Accomplishment of the EU's organizational construction politically and economically through its geography involves a two-fold objective: First, the EU objective as a global actor today trying to find its place in the global political discourse while the entire integration of the continent is seen as a priority, and second, the objective of different countries, including those at the periphery, within the European geography and beyond, to join the block. Center-periphery relations add further difficulties to this picture, including the risk on the part of aspiring countries to be involved into an open war, as in the case of Ukraine, or the risks attached to being enclaves within the EU, as in the case of the Western Balkan countries. This paper tries to analyze the EU integation paths of two Western Balkans countries, Albania and Kosovo by taking into account the aforementioned center-periphery dimension. Cases definitely present two different positions as well as different obstacles faced. Apart from the theoretical aspects, this paper will be based on a comparative methodology and will analyze carefully the EU's staged approach towards these countries in particular and to the Western Balkans in general.

The European Union, as a sui generis political entity, holds special characteristics in its foreign policy as well. Since its creation the European integration seeked to act as a global actor as well. However when we deal with the EU in international relations, its actions cannot be restricted to the CFSP only. According to this research, the European Union’s foreign affairs include, next to the CFSP, all of the steps towards third countries, such as enlargement and neighbourhood policy, common commercial policy or other donor programs and cooperations. According to both the literature and its own interpretation, the ‘UPO’ on the global level follows the path of the so-called normative foreign policy. The reasons are two-folded; first, the EU is a political entity but not a state (Hix, 2011). As a non-sovereign actor, lacks both the means of unconstrained actions and the full-titled actorness on the international level. Second, the EU focuses on promoting given values by the use of normative methods, instead of the classical (realist) means of foreign policy. This characteristic has been labeled as a 'liberal grand strategy' (Smith, 2011) or 'normative power' (Noutcheva 2009; Scheipers, Sicurelli 2008).

However, due to the Lisbon Treaty and the institutionalization of the CFSP on one hand and the several crises on the other, EU's 'foreging policies' went through meaningful changes. The EU’s actions, like cooperation with Ukraine (political, arm and financial support programs), sanctions against Russia or Belarus (after the Crimerian crisis and the 2022 war), deals with Turkey regarding the refugee issue, clashes with China (due to Taiwan and the uyghurs) or the Brexit negotiations, have started to slide away from the normative character towards a more realist approach. The EU started to follow the classical path of foreign policy.

This paper aims to give some new possible theoretical interpretations of this new European foreign policy approach. Differentiating between the partners on the basis of the symmetric and asymmetric mutual interest, analyzing the different FP actions, we prove that in given cases the EU follows the realist approach, but with normative reasoning.

The research used qualitative methods, with deep interviews with EU officials and process tracing analysis( Beach, Pedersen, 2013, Collier 2011, Bennett 2010).

Transactionalism has lately become a buzzword in academic and policy-centered debates on EU-Turkey relations amidst the comatose state of Turkey’s EU accession negotiations and the formulation the EU-Turkey relationship progressively based on interest-laden transactions. Key EU institutions like the European Parliament, abundant opinion pieces and scholarly work criticize the growing trend toward the sustenance of EU-Turkey relations at the expense of value-based concerns, while elaborating on alternative, rules-based partnership models. Despite the relevance of transactionalism for the EU’s international action, in general, and for the evolution of EU-Turkey relations, in particular, this theme remains widely underexplored and undertheorized. Synthesizing central elements of Deutsch’s transactionalist theory and rationalist institutionalism, this paper expounds why the EU has been gradually entrapped in a self-harming transactional partnership with Turkey. It shows how concrete steps of strategic transactions between Ankara and Brussels did not take place in a vacuum but brought about distinct learning processes for the EU and Turkey which led to the construction of a shared partnership identity considering transactionalism as the “new norm” in the relations. The paper thus offers a theoretical contribution to the literature on EU-Turkey relations as well as to discussions on value-driven EU external policy.