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Through a conceptual framework that combines the English School’s focus on primary institutions in international society with the Copenhagen School’s theory of securitization and desecuritization, this article studies the Europeanization of national minorities. It thus signals a categorical departure from the dominant norms transfer approach to problems of national minorities in the European Union (EU), an approach that has failed to convincingly account for many minority outcomes of European integration. This is particularly true of the continual attachment of national minorities to the state’s security agenda. The article takes Galbreath and McEvoy’s (2012) hypothesis that the EU has a unique potential to desecuritize national minorities, and applies it to one candidate (Macedonia) and one new member state (Bulgaria). It assesses flashpoints of minority/majority tensions across several sectors (the judiciary, the police, public administration, political representation, education, and health care). The investigation ascertains negative outcomes—desecuritization—but points to the crisis of confidence in the primary institution of European integration (supranationality) and the ensuing consolidation of nationalism as the dominant institution of pre-EU European society. The article concludes that improved minority/majority relations are a possible consequence of Europeanization rather than a precondition for it.

This paper examines the position of minorities in Kosovo in the light of Kosovo’s potential candidacy as a member state of the European Union (EU). The paper contends that although the international community has constructed a comprehensive suite of protections and guarantees for minorities, nation-building by internal actors in Kosovo has followed an exclusively ethnocentric dominant narrative, running counter to the state-building project, which promotes a multiethnic Kosovo. The paper considers this dichotomy in the context of Kosovo’s Europeanization. It is concluded that the conditionality principle is not sufficiently defined or measurable in order to set criteria relating to the inclusion or exclusion of minorities in Kosovo to significantly influence decisions on EU membership.

Security sector reform (SSR) has become an important part of the EU’s efforts to transform the Western Balkans from a conflict-ridden area into a stable and democratic part of Europe. This paper studies SSR in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as an illustration of the multifaceted and complex Europeanization policies employed by the EU in the region. It does not present a study of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) missions, as there is already a wealth of material available on this subject, but offers instead a broader examination of changes in two sectors of BiH’s security system with the aim of improving understanding of the EU’s impact on the domestic environments of candidate states. Its main argument is that the EU used police and intelligence reforms in Bosnia, both of which were part and parcel of the SSR efforts in the country, as state-building tools. But because domestic competence in Bosnia was lacking and the EU was rather inexperienced in implementing SSR, the reforms have had a mixed record of success and reveal the limitations of the region’s Europeanization.

The European Union (EU) developed a state-building strategy for the aspiring member states in the Western Balkans. Demanding full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the EU made transitional justice part of the accession demands. Scholars have recently criticized the EU’s limited focus on retributive justice as opposed to restorative justice. This paper goes beyond such impact-orientated analyses by asking why the EU engaged with retributive transitional justice in the first place. The EU constructed ICTY-conditionality by mirroring its own post-Second World War experiences to the envisioned post-conflict trajectory of the Western Balkans. The EU therefore expected the court to contribute to reconciliation, democratization and the rule of law. Using Serbia as a case study, this article examines the conditionality’s context, specificities and discursive claims. Finally, it relates these findings to the agenda of a promising regional initiative prioritizing restorative justice (RECOM) and sheds new light on the impact of ICTY-conditionality on transitional justice in the Western Balkans.

Our paper takes as its starting point the premise that elections are central moments in the life of polities: these are the times when individual citizens demonstrate support or otherwise of political institutions and regimes, assess their accountability and set agendas for the next government. In short, elections allow us to observe whether and how political regimes live up to society’s expectations. This issue has particular resonance in deeply divided societies that have experienced ethnic conflict in the past. In the deeply divided society of Kosovo, local and national elections in 2013 and 2014 presented an opportunity to analyze voter choices and elite agendas, with the presence of ethnopolitical issues under scrutiny. Our paper concludes that the normalization of electoral politics, within the context of European aspirations, has not yet taken place in Kosovo, and that the options available to the electorate continue to be dominated by identity politicking.

The Western Balkan countries are on the long road to European Union (EU) membership. One aspect of the accession process is the requirement for a population census, which falls under the acquis communautaire chapter covering the statistics needed. In the Western Balkans, censuses have included questions on ethnicity, language, and religion. The collection of data on ethnic and cultural characteristics raises an unresolved paradox: such questions are highly sensitive, but, in order to be able to protect minorities through, for example, antidiscrimination laws, the authorities need to know that these minorities exist. This article uses the additional coverage model mixed methods approach to illustrate the effects of including ethnic and cultural characteristics in the census questionnaires in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, where population numbers are used to determine group rights and/or proportional representation. The article argues that, although taking a census forms part of the EU conditions, it is not possible to speak of Europeanization in this area, since there is no coherent European approach on how to collect ethnic and cultural data. However, as what appears in the censuses is linked to rights, the census processes can be highly politicized, and this is being overlooked in the general process of Europeanization.

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in Europeanization, both within and beyond the European Union (EU). The impact of Eastern enlargement in 2004 on candidate and neighbourhood countries has attracted scholarly attention, and a consensus currently exists on the success of the EU’s transformative power through the employment of a conditionality mechanism. However, the limits of EU conditionality upon candidate countries and neighbourhood Europeanization, in addition to the problems experienced by the EU itself, have brought into question whether the end of Europeanization research is in sight. Considering this, we critically evaluate the issues discussed in the scholarship on Europeanization and review several points of interest in relation to EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans as well as Turkey.

This article analyses Macedonia’s Colourful Revolution and elections of 2016 against the background of the criticism and protests directed against the Skopje 2014 Project. It also provides a photographic reportage of Skopje 2014 during the political turmoil from July 2016. It examines the main grounds for resistance and opposition to Nikola Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE government by further investigating the controversies surrounding Skopje 2014. Those controversies are manifold but stem mainly from the project’s tremendous cost and corruption, its controversial rewriting of history and its exclusion of Albanians and other minorities. Finally, the article argues that the Colourful Revolution has until now failed to overturn or decisively upset Macedonia’s politics or political system, as is evident from election results there. However, it has borne fruit in one respect in that two Albanian MPs have been included in the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), a tentative step towards overcoming the ethnic deadlock of Macedonian politics.