The EPP’s Engagement with Parties of the Western Balkans and the Eastern Partnership Countries

The key puzzle of this paper is to illustrate and explain the EPP’s potentially different engagement with the sister parties from the Western Balkan (WB) compared to the sister parties from the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. By studying the cases of Georgia and Serbia, the first part of the paper seeks to explore the nature of the EPP’s engagement with its non-EU sister parties from the selected cases. The second part aims at analyzing the EPP’s rationale of engagement as well as at explaining whether the EPP develop different degrees of engagement with the Serbian sister parties as compared with the Georgian sister parties. In order to analyze the EPP’s engagement, the paper follow the three main steps. First, it conceptualizes the EPP’s engagement, second - it demonstrates the EPP’s (potentially) different engagement with the Serbian parties as compared with the Georgian parties, third - it explains the EPP’s (potentially) different engagement by analyzing the independent variables suggested by the paper methodology, which are: EU enlargement perspective, party transformation, political influence, competition with other Europarties and longevity of engagement. Our general expectation is that the EPP’s engagement is higher with the parties from the Western Balkan countries compared to the parties from the Eastern Partnership countries due to the presence and respectively the absence of an EU enlargement perspective. This expectation is guided by the theoretical framework of Normative Institutionalism and Rational Choice Institutionalism.