European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of Balkan Accession

Conditionality, legitimacy and compliance

Gergana Noutcheva

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415596848
• eBook ISBN: 9781136306198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Balkan countries have responded differently to the EU's conditional offer of membership. This book examines the diverging compliance patterns of the Balkan accession states and asks why some of them have complied substantially, some only partially and others have defied the EU.

The book examines the compliance of the Balkan states with the EU accession conditionality, arguing that the variation in the compliance behavior of Balkan governments hinges on three main factors – the legitimacy of the EU conditions as seen domestically in the accession states, the costs of compliance and the EU's ability and willingness to use its superior power resources to impose compliance when faced with domestic defiance. Placing important events from the most recent political history of the Balkans in a broader historical perspective, the author evaluates the successes and failures of the EU's state building policies in the Balkans, a geographical area of the highest priority for the EU's foreign policy and a test case for the EU's capacity and willingness for foreign policy action.

Based on detailed empirical data, European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of Balkan Accession will be of interest to scholars and students of EU and comparative politics, and those focusing on policy impact in EU integration.

1
Introduction

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 triggered a whole sequence of spectacular events we now look upon as being at the very core of Europe’s recent political history. The European Union (EU) saw it as an historical opportunity to unite the continent and extended the prospect of EU membership to ten countries from Central and Eastern Europe in 1993. It oversaw the transition to liberal democracy and market economy in the region and welcomed ten post-communist countries as full EU members in 2004 and 2007. It subsequently celebrated enlargement policy as its biggest foreign policy success to date.

Bulgaria and Romania were among the ten post-communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe that embarked on a pro-reform path in the early 1990s, embracing the goals of democratization and market reform even though no one expected them to rank among the top reformers in the group. The Eastern Balkan duo’s subsequent trajectories for reform confirmed such expectations, as both countries struggled to catch up with the front-runners from Central Europe throughout the 1990s, ultimately joining the EU two-and-a-half years later than the main group, but with special conditions attached. EU Member States since 2007, Bulgaria and Romania have continued to urge the EU to come up with innovative policy formulas to maintain pressure for further reform on the governments in Sofia and Bucharest. The EU’s ‘transformative power’ (Grabbe, 2006) has been seriously put to the test by these two difficult transition cases (Noutcheva and Bechev, 2008).

The violent dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation in the early 1990s did not provoke a decisive policy response from the EU, quite the opposite. The EU found itself unprepared to intervene, and stop the bloodshed in former Yugoslavia. The Western Balkans turned out to be Europe’s Achilles’ heel, exposing its weaknesses in crisis management and its incapacity for foreign policy action. It was the United States (US) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who restored peace in the region in the 1990s through military intervention. The EU stepped up its engagement in the region in the 2000s, extending the prospect of EU membership in the hope of replicating the success in Central and Eastern Europe. For the fragile states of the Western Balkans, the EU made its offer of future membership conditional, not only on achieving high standards of democratic and economic governance (the Copenhagen criteria), but also on the consolidation of statehood in the region, both external (state borders) and internal (autonomous governance).

The Western Balkan region has created challenges of a different nature. While the enlargement template could be easily applied to it after 2000, with ready-made formulas for steering a course toward liberal democracy and market economy, dealing with countries characterized by weak statehood was untested ground for the EU. Subsequently, the enlargement instruments had to be adapted to address, not only governance issues more generally, but also, and more importantly, issues related to the sovereignty of the protectorates and semi-protectorates in the region. The EU’s enlargement toolkit had to be geared more directly to address the problems of the post-conflict societies and newly established polities in the Western Balkans.

In addition, new policy solutions had to be found and further resources mobilized in order to overcome the post-conflict security deficit in many of the Western Balkan countries. The Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP)¹ was born out of the Balkan crises of the 1990s and the EU’s capabilities for military and civilian missions were progressively strengthened as they were tested in Balkan theatres of operation. Gradually, the EU became more present on the ground through military operations and police missions launched in the framework of the CSDP, as well as through its diplomatic channels, placing special envoys of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in states throughout the region (Emerson and Gross, 2007).

While no one expected quick fixes to the challenges of post-conflict transformation in the former Yugoslav republics, nor rapid progress toward the European integration of the whole region, the prevailing view was nonetheless positive. There was a good deal of hope and optimism that, after the EU’s (and NATO’s) mix of hard and soft power was put to use, a transformation similar to that which had occurred in Central and Eastern European (CEE), would be within reach. What is the track record of the recent performance of the Balkan states in the almost 20 years since the EU extended the prospect of membership to the Eastern Balkans (Bulgaria and Romania) as part of the Central and Eastern European group, and more than ten years since it offered conditional membership to the Western Balkans (Albania and the countries of former Yugoslavia without Slovenia)? Overall success has varied: two countries are already EU members (Romania, Bulgaria); one country is about to accede (Croatia); three countries are official candidates for membership (Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia); another three are potential candidates (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia); and one has yet to receive recognition of its independence by all EU Member States and define its status vis-à-vis the EU (Kosovo). Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007 but doubts about the quality of their domestic governance at the time of accession were commonplace. Croatia is the most advanced in its accession preparations in the whole region, having signed its accession treaty at the end of 2011. It is expected to accede in 2013. The prospect of EU accession for the other countries remains somewhat distant. In the meantime, the actual number of states in the region has multiplied, with Montenegro declaring independence in 2006 and Kosovo following suit in 2008.

