Europeanisation and judicial reforms in the third round of eastern pre-accession transformation – the case of Albania

A new era favourable to winds of enlargement has emerged and judicial reforms are being deployed to rebuild and protect the independence and accountability of courts in EU candidate countries, projecting them as (potential) future EU courts. This awakened interest comes with the hard-won awareness that the rule of law is not a once-and-for-all pre-confectioned product that once achieved can never be undone, but is instead engrained in realities which exist, evolve and cannot be ignored anymore. Judicial reforms have happened in previous rounds and continue to happen in this new pre-accession round in the countries of the Western Balkans, in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova under the conditionality pre-accession mechanism, with revived intensity and political pressure in guaranteeing the instillment of European best practices, that earn them legitimisation and trustworthiness amongst the international and local communities. The interplay between EU conditionality and contexts, be it historical contexts, or local agency and resistance has turned into the basis of evaluating the process of Europeanisation, but also the main object of critique in its literature. It has exacerbated EU's extensive focus in legal/institutional reforms in courts, which ensures immediate gratification in terms of progress-tracking, but less so in reality due to the combination of formal mimicry and informal institutionalised practices, making it a highly interesting laboratory in which conditionality's effects can be disentangled from the socialisation's effect (Piana, 2009). This will be a paper about lessons half-learned. Relying on theories of the EU as a normative power and as a transformative power (Börzel and Risse, 2012) on one side and Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe as a semi-periphery (Iancu 2024) on the other, it will trace the lessons learned throughout three waves of judicial reforms and the tracking of their transformation limits in this most recent one, with Albania as a case-study. The full transformational power of the EU as a normative power is ‘unleashed’ with the 2016 constitutional and judicial reform, contributing to redesigning the whole judiciary and affecting its every aspect. The intervention is believed to have re-shaped the notion of Europeanisation of judiciaries through enlargement again, as this is considered to be a far-reaching reform, and worth to be investigated by other countries who are undergoing reforms as (potential) EU candidates. Complemented by interviews with actors involved in the judicial reform, this paper will analyse whether the success story proclaimed in terms of the EU reformatory power, and the overreliance on international assistance and the state of the art standards design is ensuring accountability and independence in reality.