessions. The Thessaloniki promise in 2003 demonstrated the extent to which
Greece had become the ‘ambassador for the Western Balkans within the EU’.
Indeed Pangiantou suggests that Greece made Western Balkan accession to the EU
the ‘cornerstone of its foreign policy’ around this time. Its ‘Agenda 2014’ aimed atachieving accession of all the Western Balkan states by 2014 (the anniversary as it
happens of the outbreak of the First World War in Sarajevo) as part of a plan topromote peace, prosperity, security and democratic consolidation in the region.
Now hugely indebted and traumatized by the turmoil created by austerity,‘Greece’s days as a regional champion are well and truly over’.48 Greece ‘no longer
45
46
47
48

Ibid., p. 93.
Bechev, supra n. 2.
Ibid., 2.
Pangiatiou, supra n. 37, at 100.

234

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

has the clout, the prestige or the capacity to play the role of the champion ofBalkan enlargement, or to be a bridge between Brussels and the Balkans’.49 When
the Greek Foreign Affairs Ministry published its priority list for the 2014, Greek
Presidency of the EU Council enlargement was notably absent.50
6‘ACCESSION-FATIGUE’AND THE EU’S TRANSFORMATIONAL
POWER

If ‘enlargement fatigue’ constitutes the most significant challenge within theEuropean Union, it has its concomitant malady within the Western Balkans in‘accession fatigue’, or what others refer to as ‘adjustment fatigue’ or ‘evaluation
fatigue’. In reality, there is a symbiotic relationship between the two phenomena:
the weakening ‘EU anchor’ has precipitated a weakened resolution in key actors incandidate states. The European Union’s impact on candidate and associated states
seems to have reduced significantly; the reform process in many countries has
either stalled or gone into reverse.
There is ample evidence from earlier enlargement rounds demonstrating thatthe transformative power of the EU lies in the credible commitments made tocandidate states accompanied by a muscular conditionality designed to‘democratize’, ‘Europeanize’ and ‘modernize’ external states in advance of theiraccessions. The EU incentives are meant to reward progress and publicize
shortcomings, creating significant leverage for Brussels within domestic reform
processes.51 The ‘Europeanization East’ literature asserts that EU-driven
Europeanization is a product of the so-called external incentives structure whereby
candidate state actors’ cost-benefit calculations lead them to comply with EU
demands for adaptation and reform.52 This approach has identified several factors
upon which the EU’s domestic impact hinges. The two most prominent are thecosts of adaptation or compliance as a function of the misfit between EU
requirements and domestic conditions, on the one hand, and the nature andintensity of the external push of the EU to comply with its requirements, mostly
based on the consistent application of conditionality, on the other. Misfit and
49
50

51
52

Ibid.
Hellenic Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Ministry Announcement Regarding the Priorities of
the Greek EU Presidency in the First Half of 2014’, EURactiv, 7 Aug. 2013, http://www.mfa.gr/en/
current-affairs/top-story/foreign-ministry-announcement-regarding-the-priorities-of-the-greek-eupresidency-in-the-first-half-of-2014-3.html.
Spendzharova & Vachudova, supra n. 18, at 39.
U. Sedelmeir, Europeanization in New Member and Candidate States, 6 Living Reviews European
Governance (2011); F. Schimmelfennig & U. Sedelmeir, Europeanization in Central and Eastern Europe(Cornell U. Press, 2005); A. Dimitrova & B. Steneunberg, Living in Parallel Universes? Implementing
European Movable Cultural Heritage Policy in Bulgaria, 51 J. Com. Mkt, Stud. (2013); M.A. Vachudova,
Corruption and Compliance in the EU’s Post-Communist Members and Candidates, 47 J. Com. Mkt, Stud.
43–62 (2009).

