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

Beyond conditionality: international institutions in postcommunist Europe after enlargement

According to the dominant incentive-based explanation, European Union (EU) conditionality has been particularly effective when the EU offered a credible membership incentive and when incumbent governments did not consider the domestic costs of compliance threatening to their hold on power. However, after the EU's eastern enlargement the influence of international institutions could then be expected to decrease in three different contexts: (i) the new member states after accession; (ii) the current candidate countries; and (iii) the postcommunist countries in the European neighbourhood policy. Yet although the incentive-based explanation receives support in some issue areas, in others, external influence is more enduring than predicted. To the extent that our understanding of the power of incentives is complicated by post-enlargement findings, there are new avenues for research into the full range of mechanisms that international institutions have at their disposal for influencing target states

Europeanizing the Balkans: rethinking the post-communist and post-conflict transition

This paper argues that the post-communist and post-conflict transition of the Balkans requires a methodological shift in line with globalization, which shapes political and economic transformation from within through transnational networks. As a specially tailored mechanism leading to the accession of the Balkans into the European Union, the Stabilization and Association Process (SAp) sets the framework for political and economic transformation of the region. The paper posits that the weakness of the EU's approach derives from the fact that it is informed by the dominant transition paradigm, which marginalizes the impact of globalization, and specifically the role of transnational actors. The paper provides a critique of the transition literature and its explanatory potential to account for the post-conflict and post-communist transition in the Balkans. It goes on to examine the Balkan transnational space and the role of transnational actors in the process of transition as an important additional explanation, while taking into account a double legacy: the domestic legacy, inherited from communism, and the transnational and post-communist legacy acquired during the conflict. It advances an argument that a weak state offers us a conceptual nexus for the study of democratic transition in the Balkans in the global age. We demonstrate that transnational networks benefit from a weak state and perpetuate the very weakness that sustains them. At the same time, these networks exploit multi-ethnicity and stir ethnic tensions, lest stabilization should limit their scope for action. As a result, state- and nation building appear as mutually enfeebling rather than reinforcing, thus subverting the existing EU mechanisms