Challenges of Rule of Law Conditionality in EU Accession

EU enlargement process towards the Western Balkan countries has been in place since 2003 Thessaloniki summit. However, expected democratic transformation and fostering of rule law values have not become a reality, while conditionality criticized as ineffective achieving its goals. In parallel, struggling with backsliding internally, and, order to tackle this issue, developed multitude instruments that so far had limited effects on internal promotion. The paper supports idea there is need for approximation standards EU’s accession policies. After providing bird’s-eye-view position negotiations WB countries, authors go elaborate four major causes contributing lack effectiveness coherence process. doing so, provide recommendations how improve convergence between policies foster common understanding core pre-and post-accession value EU.