The EU Rule of Law Initiative Towards the Western Balkans
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The EU Rule of Law Initiative Towards the Western Balkans Andi Hoxhaj1 Accepted: 14 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The EU adopted a new enlargement strategy for the Western Balkans countries in 2018, provided a time frame for Serbia and Montenegro potentially to join the Union by 2025, and outlined the next steps for accession for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. In March 2020, the EU gave the green light to the opening of accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania, and also introduced a new reformed ‘accession talks’ framework. The strengthening of the rule of law, fighting corruption and organised crime are the cornerstones of the EUWestern Balkans strategy of 2018 and the new accession talks framework of 2020. This article examines the latest enlargement policy developments in 2018–2020 by conceptualising how the EU promotes the rule of law in the Western Balkans thorough its new enlargement policy package. Furthermore, the article offers an in-depth analysis of the case of Albania, where the EU has experimented with some of its latest enlargement-policy ideas in regard to the rule of law. The article also offers some proposals and insights on how the EU rule of law initiative of 2018 can be improved, in order to become more transformative in strengthening the rule of law in countries of the Western Balkans. Keywords Rule of law · Corruption · Organised crime · Enlargement policy · Open method of co-ordination · Western Balkans
* Andi Hoxhaj [email protected] 1
Warwick School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
123Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Hoxhaj
1 Introduction The objective of this article is to explain the latest EU enlargement policy development in the years 2018–2020, and how the EU is trying to promote the importance of strengthening the rule of law in its latest enlargement policy package for six countries in the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia1. The contribution to scholarship made in this article aims to offer an analysis of the EU-Western Balkans strategy adopted in February 2018, and the newly revised ‘accession talks’ framework for Albania and North Macedonia adopted by the European Council in March 2020. In particular, the focus of this article is to examine how the EU policy on the rule of law for candidate states has evolved over the years, and what the EU wants to achieve by reforming the judicial system (Appicciafuoco 2010). The article conceptualises how the EU is trying to promote the rule of law through its enlargement policy, offering an analysis of the ongoing judicial reform in Albania as a case study. The article also offers a discussion as to why the EU has made the reforming of the justice systems in the Western Balkans central to its new enlargement policy, in the light of the recent constitutional reforms in Poland and Hungary, which show signs of ‘democratic backsliding’ (Bátora and Fossum 2019) on the rule of law and liberal democratic standards. The
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