Tatjana Sekulić - The European Union and the Paradox of Enlargement: The Complex Accession of the Western Balkans

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as they affect people's lives, social networks and forms of mobility.

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In the first days of January 2019, we leave Sarajevo, gliding on the ice and the snow that had fallen in the previous days. Temperatures are extremely low, minus ten degrees. Before that, there was the struggle of conducting the last round of interviews and collecting research documents during the holiday breaks. The thirty kilometres of highway towards Zenica illuminate the horizon of progress, foreshadowing the idea that Bosnia and Herzegovina could become a state where mobility is possible in safety and speed. The highway ends in front of the blast furnaces of the Zenica steel mill, amid the reddish air that covers the landscape of an otherwise uniquely beautiful valley. From Zenica, the road narrows into only two lanes, which makes overtaking a car or truck a life-threatening manoeuvre. The road leads to Nemila, a small town along the river Bosna the name of which literally means undear, where for some years now there have been stalls and delays due to damage on the road caused by floods, landslides or who knows what else. The crossing of the first administrative but also political border in Bosnia and Herzegovina is marked by only one sign welcoming passengers to the Republic of Srpska in the Cyrillic alphabet (the expression is identical in all three national languagesSerbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and in English. For part of our journey we are accompanied by sights of mined houses in roadside villages, only a small number of which were restored within the twenty-four years of the Dayton Agreement marking the end of the open war conflicts. After Doboj now, a new section of the highway much more comfortably leads to the border with Croatia and, since July 2013, with the European Union. Yet we continue in the usual direction towards the border between the two shipsBosanski Brod and Slavonski Brod (brodmeans ship), across Sava River. Its waters originate in Slovenia , flow through Croatia and Bosnia and finally through Serbia to meet the Danube in Belgrade. Along the way, we stop for an Illy coffee at theNada(hope) gas station, where we are already friends with the staff. Entry into the European Union this time is not so difficulttwenty minutes waiting in Nemila and another forty at the border with Croatia . It then takes us four full hours to cross the seven kilometres that separate us from the Schengen border between Croatia and Slovenia . Hundreds of motorists are honking simultaneously as they approach the toll booth four hundred metres ahead of the border , the primary purpose of which is to control the influx of cars avoiding thus heavy congestion in front of the fortress gate. Croatia is once again the bulwark of civilization, while peopleprobably mostly from the diasporaflock back to their Western European homes after the holidays. Slovenia also has double border checks, with restrictive policies of the European institutions related to the migrant crisis, especially since the opening of the Balkan Route in 2015, pressuring both countries. At last, Europe: at the border with Italy, they just check the vignette that Slovenia required us to pay in order to drive on the highway.

This brief ethnographic reportage illustrates how the contingent redefinition of boundaries of different character directly and indirectly determines the everyday life of citizens , whether they are nationals of EU member states or residents of the accession countries. Free movement , as one of the founding principles upon which the community of European states is founded, is called into question under the pressure of European and national securitization policies, for which the pretext of a migrant crisis and its direct association with Islamic-inspired terrorism provides a very convenient framework. In addition to this, the old bilateral disputes between countriesin this particular case between Slovenia and Croatia are being reactivated in informal and non-transparent ways.