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Money, power, glory: the linkages between EU conditionality and state capture in the Western Balkans

Solveig Richter (University of Erfurt) & Natasha Wunsch (Sciences Po & ETH Zurich)

Over the past few years, EU candidate countries in the Western Balkans have gradually improved their formal compliance with the EU’s membership criteria. At the same time, democratisation in the region has stagnated at best. How can we explain patterns of decoupling between formal compliance and democratic transformation in the Western Balkans? In their article “Money, power, glory: the linkages between EU conditionality and state capture in the Western Balkans” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Solveig Richter and Natasha Wunsch identify informal, clientelist networks’ capture of political institutions as a formidable obstacle to the consolidation of democracy in the region. Solveig and Natasha argue that rather than countering state capture, EU conditionality involuntarily strengthened informal networks’ role instead. The weakening of political competition in the face of top-down conditionality and a liberalisation of markets have favoured a small ruling elite, whose interactions with EU officials have legitimized their influence in Western Balkans’ societies. Solveig and Natasha caution that “the current approach towards enlargement risks enabling and reinforcing informal networks by providing them with the resources to capture state institutions, undermine domestic mechanisms of accountability, and maintain their countries in a state of permanent hybridity.”