Without an enhanced engagement strategy, the EU risks losing relevance in the Western Balkans

An EU-Western Balkans summit is being held today in Slovenia. Ahead of the summit, Odeta Barbullushi outlines four key steps the EU should take to ensure it continues to hold relevance for Western Balkan states

EU integration and party politics in the Balkans. EPC Issue Paper No.77, September 2014

Throughout the Balkan region, popularly elected leaders consistently fail to meet the democratic standards set by the EU and, more importantly, they fall short of their voters’ expectations. Distrust in representative institutions and disengagement from political life runs dramatically high among the people of the Balkan countries, and this generalised sense of dissatisfaction is starting to breed cynicism also towards the idea of a better future inside the Union. This study highlights the interplay between EU integration and national politics in the region, and that both are consequential for the quality of Balkan democracies, as well as reminiscent of the Western and Central and Eastern European experience

The Politics of ‘Euro-Atlantic Orientation’: Political Identities Interests and Albanian Foreign Policy 1992-2007

This thesis explores the shifts and continuities in the construction of security in the post-communist period. The thesis provides an insight into the reasons and the ways in which the dominant discourse of security and foreign policy of the Albanian state shifted in 1997 from a an emphasis on the ‘nation’ and ‘national sovereignty’ into a liberal discourse which emphasized the ‘economy’ and the ‘region’. The overarching question of the thesis is why did the Euro-Atlantic orientation become the hegemonic discourse of Albanian foreign and security policy in the post-1997 period? In order to find the answer for this question I will concentrate on the meanings that the Albanian political elites—and more specifically the two main governing parties, the Democratic Party and the Socialist Party— have attached to the notions of ‘national question’ and ‘Euro-Atlantic orientation’. The argument of the thesis is that the different articulations of ‘Euro-Atlantic orientation’ and of the ‘national interest’ have relied upon the elites’ different conceptions of self, that is, what constituted Albanianism. In turn, the political actors translate the basic identity narratives of the nation through their ideological/interpretative repertoires. The thesis builds on Discourse Theory and particularly the approach developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) By incorporating notions of ‘identification strategies’, ‘interpretative repertoires’ and ‘myth’ into the framework of Lene Hansen and Ole Waever (2001), the thesis reveals the intricate interplay between the construction of state identity and of political identities in post-communist Albania