ABSTRACT
Development of state capture links between Russia on the one hand and the CEE and Western Balkan countries on the other, has emerged as foreign policy goal to provide an alternative model to liberal democracy in Europe. One of the most visible examples is Russia’s staunch opposition to the liberalization of natural gas markets, the diversification of supply sources, and the renegotiation of long-term contracts under a market-based pricing formula. An important tool to further such goals is state capture and its narrower incarnations like regulatory and policy capture. The goal of state capture as a practice is achieving legal monopoly or market power status, hence subverting the adequate functioning of regulatory and competition rules. The typical state capture scenario would be the abuse by officials of their entrusted power to design rules (laws and regulations) by turning it into the control of private actors. This chapter sheds further light on how state capture governance deficits in CEE and the Western Balkans countries have enabled the Kremlin’s influence. The conceptual discussion proposed in the chapter underpins the empirical findings about individual countries in the second part of the book.
