Arolda Elbasani

EU enlargement in the Western Balkans: strategies of borrowing and inventing

At the turn of more than a decade of violent and rather uncertain transitions to democracy, the EU has envisaged a new vision for the Balkans - stable, self-sufficient democracies, at peace with themselves and each other, with market economies and the rule of law, and which will be either members of the EU or in the road to membership. The ambitious project builds on a new strategy, the so-called Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP), which for the first time comprises the perspective of European membership and outlines the tools of achieving that for all the countries in the region. The SAP has, thus, created high expectations for change, which are further nourished by the strong assumptions on the EU transformative power in the last wave of enlargement. Still, enlargement in the Western Balkans (WB) lacks both comparative analysis and depth of research, when compared to the bourgeoning literature on Central and East European Countries (CEEC). This article questions whether the SAP justifies the strong assumptions on the EU transformative power in the region. The article suggests that although the EU policies have advanced to embrace the promise of membership and outline the accession stages for all the Balkan countries, the loaded agenda of both stabilization and association coupled with a weaker promise of membership can arguably erode the power of enlargement conditionality in the region.

EU Administrative Conditionality and Domestic Downloading: The Limits of Europeanization in Challenging Contexts

How and to what extent have European ideas transformed the political-administrative institutions in the candidate countries in the East? Which conditions work to mitigate and undermine the impact of the European Union (EU) in these contexts? Research on post-communist transformations, by and large, holds EU enlargement as a successful attempt of institutional transfer in the candidate countries. However, while the EU proved to be successful in the first wave of enlargement in the East, we know much less about its effects in ‘borderline’ cases that lack the will and/or the capacity to pursue required reforms, thus posing a real challenge to EU enlargement strategy. The paper aims to trace the effects of enlargement in challenging domestic environments focusing on public administration reform in post-communist Albania. Differently from the classic Europeanization literature, the bottom-up approach used here, seeks to bring to the fore the crucial role of domestic agency to download and sometimes mitigate European transfers in the national arena. Evidence from the case study shows that governing actors have used EU enlargement as a means to further their strategic goals – they have preferred to talk the talk of reform in order to reap the benefits associated with EU integration and broader external assistance, but also resist implementation of new rules that curtail the political control of the state and the ongoing system of spoils built throughout the post-communist transition. The EU’s broad thresholds on administrative reform and the weak association between monitoring of progress and rewards have left ample space for the governing actors to merely pay lip service to the EU prescriptions, while getting full control of a politicized administration.

Islam in the Post-Communist Balkans: Alternative Pathways to God

The Islamic ‘revival’ in the Balkans has raised many questions among mainstream politicians and academics, who tend to look at religion as a repository of ethno-national identities, and hence a risky ‘depot’, furthering divisions between and among national entities. How believers themselves discover, articulate and experience their faith is often lost in the grand narratives of nations’ assumed uniformity and the related criteria of inclusion and exclusion. This article shifts the analytical and empirical focus from nation-centric debates on the revival of Islam to believers’ self-discovery and pursuit of faith after the fall of Communism. Specifically, it explores the emerging actors and mechanisms that trigger the bifurcation between Islam as a marker of national identity, on the one hand, and a source of religious beliefs, on the other. It all depends on who speaks for Islam – state authorities, religious hierarchies and/or informal faith communities. All the while, the Islamic phenomenon is no longer merely the bearer of ethno-national alternatives, but also the symptom of alternative spaces containing a variety of new actors as well as overlapping national, regional and global processes.

Rule of law, corruption and democratic accountability in the course of EU enlargement

ABSTRACT Why has the European Union’s (EU’s) promotion of rule of law (RoL) triggered different and largely surface-thin reforms across countries subject to a similar frame of enlargement in the Western Balkans (WB)? We hypothesize that the domestic (non-)enforcement of EU-promoted rules depends on the mobilization of politically autonomous constituencies of change – organized advocacy groups and autonomous state institutions – which enable democratic accountability. The empirical investigation focuses on the prosecution of political corruption as empirical foci to assessing the travails of EU-promoted rules in the domestic context. Specifically, we trace the role of (1) EU’s RoL promotion strategy, (2) political resistance and (3) domestic accountability in explaining different records of prosecution of political corruption in Albania and Croatia.