The puzzle

The Balkan countries share many similarities but also have some differences. Like countries emerging from communist regimes, they all faced similar problems of restructuring the socialist-era institutions and economies in the early 1990s, although the former Yugoslav republics had better starting positions due to their openness toward the West during Communism, and familiarity with capitalist economic practices. The violent break-up of the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s, however, was a time when sovereignty was heavily contested in the Western part of the Balkans by ethnic groups who claimed the right to self-determination and took up arms to fight for independence. When the wars ended, with the capitulation of Milosevic in 1999 after external intervention, five officially recognized states emerged in the place of the former Yugoslavia, as well as several unresolved statehood issues, such as the status of Kosovo and the Montenegrin question. Other challenges included dealing with the weak statehood of recognized states such as Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Macedonia, both of which were forced to accept different degrees of external supervision of their domestic institutions and policies.

Notwithstanding their initial domestic conditions, the Balkan countries have responded with enthusiasm to the EU’s conditional offer of membership and have engaged in pre-accession preparations. Compliance with EU accession demands has sometimes risked political crisis or met with severe public opposition. The prospect of becoming a full EU member has led to the adoption of specific laws, the creation of executive bodies, and the revision of internal policies across the whole region. Even in the Western Balkans, which embarked on EU integration policies almost a decade after the Eastern Balkans, important institutional and policy changes have been introduced in response to the requirements of EU accession.

We have also observed a great deal of domestic resistance in the Western Balkans to submit voluntarily to solutions to statehood questions that were formulated externally. What is puzzling is that the protectorates and the semi-protectorates with severely constrained autonomy have mobilized at times against the state-building policies of external actors, including those of the EU. We have seen Serbs protesting vigorously against decisions over Kosovo at both the political and diplomatic level, as well as on the streets of Belgrade. We have witnessed a strong Montenegrin opposition to a state formula imposed from outside that did not resonate with the quest for independence led by the majority of Montenegrins. We have observed Bosnian politicians challenging the external demands placed on their domestic policies, and questioning the adequacy of those reforms sought by the EU that touch on the core characteristics of the internal structure of the Bosnian state.

The different responses of the Balkan countries to EU conditions for accession pose challenges to the eastern enlargement literature which expects accession candidates to either comply with the EU accession criteria when the benefits of EU membership are seen as sufficient to compensate the costs of compliance by incumbents; or not comply when the EU accession requirements are seen as too costly by ruling elites, or when influential veto players within the domestic context block the compliance process (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2004). What we observe in the Balkans are more diverse responses to the EU’s conditional offer of membership. Indeed, there are cases in which the accumulated empirical evidence suggests an outcome of substantial compliance over time as Bulgaria’s accession trajectory demonstrates. Certain examples show that non-compliance is also possible, as Serbia’s reaction to Kosovo’s independence implies. There are, however, instances that cannot be easily subsumed under these categories. We have seen Serbia and Montenegro comply with the EU requirement of establishing a state union between them, only to then roll back institutional and policy changes a few years later, reversing the initial compliance trend. We have observed how, regardless of Serbia’s refusal to accept the externally imposed constraints on its sovereignty, the internationally supervised independence of Kosovo became a fact, bringing an outcome that was in line with external expectations. We have also witnessed compliance with some of the EU requirements, though not all, as well as the partial implementation of reforms already adopted, as shown by the example of BiH. These empirical observations reveal a non-linear progression of compliance with setbacks and even U-turns being an important part of the Balkan countries’ reactions to the EU accession requirements. Equally important are the instances in which the initial resistance to compliance has ended up leading to compliance, as a result of external impositions placed on countries with weak domestic autonomy, such as Kosovo and BiH. In short, there are plenty of empirical examples in the Balkans that defy a simple categorization of responses as merely being of ‘compliance’ or ‘non-compliance’. Instead, they suggest a more dynamic pattern of compliance behaviour, where movements toward both more compliance and less compliance are commonplace and where different types of compliance and non-compliance can occur (see Figure 1.1). The question is what explains the variation in the compliance behaviour of the Balkan states? Why have some of them contested and openly defied the EU’s policy of conditionality, whereas others have not? Why have the protectorates and semi-protectorates in the region been most vocal in their opposition to some of the EU accession requirements?

