ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the foundations of legitimacy on which the EU’s conditionality policy rests in the selected countries from the Balkans. It analyzes the politics of EU conditionality from three distinct angles. First, it traces empirically the way in which the EU has tried to justify its conditionality policy vis-à-vis the countries from the comparative case set by making use of the conceptual distinctions introduced in Chapter 3. Secondly, it analyzes the EU’s institutional consistency in communicating its demands. Thirdly, it explores the extent to which EU conditionality has been compatible with the demands of other external actors influential in the Balkans, such as the US, Russia, the Council of Europe and the international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank).
