Paper Titles & Abstracts

In order to join the EU, prospective member states are willing to compromise, cooperate and comply without precedent in modern international history. This is so because EU enlargement process is shot through with power of a kind hitherto unseen in world politics. The first discussion about the sui generis character of the EU as a foreign policy actor took place between Francois Duchene and Hedley Bull in the early 1980s. Their discussion harbingered a new sub-genre in IR set out to analytically capture the logic of EU power in the world. Similarly, the EU enlargement to CEE have been analyzed through the lenses of Europeanization by scholars such as Schimmelfennig, Sedelmeier and Grabbe. However, few, if any, have theorized comprehensively the current round of enlargement to the Western Balkans. This paper aims to develop an analytical framework to capture the EU-WB power relationship by drawing on post-structuralist understanding of power and identity as mutually constitutive, historically contingent and discursively linked. It will distinguish between three forms of power proposed by late Foucault. Dominance is a direct form of power of one will over another expressed through discipline and police. Sovereignty is a form of power between formally equal wills expressed through strategic games. Governmentality is an indirect form of power expressing itself through the governing at the distance and self-discipline. The EU enlargement will be conceptualized as a double process of identification with and governmentalization of the prospective candidates. As the process of identification and governmentalization gains ground, prospective states show more resistance and 'counter-conduct'. In order to overcome the resistance, the EU relies on combining governmentality with dominance and sovereignty. The theoretical argument will be illustrated in the case study of EU enlargement to Serbia.