Europeanization of Statehood in the Western Balkans – a Poststructuralist Account

This paper examines the role of the EU as an actor in the Western Balkans. It sets to deconstruct the dichotomous relationship between Europeanization and statehood in the context of Western Balkan countries’ accessions to the EU. It asks how the EU is conceived in the national political discourses of the Western Balkan countries and how the established discursive representations of the EU and its norms have changed the understanding of state territoriality in the studied cases.

This research adopts a poststructuralist reading of Europeanization. Europeanization is defined as practice (process) of articulating the EU and EU norms in domestic (or transnational) political spaces. Europeanization is understood as a dual process of concurrent reproduction of EU norms in the domestic policy process and contestation (molding) of EU norms by the very policy process. The analysis deconstructs the link between mutually contesting articulations of EU norms and domestic policy outcomes, as well as establishing the meta-discourses upon which individual articulations of the European Union and its norms draw.

The research is operationalized in a study of decentralization along vertical and horizontal axes. The focus is placed on discursive articulations of the EU and its norms in political debates on territorial and non-territorial de-concentration of the state (including policy debates on (a) pluralization of decision-making (b) decentralization (c) territorial restructuring) in Albania, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Montenegro, and Serbia. The period from 1999 to 2013 is covered.