Democratic Backsliding and EU Conditionality in the Western Balkans

This paper engages critically with the role of regional organisations in promoting democracy in their neighbourhood. Focusing on the EU and its enlargement policy, it calls into question the concept of ‘democratisation by integration’ forged in the context of the Central and Eastern European EU accession process. A time-series, cross-section analysis of the development of democratic performance among the current candidate countries from the Western Balkans demonstrates an effective decoupling of the processes of Europeanisation and democratisation. Not only has democracy stagnated despite formal progress of the region towards EU membership, but the official frontrunners in the accession negotiations, Serbia and Montenegro, actually register a decline in democratic performance in recent years. Drawing on case study evidence from Serbia, the paper explains this finding by showing that the EU’s emphasis on stability and cooperation on Kosovo has enabled a dominant executive to deliberately and systematically dismantle domestic democratic safeguards, resulting in a gradual erosion of democracy. By leaving such tendencies unchecked, the EU risks not only undermining the credibility of its conditionality, but also losing support among liberal, reform-oriented actors inside the country.