ABSTRACT
The EU is facing a serious conflict of objectives in the Western Balkans, primarily between security interests calling for the rapid integration of these countries and its interest in democratization, which demands a stricter democracy promotion agenda and cautions against a rushed enlargement round including unconsolidated states. I argue that the EU’s approach, which enforces both security and democracy through one instrument, namely, political conditionality, has yielded only limited success and has contributed to the emergence of a conflict of objectives for a number of reasons. First, to render its conditionality policy credible and consistent, the EU has been forced to prioritize security at the expense of democracy promotion. Second, compliance patterns in the two areas have differed, resulting in a conditionality dilemma that forces the EU to sanction compliance or reward non-compliance. And third, the use of political conditionality in security issues has generated counterproductive side effects that may impede the consolidation of democracy. The case study of Macedonia empirically supports this argument. The study provides evidence for an argument that contradicts much of the literature on sequencing: democracy promotion should resume playing a significant role in the early stages of post-conflict transition.
