Jens Woelk

EU Member State-Building in the Western Balkans: (Prolonged) EU-protectorates or new model of sustainable enlargement? Conclusion

More than 20 years after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia European efforts to create sustainable States in the Western Balkans, as discussed in the papers of this Special Issue, have brought about some progress, but a lot of work remains. This conclusion will draw on some of the themes developed in the previous papers and contrast to what extent EU Member State-Building provides a new framework for enlargement and what the key questions of sustainable expansion of the EU and functional state-building through conditionality will be. It concludes that the EUs current engagement with the Western Balkans faces many problems and obstacles and therefore some reconsideration might be necessary.

Globalization, Technologies and Legal Revolution

The essays collected in the book look beyond the traditional academic horizon which was too tight and narrow for Professor Ortino’s innate search for new challenges, new disciplines and cross-disciplinary inputs. This ample look was always important for Professor Ortino in order to deepen the knowledge in fields that are essential to better understand the most profound reasons of legal phenomena and their evolution. This is why he could explain legal developments long before others. All his work, especially in the last twenty years of his extraordinary career, shows how foresighted he was in his research. He wrote about globalization long before this fundamental issue became “fashionable” and analyzed by legal scholars.

Reforms of Local Government in SEE: Closer to Europe?

The process of constitutional transition and transformation of the state in the Western Balkans is still far from being concluded.1 In addition to the complex processes of democratization, the political and economic reconstruction of the countries in former Yugoslavia2 has to face the problem of administrative and territorial reform of a formerly socialist political and legal system.

From Enlargement Perspective to “Waiting for Godot”? Has the EU Lost Its Transformative Power in the Balkans?

The EU has discovered the necessity of having a foreign policy of its own in the aftermath of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Territorial conflicts and ethnic cleansing, weak and unfinished States urgently required answers, raising, at the same time, difficult questions of political and economic stability and of constitutional values. After the Eastern Enlargement of 2004, the EU’s enlargement policy has been considered as a successful tool capable of adding transformative power to the EU Foreign Policy through the enlargement perspective and the conditionality of reforms. However, although its instruments have been adapted in order to meet the specific challenges of the Western Balkans, stabilization and sustainable transformation of the States in the area still have to be reached. There are even signs of pre-accession fatigue, on both sides: the status quo seems to be the preferred solution of elites in the Balkans while the EU seems to have lost its interest in the area and, consequently, its transformative power. This contribution will explore the reasons and examine recent initiatives, such as the Berlin process, asking what may be done in order to regain momentum.