In April 2007, I presented the paper “Institutional Reforms, Membership Conditionality and Domestic Needs,” co-authored with Arben Imami, at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Annual Conference in Chicago. Later, our panel chair nominated it for the Kellogg-Notre Dame prize as the best paper in comparative politics. Ever since, on my own or co-authoring with Arben, I have continued to develop an interest in the effects of political conditionality and, specifically, European Union membership conditionality, on Eastern European institutional reforms with a number of publications, conference presentations and working papers. I consider this book to be a culmination of those efforts to date.

Institutional reforms intrigue me even more now, as I view them from a research perspective. Mine is a different view from the one I developed 22 years ago, inexperienced in politics and equipped only with a revolutionary zeal “to make Albania look like the rest of Europe,” when I was first elected in the Albanian parliament. As a revolutionary interested mainly in the overarching goal of regime change rather than power struggle, I could not imagine why Albania, our “special case,” could not successfully break with its past and adopt the institutional frameworks that have worked elsewhere. Apparently, lacking a personal political agenda, I was not aware of others' legitimate personal political agendas. My learning process was painfully tricky, and continues to this today.