What is CEE

Despite relatively recent enlargement rounds, the European Union (EU) is bound to enlarge even further. Yet, for a country to be admissible into the club, it must have successfully Europeanised in multiple areas. Against that background, this chapter aims to assess why apparently similar candidate countries in the Balkans manage the Europeanisation process with widely divergent degrees of success. To answer that question, a diverse and well-established literature review is accounted for, while applying rationalist and sociological approaches to new unexplored cases and examining specific domestic pre-conditions and factors regarding their potential to induce Europeanisation. By assessing past enlargement rounds, notably the Central and Eastern European enlargement and the ongoing Western Balkans enlargement, the objective is to provide for a thorough account of the effectiveness of Europeanisation in the Balkans, especially as regards EU conditionality in the area of the rule of law.