ABSTRACT
The European Union faces some unprecedented difficulties in its integration of the Western Balkans in terms of the burden of historical and recent war legacies as well as persistent and, in some countries, severe problems of state capacity, rule of law implantation, the rooting of political pluralism, the development of civil society and also economic modernization. Accordingly, the prerequisites for change by countries in that region wishing to join as EU member states have been increased and the procedures for securing compliance have been much tightened in the past half decade. In order to meet the major challenges from that region, therefore, the EU’s political conditions have moved significantly beyond those demands made on the post-Communist entrants of 2004 and even the Eastern Balkan entrants of 2007.
