Description
European integration in the Western Balkans has been framed as a democratizing process having a transformative effect on post-socialist states aiming to join the EU. Despite its progress toward fulfilling EU conditionality, Serbia, as other states in the region, has seen developments resulting in state capture and democratic backsliding, contrary to normative expectations on European integration. Contributing to research reevaluating the EU’s role in the region, this article argues that European institutions have played a key role in legitimizing the entrenchment in power of a Serbian elite coalesced in the SNS party led by Aleksandar Vučić, in spite of the EU’s knowledge production crafting a hegemonic narrative equating European norms and values with democracy. The paper uses a critical discourse analysis of government communication on EU-Serbia membership negotiations to understand how the relationship between European integration and state capture is framed and legitimized by Serbian and EU actors. The paper argues that these dynamics are best understood relationally, rooted in the Global East conceptual framework proposed by Müller (2020). Using this framework, the paper argues that the unequal relations deepened by the seemingly contradictory mutually constitutive processes of European integration and state capture underlie the power relations defining existence in the Global East as a liminal semiperipheral space.
