Kleibrink, Alexander
(2011)
How partitocracy puts limits to the EU’s transformative power.
International Affairs at LSE
(24 Aug 2011).
Website.
Abstract
According to recent news, we should be quite optimistic about the state of European Union (EU) accession in the Western Balkans. The European Council has granted Croatia the long desired accession date and Zagreb is making progress on the corruption front. In Serbia, for a long time the most difficult EU aspirant, the prospects seem shiny, too. After extraditing the last war crime fugitives to The Hague the door to EU membership talks is wide open. What these accounts miss is the problem of partitocracy – the rule of political parties in almost all spheres of social life – that is dominating both countries. Without attracting too much international attention, political parties have incrementally increased their reach into different sphere of the society. Yet, this engrained politicisation might prove a key obstacle to successful EU integration. In particular, political parties are deeply intertwined with the public and private sector, they have been relatively free to secure financing from private sources without effective public scrutiny and party leadership has an extremely strong control over publically elected representatives. Taken together, the reach of parties into society and the public as well as private sector raises important questions of accountability and the effectiveness of public policies that are prerequisites for becoming members of the EU and functioning democracies.
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