Minority Policies and EU Conditionality - The Case of the Republic of Macedonia

The EU in the Western Balkans has been significantly engaged in the promotion of improved minority protection in the framework of its political criteria for accession. Despite the EU's involvement in these policies, the question of how external pressures have affected and interacted with domestic institutional and policy changes is still not well understood. This paper sheds light on this debate by examining the interactions between the EU and national actors in the case of the Republic of Macedonia in relation to minority policies. The theoretical and methodological approach for this research largely follows the work of Hughes, Sasse and Gordon on the Eastern enlargement. The paper argues that political conditionality should be understood as a process encompassing both its formal and informal elements and emphasizes the problems of analysing minority conditionality as an independent variable. The analysis is focused on two examples: the adoption of the law on the use of languages and the policy of equitable representation of non-majority communities. The paper tracks and explains developments in EU conditionality in relation to minority protection over time through document analysis and interviews with various stakeholders.