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Europeanization and/or Euro-Unionisation? The Croatian Model in the Western Balkans

This paper addresses Croatia’s EU accession and post-accession path with a special focus on its impact on the Western Balkans. The specificity of Croatia’s accession to the European Union will be analysed on different scales: national, regional and European. The Croatian experience is particularly important as a model for other countries in the region. Despite the country’s individual accession in 2013, the process was set in a regional context. Therefore, the paper aims to identify Croatia’s specificity in a regional context of instability characterized by the growing absence of a reliable EU perspective and by the increasing influence of external players. How has Croatia, a small EU member state and the only country in the region to have successfully joined the Union in 2013, influenced the dynamics of the EU’s enlargement to the candidate and potential candidate countries of the Western Balkans? How did Croatia use its 2020 presidency to advocate for the EU’s enlargement policy, as the only country that independently joined the existing structure of this European integration and the only one that has done so since the Maastricht’s European Union1 has existed? Examining Croatia’s potential role in bridging gaps has the advantage of recalling the very goal of ‘Europeanization’ in the Western Balkans: the effective institutional integration of the candidate countries and potential candidates. This will help sharpen the notion of ‘Europeanization’ that tends to be somewhat worn out due to the many blockages in the engaged negotiations.

Croatiam Eu presidency, Europeanisation, Euro-Unionization, Balkanization, Western Balkans, Eu enlargement process, mediation

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