Democratization of the Western Balkans through EU's enlargement strategy: from success to failure?

Abstract

Over time it became clear that the EU's most powerful foreign policy tool for democracy promotion in Europe is enlargement. Hence, through the top-down approach of a conditionality policy the EU decided to pursue democracy promotion in the Western Balkans. However, the democratization of the Western Balkans led by the EU produced very different results across the region. While Croatia managed to advance its democracy and join the Union; other Western Balkan countries fell behind. Considering that the enlargement process is a top-down process, in which domestic change is to some extent guided from the outside, the effects of the political climate inside of the EU on the democratization of the candidate country need to be researched. While attempting to democratize Western Balkans the EU suffered from more internal turmoil than ever before, which either drew attention away from the enlargement or reinforced negative sentiments about it. Thus, this thesis poses the question of how did enlargement resistance impacted the democratization process in the Western Balkans? The research looks into the problem through comparative case studies, using the most similar cases design. It focuses on Croatia - the country that managed to successfully democratize and join the Union and Montenegro - the country that in the...