The Balkan countries have responded differently to the EU's conditional offer of membership. This book examines the diverging compliance patterns of the Balkan accession states and asks why some of ...them have complied substantially, some only partially and others have defied the EU.
The book examines the compliance of the Balkan states with the EU accession conditionality, arguing that the variation in the compliance behavior of Balkan governments hinges on three main factors - the legitimacy of the EU conditions as seen domestically in the accession states, the costs of compliance and the EU's ability and willingness to use its superior power resources to impose compliance when faced with domestic defiance. Placing important events from the most recent political history of the Balkans in a broader historical perspective, the author evaluates the successes and failures of the EU's state building policies in the Balkans, a geographical area of the highest priority for the EU's foreign policy and a test case for the EU's capacity and willingness for foreign policy action.
Based on detailed empirical data, European Foreign Policy and the Challenges of Balkan Accession will be of interest to scholars and students of EU and comparative politics, and those focusing on policy impact in EU integration.
This is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of the far right political party phenomenon in the Balkans. The author focuses on parties generally described as lying on the far right in ...academic literature and examines their development from 2000 until 2010. The book provides a detailed analysis of the historical legacy essential in understanding the overall context of nationalism in the region as well as an overview of the far right political parties in each country. It discusses parties individually, detailing their ideological features, strategy, internal organisation and leadership, and compares their political, social, economic, ethno-cultural and international characteristics. It reveals the main factors that were influential in the successes and failures of the far right, and offers a comparison between the typical far right voter living in the Balkans and his counterpart in Western Europe.
This title explores ways for the Western Balkan countries to improve growth prospects through deepening of regional integration and improving selected elements of their investment climate. It ...analyzes areas relating to trade in goods and services, regional integration, and selected aspects of the investment climate. It suggests that countries in the region could reap sustained growth payoffs by focusing on deepening regional integration, improving human capital, reducing telecommunication costs and pre-empting energy shortages.
Twentieth-century Southeastern Europe endured three, separate decades of international and civil war, and was marred in forced migration and wrenching systematic changes. This book is the result of a ...year-long project by the Open Society Institute to examine and reappraise this tumultuous century.A cohort of young scholars with backgrounds in history, anthropology, political science, and comparative literature were brought together for this undertaking. The studies invite attention to fascism, socialism, and liberalism as well as nationalism and Communism. While most chapters deal with war and confrontation, they focus rather on the remembrance of such conflicts in shaping today's ideology and national identity.
Can Europe tame the Balkans? That's the question veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond addresses in this timely and absorbing book. Starting with the wars of the Yugoslav succession,Endgame in the ...Balkansguides readers through the region's tumultuous recent history and explores both how the lure of European Union (EU) membership has affected the Balkans and how Balkan developments have shaped the EU. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, as well as decades of experience as a foreign correspondent, Pond moves deftly across the region, from Bulgaria to Romania, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia and Montenegro. She examines the many hurdles standing between these countries and EU membership -including poverty, corruption, and rabid chauvinism -as well as the hopes and problems that have led Balkan leaders to look to the West. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the challenges facing the region as it seeks to vault from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Already in its brief history, the European Union has forged a historic reconciliation between France and Germany and helped consolidate democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. But in southeastern Europe, it faces one of its most difficult tasks yet. Endgame in the Balkans reveals the full extent of this challenge, as well as the grounds for hope. Rich in detail and penetrating analysis, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the future both of the region and of Europe as a whole.
Since the collapse of Eastern European communism, the Balkans have been more prominent in world affairs than at any time since before the First World War. Crises in the area have led NATO to fire its ...first ever shots in anger, whilst international forces have been deployed on a scale and in a manner unprecedented in Europe since World War Two.An understanding of why this happened is impossible without some knowledge of the history of the area before the fall of communism, of how the communists came to power and how they used their authority thereafter. Covering the communist states of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, and including Greece, Richard Crampton provides a highly readable introduction to that history, one that will be read by journalists, diplomats and anyone interested in the region and its impact on world politics today.
An ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway, exploring the post-Cold War political and cultural transformation of Europe through the examination of cross-border ...infrastructure.
Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe—a study of impediments to investment and private sector development in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the former Yugoslav ...Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro—yields fundamentally new insights for improving the region’s business environment, economic development, and prospects for growth. It focuses on four core topics: Business competition and economic barriers to entry and exit Access to regulated utilities and services Corporate ownership, transparency of business accounts, and access to finance Mechanisms for commercial dispute resolutionEach topic is empirically investigated across all eight South Eastern European countries through the systematic use of data from multiple sources: Official data from each country in the region Results from two annual rounds of quantitative, firm-level surveys covering 1,600 firms Results from 40 originally developed enterprise-level business case studiesThe result is an innovative analysis of cross-country comparisons and the development of key policy challenges from a regional perspective. Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe, a collaborative effort between the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, offers important practical insights for all policymakers and observers concerned with the future of South Eastern Europe. It makes concrete recommendations for reforms that would ease the constraints on domestic and foreign investment, an essential step in sustaining growth and reducing poverty in the region.
With the need to handle persisting problems and conflicts from the past while coping with new economic and political structures, Southeast Europe proves to be a challenging yet fruitful testing ...ground for establishing a long-term process of social and economic integration. This volume provides a theoretical and comparative overview which examines the prospects for spatial cohesion in this region.
