Diss. Linköping : Linköpings universitet, 2008.

Notwithstanding a broad range of internal and external stresses, Macedonia was the only republic to attain its independence peacefully from the otherwise violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Subject of a timely and sustained international response, it was feted as a rare preventive success for the international community. Whilst not necessarily decisive, this mobilisation helped ensure a non-violent transition to independence. Yet, much to the surprise of outside observers, Macedonia would fall into conflict a decade after independence, when self-styled freedom fighters purporting to represent the local Albanian community launched an eight-month insurgency in the name of political and cultural equality. Triggered by a coalescence of political, nationalist, ideological and criminal interests, the insurgency had complex roots, as much an intra-Albanian putsch as a struggle for greater group rights. Regardless of their precise genesis, from the perspective of conflict prevention, the events of 2001 challenge popular assumptions of Macedonia as an international success story. Above all, they reinforce the need for external actors to incorporate short-term strategies of prevention targeting immediate sources of instability within a more comprehensive, long-term framework that addresses structural, underlying conflict causes. Indeed, whilst proximate threats to Macedonian stability were addressed, fundamental risk factors remained, namely social polarisation, a large ethnic minority disenfranchised with the state, economic under-development, high levels of organised crime and corruption, a weak rule-of-law and continuing regional uncertainty. These were partly aggravated by the mistakes of a complacent international community, whose engagement in the country, accordingly, receded over time. In particular, the dissertation is critical of the European Union for its initial failure to articulate a genuine pathway to membership for Macedonia and the broader western Balkans, as well as the handling of NATO's military intervention in neighbouring Kosovo. Of course, in any preventive endeavour, the international community can only do so much; in the first instance, responsibility lay with unresponsive Macedonian institutions, who failed to adequately address legitime Albanian demands dating from independence. Be that as it may, the international community was culpable for its failure to sufficiently apply the formidable soft-power leverage it wields over a weak Macedonian state to implement reforms that, conceivably, could have precluded the outbreak of armed conflict. As a case-study of prevention, Macedonia holds instructive lessons for scholars and policymakers. Yet it remains under-researched. Examining the period 1991-2001, this investigation analyses precisely why and how Macedonia avoided violence during the process of Yugoslav dissolution yet ultimately fell into conflict, and extrapolates broader lessons that may be applied to other at-risk societies. Its purpose is to advance understanding of a poorly understood country, and contribute knowledge to key on-going international security debates. Highlighting the inter-connectedness and trans-national character of contemporary security threats, it posits that the major powers have a practical interest in addressing emerging intra-state crises, even when the putative national interest appears marginal. To facilitate more timely multilateral responses, it calls for the de-nationalisation of security, and its conceptualisation in international - as opposed to strictly national - terms.

Notwithstanding a broad range of internal and external stresses, Macedonia was the only republic to attain its independence peacefully from the otherwise violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Subject of a timely and sustained international response, it was feted as a rare preventive success for the international community. Whilst not necessarily decisive, this mobilisation helped ensure a non-violent transition to independence. Yet, much to the surprise of outside observers, Macedonia would fall into conflict a decade after independence, when self-styled freedom fighters purporting to represent the local Albanian community launched an eight-month insurgency in the name of political and cultural equality. Triggered by a coalescence of political, nationalist, ideological and criminal interests, the insurgency had complex roots, as much an intra-Albanian putsch as a struggle for greater group rights. Regardless of their precise genesis, from the perspective of conflict prevention, the events of 2001 challenge popular assumptions of Macedonia as an international success story. Above all, they reinforce the need for external actors to incorporate short-term strategies of prevention targeting immediate sources of instability within a more comprehensive, long-term framework that addresses structural, underlying conflict causes. Indeed, whilst proximate threats to Macedonian stability were addressed, fundamental risk factors remained, namely social polarisation, a large ethnic minority disenfranchised with the state, economic under-development, high levels of organised crime and corruption, a weak rule-of-law and continuing regional uncertainty. These were partly aggravated by the mistakes of a complacent international community, whose engagement in the country, accordingly, receded over time. In particular, the dissertation is critical of the European Union for its initial failure to articulate a genuine pathway to membership for Macedonia and the broader western Balkans, as well as the handling of NATO's military intervention in neighbouring Kosovo. Of course, in any preventive endeavour, the international community can only do so much; in the first instance, responsibility lay with unresponsive Macedonian institutions, who failed to adequately address legitime Albanian demands dating from independence. Be that as it may, the international community was culpable for its failure to sufficiently apply the formidable soft-power leverage it wields over a weak Macedonian state to implement reforms that, conceivably, could have precluded the outbreak of armed conflict. As a case-study of prevention, Macedonia holds instructive lessons for scholars and policymakers. Yet it remains under-researched. Examining the period 1991-2001, this investigation analyses precisely why and how Macedonia avoided violence during the process of Yugoslav dissolution yet ultimately fell into conflict, and extrapolates broader lessons that may be applied to other at-risk societies. Its purpose is to advance understanding of a poorly understood country, and contribute knowledge to key on-going international security debates. Highlighting the inter-connectedness and trans-national character of contemporary security threats, it posits that the major powers have a practical interest in addressing emerging intra-state crises, even when the putative national interest appears marginal. To facilitate more timely multilateral responses, it calls for the de-nationalisation of security, and its conceptualisation in international - as opposed to strictly national - terms.

