Paper Titles & Abstracts

The EU has never been involved in candidate countries as much as it currently is in the Western Balkans states. Through its direct and indirect involvement, the EU is attempting not only to prepare these states for EU membership, but also to shape them through instruments such as conditionality, incentives and direct intervention. By focusing on the foreign policy dimension of this change, this paper argues that, in relation to the almost dominant characterization of the EU as a normative power, the case of the Western Balkans serves as a litmus test. Through its state-building activities and tools employed in the Western Balkans (such as direct intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, political coercion in the case of Croatia and Serbia, and stricter conditionality in all Western Balkan countries), the EU is transforming itself into an international actor with peculiar qualities that contradict its so-called normative nature. By highlighting the need to look at what the EU actually does and says instead of what it is in the analysis of the EU's international role, nature and identity, this paper aims to shed light on the contradictions in and limits of the characterization of the EU as a normative power by analysing its activities and involvement in the Western Balkans from a member state-building perspective. The paper demonstrates how the EU has become involved in complex state-building exercises, what the limits of EU enlargement policy are, why the EU has been more successful in Slovenia and Croatia to initiate change than in other post-Yugoslav countries such as Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and the implications of these in EU's foreign policy.