Safeguarding EU’s interests

EU enlargements have revealed that balancing between EU’s accession criteria for new member countries and safeguarding EU’s interests is complex. This book argues that EU is compromising on its conditionality policy due to geo-political interests and that an ambiguous approach to conditionality can be useful for EU. A key case of this is Serbia, where the geo- political and historical issues reveal a complexity important to understand in future accession processes for candidate countries. This book discusses why EU is compromising due to political, economic and security-related interests in Serbia and the Balkan region. Russia has strong interests in Serbia making this a complicated geo-political issue involving Kosovo’s independency process and Russian energy supplies. Also Serbia is using its potential turning towards Russia as a political tool to make the EU compromise on its conditionality policy towards Serbia. This book is of key interest for readers wanting to understand the complexity of EU enlargement processes, the geo-political situation on the outskirts of EU and the policies of a country courting and using its position to serve own interests.