This thesis examines the South East European policy of the European Union, which promoted the prospect of a &lsquo / United Europe&rsquo / . After the end of the bipolar world system, the ultimate aim of the East European countries has been the integration into the European Union. The transition and integration process, that they initiated in accordance with this aim, made up the basis of their relations with the Union. Nevertheless, the South East European countries, which became a sub-region within East Europe, joined to the process much later, due to the wars and instability, caused by ethnic conflicts within the region. The initiatives, established by the European Union for the region, did not come with the desired outcomes. However, after the Kosovo War, the Union established a deeper framework, with the mechanisms of the Stability Pact and the Stabilization and Association Process. On the other hand, the September-11 events, which led to the gradual withdrawal of the United States from the region, handed the responsibility to the Union. As a result of this, the Union accelerated the Stabilization and Association Process, thus torpedoed the Stability Pact. Within this context, the Republic of Macedonia became a significant component of this accelerated process. Especially, with the Stabilization and Association Agreement, came into force in April 2004, and the Mission Concordia, which is the first-ever military operation the Union, the European Union aroused its interest to the country. Consequently, within the regional framework, the Republic of Macedonia made up the essence of the Union&rsquo / s strategy in the region.

This dissertation argues that European Union membership conditionality operates as a modality of political-economic governance directed at securing the conditions of possibility for a harmoniously functioning political economy of Europe. I argue that conditionality can best be understood not as a series of requirements for EU membership, a set of incentives for rule adoption, or a vehicle for the transmission of European norms to candidate states, but as an ensemble of discursive and material practices – fragile, dispersed circuits of governmental activity directed at a particular strategic ambition. I argue that existing accounts of EU membership conditionality are informed by predominantly rationalist understandings of political economy which work to conceal various cultural, social, and subjective sources of disharmony in political-economic life. Thinking about the political economy of conditionality through rationalist lenses privileges the study of bargaining and negotiation and institutional reform and overlooks the ways that conditionality targets the transformation of problematic socio-cultural and subjective elements of political economy – among them particular habits of culture, patterns of sociality, and subjective qualities and capacities of the person deemed essential to securing order and abundance. Re-reading canonical works in classical and critical traditions of political economy by James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx makes clear that political economy as a field of knowledge and practice has long been concerned with understanding the political, legislative-legal, institutional, socio-cultural, and subjective conditions of possibility for securing order and abundance and has long reflected on the potential and limits of governance to secure these conditions in a world of shifting circumstance. I argue that a political economy of EU membership conditionality concerned with disharmony should investigate the ways that particular socio-cultural and subjective features of political-economic life are problematized in the discourse of conditionality and subsequently targeted for transformation through the work of instruments and agents of conditionality operating in a variety of institutional contexts. On this basis, I analyze conditionality as practice – tracing the emergence of instruments of conditionality currently at work in the Republic of Macedonia through official documents produced by the EU and the Republic of Macedonia from 2001-2011. I then examine the ambitions and limits of the Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007-2013 (OP-HRD) – a program tasked with translating the aims of conditionality on paper into concrete activities for implementation in the fields of employment, education and training, and social inclusion. I outline some limits to the program derived from personal interviews with officials of the EU and the Republic of Macedonia who work to implement the OP-HRD "on the ground." In reflecting on these limitations, I return to the political economy of disharmony, concluding that constraints on the operation of conditionality in practice are not merely the product of technical and political impediments but are also derived from inherent limits to the old dream of political-economic harmony to which the ambitions of conditionality are ultimately directed. / Ph. D.

