Party Responses to the EU in the Western Balkans. Transformation, Opposition or Defiance?

The European Union’s recent Western Balkans summit in Sofia confirmed the ‘commitment to the European perspective’ of the region. The reactions to the summit also confirmed that it is unlikely that accession will materialise smoothly. Fifteen years after the EU first expressed its vision for these countries’ membership, only one has capitalised on it. Croatia’s accession in 2013 has furthermore proved controversial, and euroscepticism seems to be growing in other countries in the region as well.

Marko Stojić’s study is therefore timely and most welcome. Its focus on political party responses to European integration in Serbia and Croatia goes to the core of understanding the domestic dimensions of the accession processes. After all, political parties ‘mediate’ between the far-away Union and the prospective domestic constituencies. Stojić’s work is well-founded in the political science literature on the construction of pro- or anti-European party attitudes, and—the recurrent theme of the book—all the various positions in-between. From this literature, the book identifies four factors that are each analysed in one chapter: ideology and identity; party strategy; public and voters’ attitudes; and transnational party politics. Some chapters systematically analyse all Croatian and Serbian parties (especially the first chapter on ideology), while others mainly highlight insightful examples (especially the last on the transnational factors). While this asymmetry is a little distracting, it still makes sense because the domestic political sphere in fact needs to be introduced comprehensively, while other arguments can be dealt with more selectively.

Stojić’s book stands out because of the care and diligence with which the study has been conducted. Thorough empirical research is systematically integrated with the theoretical thesis the book sets out to explore. Stojić’s findings differentiate, corroborate, and occasionally contest the conclusions from the wide range of literature that is their backdrop.

Apart from the insightful theoretical underpinnings, the book’s main contribution lies in analysing new empirical data. This is best illustrated by the dense and valuable tables found throughout the book. As straightforward as they look, they are in fact very rich and do an excellent job combining Stojić’s own findings with existing data from a broad variety of sources. On top of this, his analysis integrates an excellent selection of domestic literature on Serbian and Croatian political parties that was previously inaccessible to those unfamiliar with the local languages. This opens up new venues for research. Ironically, because Stojić goes to great lengths to give proper due to the literature, his own original contributions might be somewhat overlooked. He for example offers hugely helpful insights to researchers struggling to interpret the confusing pro-European turn of the Serbian Progressive Party, the Serbian Socialist Party, and the Croatian Democratic Union. Despite growing euroscepticism amongst the electorate, these parties surprisingly decided to support EU membership after years of staunch opposition. Stojić shows that this change was strategic and enabled by leadership changes. The author is at his best when he takes the liberty to reflect more broadly on the implications of his findings. For instance, he convincingly contradicts conventional wisdom that Eurosceptic parties hold antimigrant positions. Engaging with broader debates on EU influence in the region, domestic party competition, and the European crises of the last decade, the concluding chapter underscores the lessons that everybody could draw from the Serbian and Croatian cases.

The book thus does a great job in categorising, analysing, and problematising party attitudes on EU integration in Serbia and Croatia. Apart from showing how parties respond to domestic competition and search for ‘European legitimacy’, Stojić rehabilitates ideology as a key component of party orientation. The analysis may be read as a cautionary tale of too narrow theorisation on just one variable. Political parties’ background and constituency, Stojić shows, determines to which extent their EU positions are susceptible to (a combination of) the four factors in question: ideology, strategy, electoral preferences, and transnational impact. The book therefore also serves as reminder of, as Europeanisation literature has now come to acknowledge, the importance of studying ‘becoming European’ from the bottom up. Stojić emphasises the impact of the countries’ historical path dependencies. Further confirming the importance of specific domestic factors, he qualifies the European issue as, in some contexts, ‘rather a function of the existing politicised conflicts on ethnonational issues’ (237). This same sense of complexity and particularity would have been welcome in the analysis of the European level in the last chapter. Although Stojić acknowledges here that EU actors often have not followed a consistent approach, the actual meaning of ‘European norms’ that parties are expected to subscribe to, could be further problematised.

This would however indeed pose all sorts of new methodological difficulties. Stojić has already overcome a great deal of the problems inherent to this ongoing process of differentiating ‘Europe’ and its supposed standards. The author is honest about these challenges. Studying transnational factors for example, he distinguishes between ‘indirect’ and ‘direct’ impacts of EU and other external European actors. His use of several source types including interviews with high-profile actors is laudable, as it makes for a creative and effective solution to grasp the complex nature of interaction between European and domestic actors. However, it would have seemed wiser to reflect a bit more on the value of the information obtained through these interviews. Party officials and EU representatives alike may be inclined to polish up stories of inelegant politics. Both may create logical narratives out of rather messy processes. This however applies to the book as a whole: a more historical or process-tracking approach could help to explore more convincingly the intricacies of the dynamics in question.

The above is not so much a criticism at the address of Stojić as a call upon other researchers to further push forward the agenda set by him. As the concluding chapter makes perfectly clear, his book provides plenty of such inspiration. It deserves a readership from students of the region as well as from Europeanisation theorists. Hopefully, the transnational European actors under scrutiny will also take Stojić’s findings to heart. This could in fact help to maintain the momentum created in Sofia and to improve future integration policies.