From the Western Balkans to the Greater Balkans Area: The External Conditioning of "Awkward" and "Integrated" States

Since the "big bang" enlargement of the European Union in 2004, the Balkans have acquired a renewed significance in European affairs, a fact that has been occluded by recent debates on the transatlantic rift and the constitutional fiascoes in France and the Netherlands.¹ Such attention reflects the fact that incumbent members (Bulgaria and Romania) as well as the prospective members (Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia/Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania) of the Euro-club all come from the region. At the same time, it also takes into account Turkey's EU candidacy, which has started to shift the conceptual boundaries of regional problems as well as redraw the mental maps for their solution.²

The currency of the "Brussels-speak" term the western Balkans is gradually being ph(r)ased out and exchanged for the seemingly fuzzier notion of the "Greater Balkans Area."³ This trend reflects a wider pattern of international relations within which regional issues are positioned.⁴ However, such development suggests that the term Balkans, per se, has become a notion of little explanatory value. In this respect, the regional appellation has largely remained a divisive topos and, thus, has failed to become a project for abandoning destiny by providing a destination for the "Balkan people." Some have, therefore, interpreted this condition as a call for the "dismantling" of the region by "no longer talking about it."⁵

It still remains to be seen whether the concept of the Greater Balkans Area is going to contribute any value added (in terms of destination) for addressing the posers that have beleaguered the Balkan region since the end of the Cold War. At least, as far as it can be deciphered from its infancy, this concept seems to indicate the enhanced awareness of international agents that the problems of southeastern Europe are intimately related to the issues of the Middle East and the Mediterranean and, as such, require a broader framework within which they can be addressed. At the same time, such rearticulation of regional dynamics by external actors seems to reiterate those actors' centrality in the conditioning of decision making with promoted international rules and norms.

In this article, therefore, I offer what I believe to be a much-needed conceptual analysis of the dominant socializing dynamics adopted by European agents (that is, the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in the Balkans and draw some lessons that might inform the stabilization of the Greater Balkans Area. The suggestion is that the process of external conditioning of the Balkans has been underwritten by the export of a particular framework of interstate interactions. For the purposes of this essay, this pattern of order is referred to as the "European zone of peace" and connotes the patterns of relations of a security community, underwritten by the desecuritization of interstate interactions.

In this respect, the discursive move from the Western Balkans to the Greater Balkans Area implicates a policy framework for the prospective export of the European zone of peace to the area. It is suggested that this dynamic outlines the socialization aspect of external agency and the hegemonic peace relationship, which it underscores. Consequently, in this essay I take analytical stock of the practice of extending the European zone of peace to the Balkans. Such analysis distinguishes between the socialization of "awkward" and "integrated" states. I conclude the essay with an inference on the dynamics of external socialization premised on the experience of the Balkans and suggestions for their implication in the Greater Balkans Area.

What Is Being Extended: The European Zone of Peace as Hegemonic Order

In order to elaborate the hegemonic nature of the extension of the European zone of peace, in this essay I take as a point of reference the suggestion that externally promoted orders are legitimized in the framework of interactions and exchanges among states and...