After the accession of ten new member states in 2004, the European Union seeks to expand its sphere of stability and prosperity toward the southeast, from Croatia all the way to Turkey. While democratic consolidation and economic development is already underway in Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, other countries of the region appear to be falling behind. Although the European Union has declared that all these countries share “a common European destination,” the various strategies being pursued to bring them to that destination differ profoundly. Three models may be discerned: traditional capacity-building; authoritarian state-building (in the two European protectorates of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo); and member-state building (in the official EU candidate countries of Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Turkey).
About the Authors
Gerald Knaus
Gerald Knaus is president and founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative. He is also a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and was for five years an associate fellow of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is coauthor (with Rory Stewart) of Can Intervention Work? (2011).
Marcus Cox is the European Stability Initiative (ESI)’s senior editor and a former advisor to the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ESI, an independent nonprofit association undertaking research on the future of the European Union and its periphery, is headquartered in Berlin and has offices in a number of other European cities, including Istanbul.
In February 2008, Kosovo broke away from Serbia and declared its independence. But to what extent is it making progress toward its goals of sovereignty and democracy?
