Geopolitical Competition and the Rule of Law in the Western Balkans

This article explores how heightened geopolitical competition affects patterns of state capture in the Western Balkans. Over the past decade, the EU’s neighborhood has become a battleground for influence among great powers, including China, Russia, Turkey, and the US, along with the European Union. Both scholars and the European Commission have indicated that this competition has contributed to state capture and the erosion of the rule of law in the region. However, there is a lack of comprehensive theorization on the mechanisms through which geopolitical competition contributes to state capture in the EU’s neighborhood. Moreover, the existing scholarship has failed to fully explore how geopolitical competition affects the EU conditionality mechanisms related to the rule of law in its neighborhood. This article aims to fill this gap by proposing two primary causal pathways: first, it argues that geopolitical competition reduces the opportunity costs for non-compliance with EU conditionality, providing local elites with alternative sources of rewards; second, it forces the EU to prioritize geopolitical considerations over transformative goals, leading to the informal support for undemocratic forces in exchange for ensuring the anchoring of their countries in the EU’s orbit. Using Serbia as a case study, this article employs elite interviews and process tracing to probe the plausibility of these two mechanisms. The findings suggest that alternative external incentives from geopolitical rivals diminish the effectiveness of EU conditionality, contributing to state capture. The study underscores the need for the EU to rethink its conditionality approach amidst growing geopolitical rivalry.