Albanian integration into the UE : security, Europeanization, democratization: which project for the democracy?

The prevailing political doctrine seems to be that the integration of the Western Balkans within the EU and NATO can help to achieve stability in Europe. It is also considered as the means to build a security community in the Balkans. However, these two objectives meet obstacles both at the regional and national levels. Our objective is to analyze the main actors' interests and the relationships between stabilization and democratization, by focusing on Albania. The study is based on a series of interviews with Albanian elites in December 2010. At the national level Albania is under pressure to satisfy the imposed conditionality issues. As it turns out democratization seems to be difficult to achieve given its turbulent history and the current diverging political objectives pursued by the different groups. Regarding democratization, the key reforms addressing constitutional, electoral and judicial issues are stuck. This explains in part why the implementation of European norms is difficult. Sometimes this results from diverging interpretations. Furthermore no enforcement measures are planned whereas other important norms remain ignored. Thus, on the one hand at the national level the difficulties concerning the democratization process result from the diverging attitudes of the elites as confirmed by the political crisis January 2011. On the other hand, the EU seems to give more priority to stability and security issues than to democratic ones. From the interviews it appears that the EU does not seem to require from Albania the same democracy standards as it does for its Member States. Albania has accomplished some important progress as confirmed by the annual monitoring EU reports and by the visa liberalization in December 2010. Therefore one can conclude as the interviews reveal, that the Albanian elites have no common integration project, which would be a necessary condition towards a stable EU integration