Transformation of the Wester Balkans with a special emphasis on the role of Stabilisation and Association Process

This dissertation thesis is focused on the analysis of changing relations between the Western Balkan countries (WB) and the European Union (EU) against background of actual transformation processes in these countries. The Western Balkans represents a group of countries which were not part of so-called Eastern Enlargement of the EU, but are also slowly heading towards the EU. The EU distinguishes three groups of countries within the WB: Croatia has become an acceding country; then here is a group of candidate countries (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Montenegro, Serbia), and the last group is formed by so-called potential candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo). All of these above mentioned countries are part of the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) which nowadays represents the core of the Enlargement Policy of the EU and stands for the main research topic of this thesis. The thesis also comprehends the history of the enlargement process of the EU and the basic theoretical concepts of the (EU) enlargement. The "transformation" chapter includes a theoretical grounding too. Three hypotheses were verified (mainly) by results of transformation, evaluation of Copenhagen criteria by the European Commission, and by the statistical methods (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) based on a number of economic and demographic indicators