25 Years of Unfinished Justice: The European Union, Transitional Justice, and Conditionality in the Western Balkans

Abstract

Since the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the international community has invested enormous financial and political resources to stabilize and democratize the Western Balkans. This is especially true for the European Union, which has pursued a conditionality-based strategy by promising eventual EU membership to encourage reforms related to economic development, good neighborly relations, democracy, rule of law, human rights, and transitional justice. This project analyzes this conditionality strategy in relation to transitional justice in the cases of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo over the past 25 years. It aims to answer two interrelated questions. First, how effective has this strategy been? Second, what explains the variation in compliance across the region? By examining EU and government documents, speeches, NGO reports, and news coverage, I place each country on a scale of compliance: non, reluctant, selective, and cooperative. Through these classifications, I find that political figures’ actions and rhetoric, lack of media freedom and education and impunity for war crimes are the key factors that affect a country’s compliance level, and that the EU’s strategy has resulted in brief, temporary moments of cooperative compliance, but has otherwise failed to cause long-term and sustained compliance. Using the sources above, combined with semi-structured interviews with CSO workers from around the region, I argue that the EU’s conditionality approach has resulted in varying levels of success across the region and across time. The results of the research hold important implications for the field of transitional justice by showing the effects of an inconsistent outside-in conditionality approach to transitional justice as practiced by international organizations. It also helps us better understand the implementation of conditionality policies more broadly by demonstrating the effects of this strategy when it is led by an international organization intending to affect the domestic politics of postwar states. Lastly, this project is timely due to recent political developments in the region that showcase the lack of improvement in terms of democratic backsliding and high rates of nationalism, further reinforcing my argument that the EU’s conditionality-based approach to promoting transitional justice has failed to result in significant progress over the course of the past 25 years.