The Post-communist Transition of the Western Balkans: EUropeanisation with a Small Enlargement Carrot

There is wide academic and political consensus that the political democratisation and economic marketisation of the post-communist countries of East Central Europe and the Baltics have been (generally) accomplished, primarily thanks to their ‘Europeanisation’ through the EU accession process. However, the reasons why post-communist transformation in the Western Balkan states has been less successful—although these states have also received the EU’s invitation for accession—have not yet been convincingly explained. This chapter argues that these reasons do not primarily stem (as often emphasised by EU officials and some scholars) from the structural inabilities of the Western Balkan states to adopt the EU’s values and norms, but rather from inconsistencies in the accession conditions and some EU policy incentives towards these states.