ABSTRACT
This chapter provides context for the examination of cohesion, borders and migration, and environmental policy in Greece, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, and thereby elaborates further on the case selection. As such, the chapter takes time and place as its major concerns, informed by a broadly ‘historical theory’, an approach that seeks to explain a state’s governance through interaction with major historical transformations (Tilly 1975, 2006). We are not attempting a comparative historical-sociological analysis of the development of ‘the’ Balkan state (Jelavich and Jelavich 1977; Jelavich 1983a, b; Wachtel 2008; van Meurs and Pippidi 2010) but we do see engagement with the EU as an epochal historical transformation, reflecting ‘an ontology of constant and profound change’ (Todorova 1997: 184). The chapter has three parts: the first places the process of EU member-state building in the wider experience of state building in SEE and elsewhere, arguing that engagement with EU is characterised by separate but interconnected processes of boundary creation and transcendence. The second part outlines the process whereby each of our cases ‘came to Europe’. It adopts a broadly historical institutionalist approach to explore legacies, and especially the critical junctures that influenced engagement with the EU and its predecessors. The final part examines patterns of governance and compares these with the aggregate pattern in the EU, and then considers how citizens perceive their relationship with the EU. The aim here is to provide some estimate of the ‘misfit’ between our cases and the EU before embarking on the case studies.
