Description
Mainstream scholarship has long emphasised the EU’s normative potential enacted by enlargement, with ‘Europeanisation’ cemented as a guarantor of democratic change. However, the EU’s defence of its stated democratic normative values is significantly challenged, from far-right ‘populist’ normalization, Brexit and authoritarian governance which reproduce ‘de-Europeanization’. This holds deep reverberations for the EU’s relations with the Western Balkans, a region long defined by its proximity to, and exclusion from EU-rope. Whilst mainstream Europeanisation debates emphasize the Western Balkans’ ‘de-Europeanization’, they overlook the EU’s role in undermining its stated democratic values through counter-intuitive border security interests and ‘stabilocracy’, and increasingly exclusionary formulations of ‘European values’.
Informed by an inversion of Borzel & Risse’s (2012) model of Europeanisation as norm diffusion, this paper argues that the EU’s established mechanisms of normative Europeanisation via enlargement are highly vulnerable to ‘illiberal’ infiltration, forming patterns of duplicitous Europeanisation. Applied to the case-study of Serbia, this paper presents the findings of a sequential mixed-methods study which charts Serbia’s compliance with EU conditions alongside V-Dem datasets. This is complemented by Critical Discourse Analysis involving European and Serbian policymakers and ‘uncivil society’ actors to scrutinize the transnational networks which bind far-right and mainstream politics to understand Serbia’s duplicitous Europeanisation.
