36 Enlargement Fatigue and its Impact on the Enlargement Process in the Western Balkans John O’ Brennan T he protracted economic crisis which has enveloped the Eurozone since 2008 has thrown the very survival of the EU into doubt. The EU has begun to cannibalise itself in the exhaustive effort to save the single currency, putting at risk some of the extraordinary gains made by the world’s most successful collective governance system. Chief amongst these gains has been the transformation wrought on the continent by the successive enlargements of the EU. Eastern enlargement, through the so-called ‘big bang’ of 2004 and the later ‘coda’ accessions of Bulgaria and Romania, brought the number of member states to 27. This increased to 28 when Croatia joined on 1 July 2013. The EU is now not only a direct neighbour of the Western Balkans, but also the most important economic, political and geopolitical actor in South Eastern Europe. Using the different templates employed in designing the successful eastern enlargement policy, the EU is now engaged in a similar process of negotiations with the Western Balkan states. The EU-Western Balkans Summit meeting at Thessaloniki in June 2003 affirmed that ‘the EU reiterates its unequivocal support to the European perspective of the Western Balkan countries. The future of the Balkans is within the European Union’. This ‘European Perspective’ is thus meant to lead to membership and full incorporation in the institutional and policy regimes of the EU. 1 Despite its economic woes, the EU still aims to act as a lodestar for the countries of the region as they recover from the conflicts of the 1990s and seek integration. Indeed, just as a ‘return to Europe’ took place in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, the EU’s gravitational pull has proven key in the reconstitution of the economic, political and civic life of the Western Balkan region over the past decade. The European Commission manages the EU enlargement process. Within this policy domain (and its ‘antechamber’ regime, the Stabilisation and Association Process), the EU seeks to promote and police an intense ‘Europeanisation’ strategy for enlargement candidate states. This strategy aims to ‘modernise’, ‘democratise’, ‘pluralise’ and transform the most fragile part of Europe and progressively connect it to the mainstream landscape of EU politics and the norms of European integration. However, the EU’s deep economic crisis and exhaustive introspection has had a pronouncedly detrimental impact on the progress of enlargement-related reform in the Western Balkans. The crisis has had an impact at both the national level (on the appetite for and capacity to implement EU-related reform measures) and at the EU level (where ‘enlargement fatigue’ has gone from a mere discursive presence in the policy-making arena to a determinative part of enlargement politics). Indeed, the contagion from the Eurozone has reached so deep that Dimitar Bechev argues that we now have a crisis of the ‘periphery of the periphery’. The catastrophic experiences of Greece, Portugal and Spain have relegated 1 See: European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament: the Western Balkans and European Integration, Brussels: 21 May 2003, COM (2003) 285. The Thessaloniki ‘promise’ was reiterated at the EU-Western Balkans ministerial meeting at Sarajevo on 2 June 2010, where the EU provided ‘an unequivocal commitment to the European perspective of the Western Balkans’ and re-iterated that ‘the future of the Western Balkans lies in the EU’.