EU Enlargement Politics: Explaining the Development of Political Conditionality of ‘Full Cooperation with the ICTY’ towards Western Balkans

In the midst of the Kosovo crisis in 1999 the European Union (EU) pledged itself to draw the Western Balkan region closer to the perspective of full integration into the EU. While the EU has firmly committed itself to the eventual membership of the Western Balkan countries it has set a unique membership condition requesting ‘full cooperation with the ICTY’ prior to opening accession negotiations with some of the countries in the region. This essay tries to unravel why this condition has been developed and how to explain its somewhat differentiated use. The approach taken is a theoretically informed analytical discussion in the form of a qualitative case study on Serbia and Croatia from the point of view of the European Council. The empirical data presented is partly novel, partly borrowing from past scholarly undertakings and suggests that both rationalist and constructivist meta-theories can yield valid explanations on why the EU holds tight on its unique membership condition, but also why Croatia seems to be closer to EU membership than Serbia. The essay relies heavily and advances substantively on the two meta-theoretical frameworks which it embodies in the empirical data presented