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

235

external push combine in the pressure for adaptation the EU exerts on a target
country. Its impact is mediated by domestic factors such as veto players, politicalculture, norm entrepreneurs and formal or informal institutions and practices.53
Change in public policy can be frequently very costly. Introducing political andeconomic reforms does not only require significant resources, staff, expertise andinformation but it also creates potential or actual political costs for governments,
which risk losing pubic support, or political power altogether, over imposing
EU-related expensive and unpopular changes.54 As long as rewards were ‘big
enough and tangible enough to compensate political incumbents for perceived
losses of power or popularity’, the EU’s transposition and implementation
programme could be adopted.55 For Vachudova, the cases of Croatia and Serbia
confirm the findings of the ‘Enlargement Europeanization’ that countries evencomply with costly conditions related to issues of statehood, if EU rewards are
sizeable and credible enough. In the end, both governments agreed to cooperatewith the ICTY, although only reluctantly and not always to the full satisfaction of
the EU.56
When dealing with the Western Balkan states, the EU has applied lessons
learned from the 2004/2007 enlargements. The most important ones are thatleverage works well only before accession, and that a longer period for exercisingconditionality is needed in certain areas.57 Milada Ana Vachudova takes a positive
view in arguing that political parties and governments in at least some of thecandidate states in the Western Balkans are responding to these incentives bychanging party agendas and implementing policies, even in the face of tougher EU
requirements and sometimes costly adaptation costs. The leverage of the EU was
crucial for the democratization of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union(HDZ), which made EU membership the primary goal after 2003 and ousted hard
liners from top positions in the party leadership, indicating a decisive break withthe era of Franjo Tudjman.58 Serbia’s coalition government, led by the Progressive
and Socialist parties has made major policy changes in order to move forward in
the EU pre-accession process. Alexander Vuč ić took on the fight against
corruption with ‘unexpected vigour’ and had, among others, the most powerfuloligarch in Serbia jailed and indicted on corruption charges.59 The Serbian case
53

54
55

56
57

58
59

Borzel, supra n. 20;T.A. Borzel & T. Risse, Conceptualising the Domestic Impact of Europe, in The Politics ofEuropeanization 55–78 (K. Featherstone & C. Radaelli ed., Oxford U. Press 2003).
Borzel, supra n. 20, at 9.
G. Noutcheva & S. Aydin-Duzgit, Lost in Europeanization: the Western Balkans and Turkey, 35
W. European Pol. 59–78 (2012).
Borzel, supra n. 20, at 12.
M.A.Vachudova, EU Leverage and National Interests in the Balkans:The Puzzle of Enlargement TenYears on,
52 J. Com. Mkt, Stud. (2013).
Borzel, supra n. 20, at 7.
Vachudova, supra n. 55.

236

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

demonstrates how the EU has created significantly more junctures where it canapply leverage well before accession. Thus one might argue that the enlargement
process now revolves around finely judged ‘windows for leverage’.These are points
where political pressure is maximized, where the EU can ally with (or ‘use’) local
civil society networks and media organizations to compel transposition andimplementation of EU standards. Progress is garnered through specific rewards,
usually towards the next stage of the process. Milestones include: negotiating the
SAA agreement; having the SAA agreement come into force; negotiating a visa
liberalization agreement; official recognition as a candidate country; the award of
an official date for the start of accession negotiations; and then progressing throughthe negotiations in stages with the opening and closing of individual chapters andthe utilization of opening and closing benchmarks which help to delineate
expectations and progress.60 And while one can certainly adduce evidence ofcandidate states complying ‘in the moment’ with specific EU demands in order toachieve a breakthrough in negotiations, one has to ask whether this kind ofcompliance leads to the desired longer term internalization of EU norms? In theWestern Balkans, many instances of compliance look increasingly like those posted
by Bulgaria and Romania in the mid 2000s. And equally one can clearly
demonstrate links between the use of more and more benchmarks in the accession
process with national politics within incumbent EU Member States: politicizationand nationalization seem to be driving the EU policy of accession preparations asmuch as a Brussels-driven push for deep implementation of acquis
communautaire.
The problem here is that absent a substantive belief on the part of domestic
policy-makers and interest groups that they will reap longer term benefits, theEU’s capacity to influence change reduces significantly. The EU’s promise of
membership simply has to be a credible one if accession-driven reforms are to
succeed and EU norms substantively internalized. In the Western Balkans, the EU
has undermined its own credibility by increasingly subordinating theconditionality demands to political expediency, thus turning those demands into
‘moving targets’.61 In some instances, this has meant raising the threshold forcompliance, in others it has led to a lowering of the bar. The impact of thisunevenness has been to damage the wider credibility of EU policy. Credibility isfrequently cited as one of the four (key) C-words by European Commission
officials along with consistency, commitment and courage. Yet it is arguable that
the EU is lacking all these elements in its current engagement with the Western
Balkan states.
60
61