The thesis describes the process of enlargement of EU, with emphasis on circumstances, which influences the enlargement process, with current candidate countries (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Iceland, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey) and the new member state Croatia as example. The thesis is divided into three chapters; first chapter presents basic information about phases of the process. Second chapter deals with previous enlargements of European Community, or EU. Third chapter analyzes current candidate states, presents their political and economical characteristics and current stage of the process. A part of the third chapter predicts future development and possible date of the entry of each candidate state.

The thesis aims to unravel the relationship between the EU's enlargement strategies and democratization in the Western Balkan countries by looking on the impact of the strategies on changing democracy levels in two empirical cases: the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Serbia. Over more than a decade, the effect of the conditionality tool on democratization has been curbed by an insufficient emphasis placed on pro-democratic reforms and by the role of security concerns which were often prioritized over aims directly linked to democracy promotion. Grounded in the conflicting objectives theory, the thesis demonstrates that the recently employed strategy appropriately sequencing goals while prioritizing democratic transition over security concerns is more effective in inflicting domestic democratic change. Subsequently, the following necessary and sufficient conditions for a successful sequencing strategy were defined: strong emphasis on democracy-related goals combined with clearly outlined temporal perspective, and corresponding action of international actors.

This dissertation explores the types of professional communities that are built when teachers work in initiatives that, in various forms, link them to teachers from other countries. In doing so it explores the types of knowledge that may be exchanged by the building of these communities and the value that teachers put upon these different forms of knowledge. Therefore, this study is situated in the broad theoretical context of discussions related to the building of professional communities but explores this within a specifically international context. The most significant findings that this dissertation identifies are: that the teachers involved built the professional communities that are most important to them in more exploratory ways and with more agency than is suggested by other related research, and in connection to this that those professional communities that the participants attached most significance to were consistently alternative to the immediate workplace. It was also found that whilst the teachers involved in this study problematised the possibility of directly transferring specific classroom strategies, stories about teaching were seen by all to be useful vehicles for exchanging other forms of knowledge, for enabling affirmation and for co-constructing moral purpose. These findings have potential implications for policy and practice as they indicate that structures that focus exclusively on developing communities within schools may need to be enriched by those that provide teachers with the flexibility to discover and build communities in alternative ways too. The primary data collection method used when conducting this research was interview. The participants who were interviewed came from two countries, namely England and Macedonia. This entirely qualitative approach is positioned within an interpretivist paradigm. However, it is argued that contributions to theoretical debates regarding the nature of professional communities can still be made.

This dissertation thesis is focused on the analysis of changing relations between the Western Balkan countries (WB) and the European Union (EU) against background of actual transformation processes in these countries. The Western Balkans represents a group of countries which were not part of so-called Eastern Enlargement of the EU, but are also slowly heading towards the EU. The EU distinguishes three groups of countries within the WB: Croatia has become an acceding country; then here is a group of candidate countries (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Montenegro, Serbia), and the last group is formed by so-called potential candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo). All of these above mentioned countries are part of the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) which nowadays represents the core of the Enlargement Policy of the EU and stands for the main research topic of this thesis. The thesis also comprehends the history of the enlargement process of the EU and the basic theoretical concepts of the (EU) enlargement. The "transformation" chapter includes a theoretical grounding too. Three hypotheses were verified (mainly) by results of transformation, evaluation of Copenhagen criteria by the European Commission, and by the statistical methods (Principal Components Analysis and Cluster Analysis) based on a number of economic and demographic indicators.