EURINT (Dec 2019)
RE-ASSESSING EU’S WESTERN BALKAN ENLARGEMENT: ETHNO-POLITICAL CHALLENGES AND THE RUSSIAN REVISIONISM
Abstract
The European Union is in the process of re-assessing the various challenges engulfing it. Enlargement - a flagship policy of the EU, is now materialising as a challenge, critically testing its competence. The course of Western Balkan enlargement comes with its own tier of difficulties. Complications stem from the very conceptualisation of the six Western Balkan countries as a single bloc and the underlying fragilities that characterise them. This paper attempts to deconstruct the EU’s political conditionality applied in the Western Balkan enlargement. It postulates the critical issues of ethno-political conflicts within these territories as one of the major causes behind the delay in accession and highlights the limits of EU’s approach to influence these countries. As a result, the geopolitical vacuum gives space for external actors like Russia to become proactive. The growing Russian intervention in these regions, contributes to the construction of salient political discourse in the enlargement.