Ibid.
See, for example, B. Stahl, Perverted Conditionality:The Stabilization and Association Agreement between theEuropean Union and Serbia, 16 European For.Affairs Rev. 4, 465–487 (2011).

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

237

The EU’s most significant credibility problem in the Western Balkans stems
from the fact that the Thessaloniki promise of membership is no longer sufficient
to counter the currents of enlargement fatigue which pervade the process on theEU side. An excess of enlargement fatigue has led to an excess of ‘accession
fatigue’: transposition and implementation of EU laws in the Western Balkans has
slowed to a standstill. Enlargement is one of the EU policy spheres where there is
the most significant divergence between transposition and implementation of EU
rules. As Börzel and Risse put it: it does not matter how many measures are‘uploaded’ at EU level, if Member States fail to implement them at national level;
mere ‘downloading’ of rules does not guarantee substantive and successful
implementation.62 This is especially the case where compliance with EU rules
carries significant financial costs for the Member State (or candidate state) inquestion. Noutcheva and Aydin-Duzgit emphasize the ‘key role of agency intransforming the EU stimuli into domestic impact’ in candidate states. If EU
incentives are aligned closely with those of domestic elites there is a stronger
chance that rule of law will orient towards the desired point of adaptation.When,however, there is a mis-alignment, compliance with EU demands is likely to bepatchy, inadequate or completely absent.63 Where previously in the CEE case an
accession perspective gave rise to what Vachudova calls a ‘lock-in’ effect on
candidate state policy, the dynamics of adaptation and reform have been very
different in the Western Balkans.64
This negative symbiosis has produced an ugly child which has been dubbed‘Potemkin implementation’: local elites engage in ‘smoke and mirrors’
policy-making which gives the appearance of EU-trajectory reform but falls wellshort on implementation.65 Rhetorical statements of intent are not followed
through in any substantive way and the gap between transposition andimplementation of EU laws is substantial. Political elites in candidate states ‘pay lip
service’ to EU membership, conditionality and reforms but in reality they areconcerned with protecting their own narrow political interests. Faced withdemands for reform domestic actors create ‘two parallel sets of structures of formal
and informal rules. This frequently produces a dynamic of only “symbolic
compliance with external requirements” while in practice a different informal rule
set actually prevails. The gap between formal transposition and actual
implementation is such that what remains is simply “law on the books”, as very

62
63
64
65

T.A. Borzel & T. Risse, From Europeanization to Diffusion: Introduction, 35 W. European Pol. 1–19 (2012).
Noutcheva & Aydin-Duzgit, supra n. 53, at 62.
M.A.Vachudova, Europe Undivided (Oxford U. Press 2005).
Blockmans, supra n. 3; W. Jacoby, Priest and Penitent:The EU as a Force in the Domestic Politics of Eastern
Europe, 8 E. Eur. Const. Rev. 62–67 (1999).

