BB: EU’S COMMON FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY AND THE WESTERN BALKANS

With the establishment of the Political Union in 1992 and the introduction of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the EU member states wanted to "spill over" the success in economic integration to the sphere of politics and to strengthen the spirit of the European community with citizens sharing the same values. On the one hand, CFSP is still an area where member states play a key role in decision-making while some of them do not always perceive decisions in this pillar of cooperation as binding. The Western Balkans, on the other hand, although formally outside the EU, and in various stages of the EU integration process, is often mentioned in the context of mandatory compliance/alignment with CFSP. Hence, the question arises whether compliance with CFSP is an obligation or a mindful decision of the state to stand in solidarity with the partners.

Therefore, this research has a three-fold goal to: 1) analyse how and to what extent CFSP contributed to the strengthening of the idea of Europe, unity, solidarity among EU member states and the EU itself 2) analyse instruments which are available to the EU to react in case of non-compliance/alignment of the state with CFSP 3) to explore directions for "connecting" CFSP with the EU conditionality - incentives and sanctions - in the case of the Western Balkans.

 Given that the search for a model that would make the EU both wider and deeper is still being sought, the goal of this research is also to indirectly explore possible directions for the best possible use of existing instruments in that sense.