Meeting the political and the legislative Copenhagen criteria, the case of Kosovo.

The next enlargement of the European Union is predicted to be in the Balkans. Kosovo, a small country of the Balkan Peninsula, which has been declared as an independent state in 2008, aims the membership in EU. Kosovo is currently at the stage of negotiating the Stabilization and Association Agreement with EU. For the membership in EU, candidate countries are required to achieve certain criteria: political, legislative, economic and administrative. The first three are known as the Copenhagen Criteria, whereas the last one as the Madrid Criteria. This paper looks to briefly asses the difficulties of Kosovo in meeting the two Copenhagen Criteria: the political and the legislative one. Although, Kosovo has achieved certain progress related to this matter, this paper presents only the dimensions where Kosovo is lacking in achieving the aforementioned requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]