EU Administrative Conditionality and Domestic Downloading: The Limits of Europeanization in Challenging Contexts

When Enlargement Meets Common Foreign and Security Policy: Serbia's Europeanisation, Visa Liberalisation and the Kosovo Policy

“…In the Western Balkans, further understanding of EU conditionality is needed from a bottom-up perspective. The focus on domestic conditions, as mediators of EU leverage (Börzel 2011;Elbasani 2009), should also include consideration of the constantly shifting local policy context, which itself is partly caused by EU's multiple policy instruments. …”

“…The actors' formal response to external incentives goes hand in hand with full or partial resistance to the adaptation costs (Börzel 2011;Elbasani 2009), not unlike in CEE and the Eastern Balkans (Romania and Bulgaria), both during accession and post-accession stages (Dimitrova 2010). The sociological institutionalist approach, contrastingly, uses divergence in identities and norms to explain either stalled Europeanisation (Subotić 2011) or fake, partial, or imposed compliance (Noutcheva 2009).…”

Human Rights in the EU’s Conditionality Policy Towards Albania: The Practice of Sub-committee Meetings

“…This has pushed the country's elite to avoid implementing policies that would endanger the country's EU membership. The work of the sub-committees matches the interventionist style of the international community in Albania, and it has been noted that Albania's problems have been solved through the mediation, supervision or intervention of various organs of the international community (Elbasani, 2009).…”

“…The discussions and the results of the sub-committee meetings feed into the preparation of the annual reports of the EU on the progress of Albania in European integration. The assessment in annual reports on the human rights situation since 2009 indicates progress, albeit with many caveats (Elbasani, 2009). The next section of this paper provides an overview of the application of conditionality with a focus on the workings of the JLS Sub-Committee.…”

“…The post-2009 era signalled the start of a new period when the subcommittees turned into an all-important actor, leading efforts to rebuild human rights protection structures under the conditions of a highly politicised political atmosphere and weak domestic leadership as concerned reform (Elbasani, 2009). Sub-committees are credited with having impacted institutional change in the EU candidate country of Albania, having been crucial instruments of domestic change and having vested EU conditionality with influence over domestic change.…”