The EU and Member State Building ─ European Foreign Policy and Intervention in the Western Balkans

This book provides a critical examination of the process of statebuilding by the EU through its institutions and Member States, focusing the cases of the Western Balkan states.

The EU is now viewed as an international actor, and this book analyses the Union's policies towards and impact upon the states of the Western Balkans, and assesses how these affect the nature of EU foreign policy. To this end, it focuses on the tools and mechanisms that the EU employs in its enlargement policy and examines the new instruments of direct intervention (in Bosnia and Kosovo), political coercion (in the case of Croatia and Serbia in relation to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia), and stricter conditionality in the Western Balkan countries.

A key assumption of the book is that, through the use of these new instruments in its statebuilding activities, the EU is gradually transforming itself into a 'hard' power. Applying a critical approach to the EU's enlargement policy towards the region, the authors aim to analyze the changing nature of EU foreign policy within the framework of EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkans and the effects of EU Member Statebuilding on the countries in the region. To this end, the volume first provides an in-depth discussion of the theory of EU Member Statebuilding and applies this to a number of cases in the following chapters. It could be argued that the key aim of this special form of statebuilding (in contrast to other forms of international statebuilding such as the projects in Afghanistan and Iraq) is to establish functional liberal-democratic states in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia in order for them to join the EU and to cope with the responsibilities and pressures of membership in the future. EU Member Statebuilding, therefore, is a process of state and institutional reform, initiated by the EU and comprising different incentives and mechanisms to prepare countries for their membership of the Union and to ensure that these countries are: a) able to function properly and efficiently; b) liberal democracies; and c) capable of coping with the pressures of being part of the Single Market. In terms of its nature and aims, it could thus be argued that EU Member Statebuilding is the process of transforming the Western Balkan states into ideal EU Member States (i.e., coherent and functional liberal democratic states with no border disputes and open and competitive markets). In this respect, while the EU sees itself as an international actor that promotes and protects liberal-democratic values, norms and principles, its experiences in the Western Balkans demonstrates how the EU's actions in the region have undermined the basic principles of democratic decision-making (such as the European support for impositions in Bosnia) and international law (Kosovo), and have consequently contributed to new tensions (see police reform in Bosnia, and the tensions between Kosovo and Serbia) and dependencies.

This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, EU politics, global governance and IR/Security Studies in general.

Soeren Keil is a lecturer in International Relations at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.

Arkan Zeynep has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent, UK.