238

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

different policy objectives are pursued through informal practices’.66 The problem
of weak administrative capacity also plays a role here. Thus the dominant impulses
within the Western Balkans in 2014 remain clientelism and rent-seeking rather
than EU-motivated reforms being transposed and implemented.67 The failure to
improve rule-of-law performance has emerged as the single most important
deficiency identified by the European Commission in its annual progress reports.
In accounting for the evident problem in replicating the success of easternenlargement in the Western Balkans, Tanja A. Börzel identifies problems linked tolimited statehood which ‘have seriously curbed the transformative power of the
EU in the Western Balkans – despite their membership perspective’. Here the‘weight of the past’ weighs heavily: secessionist movements, unsettled borders,ethnic tensions, deficient state capacity and/or strong clientelistic networks haveseverely mitigated the transformative power of the EU and held back the accession
ambitions of the region.68 The Western Balkans have engaged in significant formal
domestic change – even the weakest and most contested states have legally adopted
EU norms and rules, including in areas where costs are high.The issue is effective
implementation and enforcement.69
The economic crisis has also fundamentally challenged some of the key
assumptions about ‘EU normative power’, and this in turn has changed the
dynamics of the previously successful ‘external incentives’ model. The
Mediterranean and eastern enlargements provided the templates for this EU‘success’ as a modern form of inside/outside ‘soft power’. Now the economic crisis
has thrown that model into severe doubt as Greece, Portugal and Spain have
moved onto the ‘EU’s life support’ system. Even Ireland, for long the star pupil of
the EU’s so-called cohesion countries needed a dramatic rescue by a troika
consisting of the IMF, the ECB and European Commission as its economy
collapsed in 2009–2010. The Greek imbroglio has further reinforced the image of
the Balkans as the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, a region where multiple and varied‘local difficulties’ have a habit of mutating into trans-European problems. The
bursting of the Greek EU bubble dealt a serious blow to the enlargement narrative
as one of sustained convergence, EU-driven modernization and increasing
prosperity. As Dimitar Bechev puts it: ‘Greece was one of the region’s models; aquintessentially Balkan country that had made the grade from rags to riches, fromunderdevelopment and marginality to prosperity under the star-studded EU

66
67
68
69

Dimitrova & Steunenberg, supra n. 50, at 247.
Bechev, supra n. 2.
Borzel, supra n. 20.
Ibid.

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

239

flag . . . Now, however, Greece is a warning about the perils of Europeanization
without deeper transformation’.70
7

CONCLUSION

Despite the fact that more than three quarters of the EU Member States are now
former ‘enlargement’ countries and that expansion is frequently depicted as the
key tool in the Union’s foreign policy armoury, enlargement is no longer narrated
as a success story for the European Union. Rather it is more often presented as ‘abridge too far’ for a European project beset by crisis and incapable of repeating
previous geopolitical triumphs. In short the environment in which enlargement isbeing negotiated has become much more brutal for all applicant states.
Enlargement fatigue has been the dominant feature of EU relations with theWestern Balkan states in the decade since the Thessaloniki summit in 2003 andexplains why the accession process has been ‘running on empty’ in recent years.
Enlargement fatigue is both a reflex response to a rather inchoate set of EU
problems and simultaneously helps to structure a culture of partial or
non-compliance with EU laws on the part of Western Balkan aspirant states. Fearsof instability in the Western Balkans have made the EU especially keen to apply its
leverage there, while setbacks in governance have underscored the importance ofusing more extensive and credible conditionality well in advance of accession.This
has created a complicated dynamic: on the one hand, EU leaders have insisted
more sharply on compliance on critical issues such as solving territorial problems
and fighting corruption; on the other hand, EU leaders have also looked for ways
to keep politically divided states such as Bosnia and FYROM from falling out ofthe process altogether.71
Europeanization has remained largely shallow in the Western Balkans, giving
rise to formalistic, short-term and technocratic reforms rather than sustainable andtransformative domestic change. This tendency can in some measure be explainedby problems of limited or incomplete statehood: the more limited the statehood ofa country is, the more likely we are to find a decoupling between formal
institutional changes and informal institutions and behavioural practices.72 The
Western Balkans remains a region of great fragility, defined by inter-ethnic
contestation for territory and power, mutually antagonistic nationalisms,
incomplete state formation, deep and pervasive patterns of corruption andendemic economic mismanagement. The EU officials still speak of ‘Europe’ as thewonder drug which will cure any and all Balkan pathologies. But the financial and
70
71
72

Bechev, supra n. 2.
Vachudova, supra n. 19.
Borzel, supra n. 20, at 12.

