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EU Enlargement and Civil Society in the Western Balkans 1st ed. Edition Natasha Wunsch full chapter instant download
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
EUROPEAN UNION POLITICS
Series Editors: Michelle Egan, Neill Nugent
and William E. Paterson
EU ENLARGEMENT
AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN
THE WESTERN BALKANS
From Mobilisation to Empowerment
Natasha Wunsch
Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics
Series Editors
Michelle Egan
American University
Washington, USA
Neill Nugent
Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester, UK
William E. Paterson
Aston University
Birmingham, UK
Following on the sustained success of the acclaimed European Union
Series, which essentially publishes research-based textbooks, Palgrave
Studies in European Union Politics publishes cutting edge research-
driven monographs. The remit of the series is broadly defined, both in
terms of subject and academic discipline. All topics of significance con-
cerning the nature and operation of the European Union potentially fall
within the scope of the series. The series is multidisciplinary to reflect the
growing importance of the EU as a political, economic and social phe-
nomenon.
EU Enlargement and
Civil Society in the
Western Balkans
From Mobilisation to Empowerment
Natasha Wunsch
Center for Comparative
and International Studies
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland
The idea for this book emerged from a project in support of think tanks
from the Western Balkans that I managed as a Research Fellow with
the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). I had drawn up a
grant application to the German Federal Foreign Office jointly with my
colleague Cornelius Adebahr and, upon successful evaluation, began
implementing a pilot of the project from June 2010 onwards. Our ini-
tial idea had been to connect researchers working in policy-oriented civil
society organisations from throughout the Western Balkans region more
closely to the agendas of their respective national parliaments, with the
aim of ensuring both timely and relevant input into EU-related reform
processes from actors outside the immediate policy-making cycles. We
quickly realised that we had overestimated the agenda-setting powers
and more general capacities of parliaments in the region, and adapted a
more flexible approach, allowing applicants themselves to propose top-
ics that seemed particularly pressing to them. The TRAIN programme—
short for ‘Think Tanks providing Research and Advice through
Interaction and Networking’—then sought to strengthen local research-
ers’ skills with regard to policy paper writing and advocacy, and to con-
nect them to stakeholders in Berlin and Brussels.
I took great pleasure in working with the first two TRAIN genera-
tions in 2010 and 2011. It was inspiring to see people from my gen-
eration work on topics that seemed so much larger and more crucial
to the future of their countries than the more incremental changes in
German and European foreign policy my DGAP colleagues and I were
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
Index 165
xi
Abbreviations
xvii
CHAPTER 1
On the other hand, the term has been used to describe a process of
adaptation that acts as a framework for domestic interactions, with an
emphasis on the importance of agency at both the EU and domestic lev-
els (Exadaktylos and Radaelli 2012). This book adopts a process-based
understanding of Europeanisation that allows for an explicit engagement
with domestic as well as horizontal dynamics in the study of domestic
change. One of its central premises is that the EU accession process,
rather than triggering a direct causal effect of membership conditionality
upon policy-making practices in candidate states, offers a framework that
domestic actors can exploit to bolster their own positions in the national
political arena. The process of Europeanisation transforms the political
opportunity structure in a given candidate country, thereby changing
the context in which domestic interactions take place in ways that benefit
some actors over others.
Closely connected to the contested definition of Europeanisation is
the question of the directionality of change, which opposes top-down
and bottom-up approaches to the field. The parallel existence of these
two dynamics poses both conceptual and methodological challenges.
Faced with the intricacy of accounting for both upward and downward
pressures within the same analytical framework, most studies bracket one
of the two dimensions and concentrate on the other. In the EU enlarge-
ment context, the analytical perspective is typically top-down (Sedelmeier
2011). Domestic actors are understood as the intermediaries of EU
pressures, responding to incentives and adaptational pressures based on
rational calculations of the political costs involved in compliance with
membership requirements (see Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005b;
Vachudova 2005). Interactions at the domestic level therefore play a
secondary role, with conditionality and the underlying prospect of EU
membership seen as the key drivers of domestic change.
Previous approaches to civil society empowerment in Central and
Eastern Europe (CEE) have often adopted this restrictive, EU-focused
viewpoint. At the policy level, the challenging nature of the EU
enlargement process has resulted in a growing focus on civil society
inclusion as a means to expand the circle of actors involved in reform
processes and to enhance the legitimacy of changes introduced. The
EU has invested considerable amounts of money into trainings and
project grants for CSOs in the enlargement region, and emphasized
the political importance of broadening participation in domestic pol-
icy-making settings. Mirroring this approach, the existing literature
6 N. WUNSCH