EU PRE-ACCESSION POLITICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR WESTERN BALKANS: Unravelling the Application and Compliance Record of the ICTY Conditionality

The European Union’s association offer to Western Balkans included, among other pre-accession political requirements, full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This requirement was envisaged as one of the crucial elements of the EU conditionality mechanism towards Western Balkans, and has heavily dominated the EU’s external relations agenda with the Western Balkans states. This essay analyses structural preconditions in selected countries of the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia), and assesses impact of the ICTY conditionality on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanization of the three states. With basis in both rationalist and sociological/constructivist meta-theories, discussion tracks down essential international and domestic factors, which if favourable facilitated the EU’s policy of ICTY conditionality. Primary aim of the essay is to arrive to a descriptive and causal conclusions and get better understanding why both the application of, and compliance with, the ICTY conditionality was in the end rather troublesome and inconsistent process. Main argument is that in the case of each country observed, serious impediments undermining the ICTY conditionality’s effectiveness can be encountered within the every factor assessed, which can be used to explain disruptive application and compliance record of the ICTY conditionality