Pushing for Cooperation: External Actors in Balkan Regionalism

Abstract

Whatever the significance of regional interdependence, cooperation among Balkan states has largely been a product of external pressure or inducement. Anastasakis and Bojičić-Dželilović’s 2002 survey found that local elites saw regional schemes as designed, promoted and implemented by powerful outside actors. That regionalism has been an import commodity is a small wonder, given South East Europe’s legacies of conflict, economic downturn and post-1989 political vola­tility described in the foregoing chapter. This chimes well with what Iver Neumann (1994, 2001) defines as the ‘outside-in’ trajectory of regionalism. The outside-in understanding is particularly ame­nable to the notion of hegemony, central to both Neorealism and Neoliberal Institutionalism — arguably the dominant perspectives in IR over the past three decades or so. The development and growth of regimes and institutions, be they regional or global, are sustained or facilitated by the presence and actions of (benign) hegemonic power. In the Balkan case, one may well point at the Western interventions of the 1990s as well as the deployment of the EU’s ‘soft power’ in the following decade. Compared to anywhere else in post-communist Europe, it is in the Balkans that regional cooperation has been sin­gled out, most explicitly, as a precondition for joining prestigious international clubs such as the EU and NATO.