Challenging assumptions of the enlargement literature : the impact of the EU on human and minority rights in Macedonia

This article argues that from the very start of the transition process in Macedonia, a fusion of concerns about security and democratisation locked local nationalist elites and international organisations intoa political dynamic that prioritised security over democratisation. This dynamic resulted in little progress in the implementation of human and minority rights until 2009, despite heavy EU involvement in Macedonia after the internal warfare of 2001. The effects of this informally institutionalised relationship have been overlooked by scholarship on EU enlargement towards Eastern Europe, which has made generalisations based on assumptions relevant to the democratisation of countries in Eastern Europe, but not the Western Balkans

The European Union, Russia and the Eastern region: The analytics of government for sustainable cohabitation

This article applies the Foucauldian premise of governmentality and the analytics of government framework to demonstrate how exclusive modalities of power – of the European Union (EU) and Russia – and their competing rationalities relate, intersect and become, counter-intuitively, inextricable in their exercise of governance over the eastern neighbourhood. This particular approach focuses on power as a process to gauge the prospects for compatibility and cohabitation between the EU and Russia. Using original primary evidence, this article contends that cohabitation between these two exclusive power modalities is possible and even inevitable, if they were to legitimise their influence over the contested eastern region. It also exposes a fundamental flaw in the existing power systems, as demonstrated so vividly in the case of Ukraine – that is, a neglect for the essential value of freedom in fostering subjection to one’s authority, and the role of ‘the other’ in shaping the EU–Russian power relations in the contested regio

Official Discrepancies: Kosovo Independence and Western European Rhetoric

This article examines approaches and official discrepancies characterising Western European rhetoric with regard to the Kosovo status question. Since the early 1980s, Kosovo has been increasingly present in European debates, culminating with the 1999 international intervention in the region and subsequent talks about its final status. Although the Kosovo Albanians proclaimed independence in February 2008 and the majority of EU Member States decided to recognise Kosovo as an independent state, Western European rhetoric has been rather divided. This article shows that in addition to five EU members who have decided not to recognise Kosovo from the very beginning, and thus are powerful enough to affect its further progress, both locally and internationally, some of the recognisers, although having abandoned the policy of ‘standards before status’, have also struggled to develop full support for the province – a discrepancy that surely questions the overall Western support for Kosovo’s independence