The revival of Islam in the Balkans

The revival of Islam in the Balkans : , The revival of Islam in the Balkans : , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

State-building and patronage networks: how political parties embezzled the bureaucracy in post-war Kosovo

ABSTRACT Why has the internationally promoted Weberian-style bureaucracy failed to replace patronage as the dominant principle of state organization in post-war Kosovo? This article explores how international actors’ rule-promotion activities and local actors’ strategies of resistance play out and interact to explain the failure. The empirical analysis focuses on rules of recruitment in the civil service system in the period 2000–2016. The analysis juxtaposes two consecutive stages of the state-building process, which are marked by different degrees and forms of international involvement: the pre-independence period, 1999–2008; and post-independence period, 2008–2016. Evidence from the case suggests that during the pre-independence period, legal inconsistencies embedded in the internationally promulgated legislation enabled local actors’ formal and informal strategies to recruit political cronies in the newly created civil service system. The transfer of authority from international administrators to elected local authorities, especially after Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, did not solve the problem of legal inconsistencies, and instead, served to consolidate governing parties’ strategies of control over recruitment in the state bureaucracy. More often than not, patron–client relationships that thrive at the borderline between formality and informality of political behaviour, continued to undermine external rule transfers.

State-organised Religion and Muslims’ Commitment to Democracy in Albania

Abstract This article questions why, and indeed how, Muslims have committed to democratisation in post-communist Albania. The explanatory framework merges the theoretical insights of the moderation paradigm with the specific devices that characterise the post-communist religious field in investigating Muslims’ support for democracy. The empirical analysis draws on a within-case comparison of Muslims’ behaviour in three consequential stages of democratic transition—each marked by different configurations of institutional settings and ideological options, which we trace as potential explanations. The analysis suggests that institutional arrangements played the primary role. Yet, learning from the experience of dictatorship and from a ready pool of inherited Albanian-specific templates facilitated the consensual reclaiming of Islam in a local, pro-democratic, and pro-European manner.

Introduction: Nation, State and Faith in the Post-Communist Era

The growing specter of Muslim migrants has triggered a bourgeoning research on processes of contestation, adaptation and manifestations of Islam in Europe. In contrast, the resurgence of Islam across the post-communist Balkans, the historical stronghold of Muslims in Europe, has gone largely unnoticed. If we heard about them, it was usually in the context of allegiances to the state, the rise of nationalism and violent conflicts brought to world attention by the media in the early 1990s. The violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia has certainly sparked some academic interest concerning the Muslim communities involved, but the ferocity of the various conflicts has contributed to constraining research only to the most striking cases and particular moments in time (Poulton and Taji-Farouki 1997: 1). The occurrence of war and conflict has, moreover, left the exploration of the Islamic phenomena to the mercy of nationalism and post-conflict paradigms, which have essentialized religion in line with ethno-national divisions of the day (Henig and Bielenin-Lenczowska 2013). Consequently, mainstream research tends to analyze religious groups as a repository of clear-cut ethno-national identities, the ends of which are closely monitored by the state in the interest of imposing communal uniformity and charting well-defined criteria for inclusion and exclusion.

State-building or state-capture? Institutional exports, local reception and hybridity of reforms in post-war Kosovo

ABSTRACT Post-war Kosovo has been the subject of a highly intrusive international state-building project, including an unprecedented influx of international administrators, assistance and funds. However, it increasingly bears the hallmark of a weak and captured state. This special issue contributes theoretical and empirical insights that shed light on possible explanations, difficulties and prospects of the state-building project in Kosovo. Theoretically, we investigate how international and local explanations play out, interact and gain dominance over each other; highlight the local factors that shape the experience of state-building; and focus on the hybridity of institution- and state-building on the ground. Empirically, we take stock of two decades of international state-building activities and one decade of independent statehood by providing long-term and in-depth analysis of specific areas of reform – municipal governance, state bureaucracy, normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo, education, creation of armed forces, security sector reforms and reception of Salafi ideologies. Such time-sensitive, case-nuanced and empirically heavy analysis enables the authors to go back and forth between the role of international activities, domestic strategies of resistance and evidence of hybrid reforms in order to test the role of competing explanations.

Localized Islam(s): interpreting agents, competing narratives, and experiences of faith

This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept of localized Islam as an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans.