The global strategy of the European Union (2016) locates the EU in an ever more connected, contested, and complex world, characterized by a shift from a unipolar structure to a “more fragmented distribution of power”, leading to “growing uncertainty and rivalry”. Particularly in the Western Balkans we can discern an increasing competition for influence and thus a contestation of European offers, as players like Russia, China or Turkey enter the arena. This begs important questions: first, how are the countries of the region adapting their strategies in this contestation, as their range of prospective cooperation partners increases and new alternatives for action emerge? How does this affect their approach towards European integration? Is this necessarily a constraining factor in their path towards EU membership or might the EU become the reliable partner in this competitive field? As regards the EU, the major questions are: What does it mean to cope with this competition in the immediate vicinity? How does it affect European policies towards the Western Balkans and the offers for association and membership? In a more abstract sense, the question is also whether these dynamics and their effects also challenge the EU as liberal power, or whether they demand a move from its reliance on institutions, norms, values, and markets to a more geostrategic, realist approach. This also means that the question must be asked whether we need to adapt our theoretic approaches and what we know about Europeanization, conditionality mechanisms, normative and transformative power, and European actorness in this competitive setting.

This project tackles these questions by drawing on qualitative comparative case studies. Close cooperation during the exchange stays and the workshop aims at developing refined and new methodological approaches to study not only accession procedures from a comparative perspective, but also to tackle the issues of contestation and geopolitical competition and their effects on actors’ strategies. The idea is to develop a common set of factors for mapping variants of contestation and to guarantee for a better comparability of cases across various scenarios. The projects aims at taking interdisciplinarity seriously by respecting the academic rigour of each discipline (also concerning publication), but at the same time allowing the different disciplines to get into a meaningful dialogue by developing common analytical tools