The European Commission, Enlargement Policy and Civil Society in the Western Balkans

Abstract

The European Union’s enlargement policy is universally recognised as contributing decisively to the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the two decades following the end of Communism. With the historic enlargements of 2004 and 2007 the EU extended its borders to the east and to the southeast. As a result, the EU is now a neighbour of the Western Balkans. Utilising the different templates employed in the design of the successful eastern enlargement policy, the EU is now engaged in a similar process of negotiations with the Western Balkan states. This is intended to lead to membership and full incorporation in the institutional and policy regimes of the EU.¹ However, this process has developed along a separate and very different trajectory to CEE. As CEE drew closer to the EU, the Western Balkan region was inflamed by a series of conflicts that splintered the old federal state of Yugoslavia. Since the Dayton Agreement in 1995, EU engagement with the region has been fashioned, if fitfully and unevenly, through a familiar mix of political, economic and institutional instruments. Gradually the EU has become the most important point of reference for the countries of the region as they recover from the conflicts of the 1990s and seek to integrate into the EU. Indeed, just as the countries of CEE sought to ‘return to Europe’ in the 1990s, the EU’s gravitational pull has been the most important factor in the reconstitution of economic, political and civic life in the Western Balkan region over the past decade.