240

EUROPEAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW

economic crisis has altered this ‘logic’ considerably: Rather than acting as an agentof stability and practical reform, the EU is now an arc of instability and Western
Balkan states, like others on the periphery of Europe, have got caught in the
crossfire. 73 The extended economic crisis which has so damaged EU solidarity has
had a knock-on impact on enlargement: the previously successful ‘external
incentives model’ has run aground on the rocks of growing mistrust and pervasive
uncertainty about the endpoint of the process. Prior to the crisis, it was often
stated that EU integration constituted the key ex ante condition for stabilization of
the region.There are few who now hold to that position.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2012, in the midst of theworst economic and political crisis since the creation of the EU was, however, alsoa reminder of what the EU can achieve in its neighbourhood, and also an
acknowledgment of the historical success of enlargement in mitigating conflict.74
The Enlargement process has not ground to a complete halt. In particular the
potentially landmark deal signed by Kosovo and Serbia on 19 April 2013 provides
a template for neutralizing the worst elements of inter-ethnic and inter-state
conflict in the Western Balkans.75 The agreement is designed to bolster local
self-government through an association of Serb-majority municipalities whilst
providing new arrangements for policing and the judiciary.76 Here the EU’s
foreign policy team has enjoyed a much needed triumph in 2013 by brokering adeal between Belgrade and Pristina that, if it works, will also boost perceptions that
the EU acts competently in trying to solve outstanding issues related tosovereignty and territory in the region.77 The Agreement points in the directionof future dividends for the EU deriving from a comprehensive enlargement to theWestern Balkans. These include the potential re-calibration of a range ofchallenging cross-border policy externalities, achieving an enduring settlement ofinherited border disputes, and keeping the Eastern Partnership model on track bydemonstrating the gains to be made by associated countries in honouring their EU
commitments.
The EU ‘bet’ here is that on the back of Croatia’s accession to the EU on
1 July 2013 the enlargement logjam in the Western Balkans will finally be broken.
Croatian accession provides all actors within the region with grounds for optimism
but unlike previous accession rounds the EU has provided no concrete timetable
for achieving the Thessaloniki promise of membership. Rather the process remains
73
74

75

76
77

Bechev, supra n. 2.
R.G. Whitman & A.E. Juncos, Stasis in Status: Relations with the Wider Europe, 51 J. Com. Mkt, Stud.
Annual Rev. 155–167 (2013).
See W. Koeth, The Serbia-Kosovo Agreement on Kosovo’s Regional Representation and the ‘Feasibility Study’:
A Breakthrough in EU-Kosovo Relations, 18 European For.Affairs Rev. 1, 127–154 (2013).
S. Lehne, Serbia-Kosovo Deal Should Boost the EU’s Western Balkans Policy, Carnegie Eur. (23 Apr. 2013).
Vachudova, supra n. 20.

‘ON THE SLOW TRAIN TO NOWHERE?’

241

open and indeterminate. The European Commission remains the ‘best friend’ of
the candidate and potential candidate states in Brussels, but the Commission has
been decisively weakened within the institutional architecture by the economiccrisis and increasingly acts as the mere ‘agent’ of the Council, where ‘creeping
nationalization’ has resulted in an unprecedented politicization of the enlargement
process. The Commission continues to insist that a rational, technocratic, andultimately fair rewards-based process is continuing to deliver results (if indeed
somewhat ‘under-the-radar’). The Western Balkans will continue to gravitate
toward the sui generis EU model, if only because Brussels remains ‘the only gamein town’. But the Thessaloniki commitments need to be reinforced by acomprehensive new EU strategy for the region. Such a strategy should contain theproper balance of incentives, stimuli and capacity-building tools andsimultaneously help boost the EU’s flagging credibility whilst tackling enlargement
fatigue.