The book aims to explain patterns of compliance among Balkan countries, within the framework of the EU accession process. It examines the EU’s conditionality policy and the compliance responses of Balkan governments, taking into account the EU’s state-building objectives in the Western Balkans. The EU’s

Figure 1.1 The compliance behaviour of Balkan accession states.

impact on the statehood structures of accession countries is an important dimension neglected in the enlargement literature. While a significant number of studies explore the process of political and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe as a reaction to the EU’s conditional offer of membership (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005; Grabbe, 2006; Jacoby, 2004; Kelley, 2004; Vachudova, 2005), there is no systemic examination of the EU’s influence on the protectorates and semi-protectorates from the Western Balkans. This book attempts to address this gap in the literature by focusing on the EU conditionality in the area of sovereignty and the compliance behaviour of Balkan countries in response to the Brussels statehood-linked demands.

The argument in brief

Why have the Balkan countries responded differently to the EU’s pre-accession demands? Why have some of them complied substantially, others only partially, some having simulated compliance and later reversed the compliance trend, others having directly defied the EU and refused to submit voluntarily to externally formulated conditions? This book argues that the variation in the compliance behaviour of Balkans governments hinges on three main factors – the legitimacy of the EU conditions as seen by domestic actors in the accession states, the costs of compliance of incumbent governments and the EU’s ability and willingness to use its superior power resources to impose compliance when faced with domestic defiance. The argument unfolds in three steps:

First, where the legitimacy of EU demands is perceived to be high by national politicians, compliance is substantial but may take time to manifest itself. In such contexts, domestic actors seek the EU’s legitimization of their own domestic agenda and are sensitive to EU evaluations of their reform record. Incumbents are also vulnerable to criticism and challenges from political opponents and societal actors, who can expose weaknesses in government performance and increase the pressure on officeholders to comply. In time, the reforms accumulate and result in substantial compliance, even in cases where the initial costs of compliance appeared too high to bear by politicians in office.

Second, where the legitimacy of the EU demands is perceived to be low, the costs of compliance become decisive. Where domestic actors consider the EU rewards to exceed the losses they have to bear, compliance is partial and volatile. Incumbents comply selectively only with reforms that are set to advance their own interests. Pressure on them to comply, exerted from the inside, is weaker, as various political and societal players question the appropriateness of EU demands and challenge further efforts to comply.

Third, where EU demands have a low level of legitimacy and compliance is perceived to be too costly, domestic actors refuse to comply voluntarily. In such environments, compliance outcomes depend on the EU’s ability and willingness to resort to coercive power, a distinct possibility in protectorate and semi-protectorate cases with limited sovereignty. If the EU consistently applies pressure on domestic actors to change their position, compliance occurs but is imposed from outside rather than being homegrown, and requires further external tutelage if it is to be sustained over time. If, however, the EU is reluctant or unable to consistently use its leverage to that effect, there is a high probability of fake compliance where domestic actors submit to initial EU demands but seek ways to reverse the compliance trend (reversed compliance).

This book maintains that the reluctance of political elites in the Western Balkans to acquiesce to the EU’s conditionality in the area of sovereignty can be partly explained by the dubious foundations of legitimacy on which the EU is seeking to build states in the region. The EU has had difficulty justifying its specific pre-accession requirements linked to changes in statehood structures in a normative manner, and this has fuelled domestic resistance to compliance. The lack of strong and convincing arguments explaining the appropriateness of the EU’s sovereignty conditions has empowered domestic opponents to question the EU’s authority to set conditions in the area of statehood, and to doubt the benign motives behind EU policies in the region. The political mobilization against the EU’s conditions, as observed in the Western Balkans, is closely linked to the contested legitimacy of the EU’s state-building policy, and the justification for the EU’s country-specific demands. In contrast, the EU governance conditions encoded in the Copenhagen accession criteria have been viewed as highly legitimate in the Eastern Balkans. This has helped forge a political consensus on pro-EU reforms, leading to a trend of sustained compliance over time.

The book emphasizes the importance of actor perceptions of EU’s motives, a factor that is crucial for those on the receiving end of EU policies. Conditions for the successful transformation of EU candidates have often been attributed to the ability of the EU to offer credible incentives to the accession hopefuls (Schimelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2004), notwithstanding the conditions attached to them, and irrespective of how those are seen by domestic actors. The empirical analysis presented in the book, of how the EU’s policies in the Balkans were received, demonstrates that the perceived legitimacy of EU actions is key to securing any lasting impact on the institutional and policy s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Theories and concepts
• The dynamics of EU conditionality
• The dynamics of compliance in the Balkans
• Bibliography
• Index