The Compliance-Capture Bargain: How the Western Balkans Learned to Pass the Test Without Passing the Course

For over two decades, the theory of how Brussels deals the Western Balkans has been simple: offer EU membership, demand reform, and let self-interested elites in power do the rest. In the Europeanization theory this idea is defined as external incentives model, providing that compliance follows from a credible reward weighed against the domestic cost of change, as a cost-benefit calculation of the governments in the candidate-countries. This idea is later refined by distinguishing the EU’s passive leverage, the simple attraction of the market or institutions for instance, from active leverage, the explicit conditionality on the conditions for accession.

Although this theory is dominantly applied in the case of the accession to the EU of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), it explains a lot about the relation between the EU and the Western Balkan region as well. But, what it doesn’t explain in this particular context is what happens when the “reward” stays credible but all conditions and developments are not rightly assessed, or when the reward itself gets frozen for reasons that have nothing to do with reform at all.

That’s the actual current story in the Western Balkans. It can be framed as a compliance capture bargain: Brussels can do the paperwork, it knows how to grade, new laws, new institutions, closed negotiating chapters, while state capture networks keep the things that actually matter to citizens safely out of reach: prosecutorial discretion, procurement, media ownership. This isn’t backsliding. It’s a state of equilibrium. And right now, it’s splitting the region into three distinct realities.

Reality one: Managed capture

Montenegro and Albania are the EU’s advertisement for enlargement working. Montenegro was the first country in the region to reach the interim rule-of-law benchmark (IBAR) and hopes to close its accession negotiations by the end of this year. Albania has been treated as a frontrunner following its own positive benchmark assessment. Both are held up in Brussels as proof that conditionality still works.

And yet, during the same time, Tirana’s mayor was detained on corruption and money- laundering charges, and Albania’s former deputy prime minister was removed from office over a separate corruption case. Montenegro’s former Supreme Court Chief Justice was found to have used her position to protect a criminal network run by her son, who is convicted of crimes. Nobody in Brussels treated either event as a reason to slow down accession. And this tells a lot. In the past, a high official facing corruption charges would have been an accession-derailing scandal. Now, that is entirely not the case. The frontrunners haven’t solved state capture, they have learned to keep it from touching the metrics that matter for the timeline and the benchmarks.

Long-running civil society corruption monitoring in the region confirms the same story from the citizen’s perspective. Ordinary people report paying bribes and facing corruption pressure at roughly the same rates as a decade ago. The anti-corruption efforts have essentially stalled. Laws changed. Institutions were created. Governments changed. The lived experience of corruption didn’t move. That gap between what gets legislated and what gets lived is ever expanding.

Reality two: Bargain that never gets tested

North Macedonia has held EU candidate status since 2005. It has just had its eighth parliamentary election in five years. What it hasn’t had, in all that time, is the opening of a single negotiating cluster. This is not entirely because Brussels assessed its institutions unready, but because the accession process as a whole is frozen over a bilateral dispute with an EU member-state, which is outside the accession framework itself, but vetoes the accession. Political conditions for Skopje continue to emerge in the form of constitutional amendments, even after prior compromises made, and the negotiations are not held about rule of law, but about solving political and historical issues.

What is devastating the most is what this freeze has done to the country. With the reward being distant and out of sight, regardless of performance, the pressure for reforms is declining and reforms are in fact stagnating. Reform momentum needs an end-goal in sight to sustain itself, and North Macedonia’s has been moved so many times that its own government has stopped running forward and instead ended in an institutional inertia and a dangerous vicious
cycle. Instead of being pragmatic and use diplomacy in overcoming the political standstill, the government has decided to wait for Brussels to change the conditions, thus failed to recognize the urgency for reform and EU accession overall, including the estimate of the opportunity cost of this decision.

Reality three: Overt capture, contested externally

Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina show what happens when the bargain breaks down instead of holding. Serbia has spent the past year in a near-continuous political crisis, with the government refusing to call elections despite of sustained street protests and citizens pressure. In Republika Srpska, Dodik was forced from office by a court ruling, but instead of that being reinforced externally, the US lifted his sanctions soon after. He’s since remained without formal power, yet his party’s candidate now holds the presidency, widely seen as a continuation of Dodik’s own rule, with secession threats still on the table.

This isn’t a case of the compliance-capture bargain failing on its own domestic terms, it’s a case of the bargain losing its only credible outside enforcer. The EU can only sustain the arrangement in Montenegro and Albania because it remains, for now, the only actor offering a reward big enough to matter. In Serbia and Republika Srpska, that exclusivity is not the case. Serbia has leaned on Russian energy dependency for years, and only under a hard US deadline did it stop shielding Gazprom’s stake in its national oil company, clearing the way for a forced Russian divestment it did not choose. Dodik, for his part, has treated a Washington sanctions reversal as license rather than reprieve. When elites can shop between external actors whose signals contradict each other, the incentive to keep even the paperwork side of the bargain moving collapses. What’s left isn’t managed capture. It’s capture with no one left pretending to manage it.

More worrying for Brussels than backsliding

The EU’s own rule-of-law monitoring is very good at seeing legislation and very bad at seeing enforcement. Its most recent Rule of Law report assessment of the four candidate countries makes the point almost despite itself: judicial reforms are being implemented, and at the same time judges and prosecutors face „great pressures“ from politicians, corruption „remains a matter of great concern“ in every one of them, and civil society operates in a shrinking space. That is precisely the compliance capture bargain, described in the Commission’s own language.

The danger isn’t that the Western Balkans will fail to reform. It’s that the region has found a stable, sustainable way to look like it’s reforming forever. The status of “candidate country” was supposed to be a transition. It’s turning into a permanent status, one where accession moves forward exactly as fast as it needs to keep the story alive. This is without ever threatening the people that story was supposed to be about. Until Brussels grades the back end as rigorously as the front end, none of this is a malfunction. It’s the process performing exactly as built.