CfP Panel "The Balkans - In-between Enlargement and Wider Europe" - ICCEES
World Congress, Berlin July 2005

For the ICCEES World Congress in Berlin in July 2005, I would like to
propose a broad policy-oriented panel: "The Balkans - In-between
Enlargement and Wider Europe"

On the eve of EU Eastern enlargement in May 2004 it became apparent that
enlargement incentives and instruments cannot be applied to the full and
will not produce similar results in the neighbourhood region of "Wider
Europe". Conversely, with the EU agenda shifting from stabilisation to
integration, enlargement instruments and incentives are increasingly
applied to the Western Balkans. The key policy question and the topic of
this panel is, however, whether a success similar to East Central Europe is
a matter of (more) time or whether the weakness of states, reform elites
and their constituencies defies European strategies of transformation and
integration as it does in most former Soviet Republics. Is, in other words,
the Western Balkans for Europe the last case of the enlargement paradigm or
the first case of the "Wider Europe" paradigm?

My own paper will address the institutional similarities of the EU
instruments for the accession states, the associated states of the Western
Balkans and the neighbouring states of Wider Europe as well as the EU's
implicit policy assumptions.
I would like to invite two or three speakers and one or two commentators to
join this panel. If you are interested, please contact me by email:
meurs@lrz-uni-muenchen.de (Deadline for the submission of panels is 29 Feb.
2004) See: www.rusin.fi/iccees or www.iccees2005.de.

Dr. Wim van Meurs
University of Munich, Center for Applied Policy Research