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Nuances of (geo)politics of democracy in Albania explained through the Italy-Albania agreement on migrants
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Jelena DŽANKIĆ, Biljana KOTEVSKA and Lucia MOKRÁ (eds), The (geo)politics of democracy in wider Europe, Florence : European University Institute, 2025, pp. 8-17
Global Governance Programme; [Southeastern Europe]
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BESHKU, Klodiana, Nuances of (geo)politics of democracy in Albania explained through the Italy-Albania agreement on migrants, in Jelena DŽANKIĆ, Biljana KOTEVSKA and Lucia MOKRÁ (eds), The (geo)politics of democracy in wider Europe, Florence : European University Institute, 2025, pp. 8-17, Global Governance Programme, [Southeastern Europe] - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93764
Abstract
The war in Ukraine unblocked Albania’s path to European Integration. The country started the accession talks with the European Union (EU) in March 2022, held the first Intergovernmental Conference with the Union in July 2022, and completed the screening for all six clusters in November 2023. The accession negotiations kicked off in mid-October 2024. Albanian leadership hopes to close all the negotiation chapters by the end of 2027 so that the country can become a full EU Member State by 2030. Scholarship on the Eastern EU enlargement has established that the more a country advances to the European Union, the more its democracy consolidates, at least at an institutional level (Pridham 2002). The relationship between ‘Europeanisation’ and ‘democratisation’ has become so entrenched that the two have often been used interchangeably in scholarship on the Western Balkans. Even so, approximation to the EU does not always go hand in hand with the strengthening of the democracy in a candidate country. In the Western Balkan region, the backsliding of democracy (Bieber and Kmezić 2017), and the rise of authoritarianism (Bieber 2020) have often been linked to the weaknesses of the EU’s conditionality mechanism (Džankić, Keil, and Kmezić 2018). These adverse phenomena have also been related to the decoupling between formal compliance with the EU norms and the democratic transformation of the region (Richter and Wunsch 2020).
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Published online: June 2025