Introduction

The Western Balkan region includes those countries in South East Europe that have yet to join the European Union (EU). It comprises Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and its province of Kosovo. Apart from Albania, all emerged from the former Yugoslavia, and all are on the path of European integration at different speeds and with different degrees of enthusiasm.1 This book is about the complex and inter-connected processes of transition to a market economy, post-conflict reconstruction and development and European integration that all the countries in the region have faced over the last twenty years. It deals with the policy choices that have been taken by the political and economic elites and the associated economic and social reforms that have been carried out, leading to diverse forms of emergent capitalism in each country. The region is an example of the transition process that has marked the all former socialist states of Eastern Europe but has been differentiated by simultaneous processes of war and armed conflict. In the cases of BiH, Croatia and Macedonia, the process of democratization has been mixed with the necessity to create new states out of the ruins of the former Yugoslavia. It is conventional to talk about the ‘triple transition’ of democratization, statebuilding and transition to a market economy, which all the former socialist countries had to deal with in one way or another (Elster et al. 1998). But the Western Balkan countries stand out, not just in the difficulty of carrying this out in the context of wars and conflicts, but also because in some countries new states had to be built virtually from scratch.