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Europeanization in a Difficult Environment - A Comparative Analysis of Croatia and Albania

This article examines the impact of the process of Europeanization on consolidation of political system and pace of European Union (EU) accession in very difficult transitional environments like those of Croatia and Albania. The first country being both a post-socialist and a post-conflict state and the second heavily burdened with consequences of its isolationist recent history unprecedented in other post-socialist states are intentionally selected for this research as atypical cases. Acknowledging lack of consensus about the Europeanization phenomena in the academic community, the authors decided to rely on those concentrating not only on institution-building and policy-making processes in its utmost technical sense but also to processes of construction and diffusion of formal and informal rules, procedures, styles and shared beliefs, norms and identities, that are being transmitted from European to national level.Based on the conducted research, it concludes that while the Europeanization is an important part of the European politics in general and EU accession process in particular, it does not produce a uniform impact on processes of consolidation and EU accession of different candidate countries. On contrary, it depends substantially on their specific political context, role of domestic institutions and their process of adaptation to European political environment.

Europeanization, EU accession, consolidation, transitional reforms, Croatia, Albania

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