Introduction: situating South East Europe

It is far from clear where South East Europe begins and ends. It is as much, if not more, a geopolitical construct as it is an identifiable geographical space. It may best be conceived as an emergent subregional space, more ascribed by outside forces rather than celebrated as a region from within. These ascriptions are, themselves, contradictory and somewhat Janus-faced, with a rather pejorative construction of the Balkans, only slightly amended in the European Union's (EU) notion of the Western Balkans (former Yugoslavia minus EU member state Slovenia and plus Albania), standing in some tension with an idea that the countries of the region are next in line for EU membership. These tensions relate to real political processes, which tend to fuse and confuse the border between truly ‘domestic’ and truly ‘international’ policy processes, between a status of ‘rejoining Europe’ or remaining as one of ‘Europe's others’. At times, nation-state building processes have led to a scramble for positioning regarding what has been termed ‘Euro-Atlantic integration’ in which countries and territories seek to out-do their neighbours in meeting broad conditionalities for EU and NATO membership. At other times, quite specific political choices have led to rather idiosyncratic developmental paths being pursued, producing new hybrid political economies merging a rather clientelistic ‘crony capitalism’ (Bičanić and Franičević, 2003) with the existence of authoritarian nationalisms and parallel power networks (Solioz, 2007). Sometimes, both tendencies appear to co-exist in a rather uneasy relationship not easily challenged by a rather crude ‘stick-and-carrot’ approach from the EU and other regional players (Bechev, 2006).

The wars and conflicts since 1991, and the reconstitution of various states, mini-states and territories with a rather complex relationship to each other, indicate how political, social, cultural, economic and institutional arrangements have been profoundly destabilised, and subnational, national and regional scales and their interrelationships are still heavily contested (Deacon and Stubbs, 2007; Clarke, 2008). The complexities of governance arrangements in the region certainly stretch the logics of a ‘multilevel governance’ approach popular within Western European political science, although whether or not this stretching reaches ‘breaking point’ is contested (see Stubbs, 2005; Bache et al, 2007). The complexities of state fragmentation and state-building consequent upon the wars of the Yugoslav succession remain unfinished.