Launched in 2014, the European Union Strategy for the Adriatic-Ionian Region (EUSAIR) is one of four ‘EU Macro-regional Strategies’ (EUMRS). It followed the strategies for the Baltic Sea Region and the Danube Region and preceded the Alpine Region Strategy. These initiatives aim to foster territorial cooperation among EU and non-EU countries by addressing shared challenges. Although the governance structures of the four EUMRS formally are quite similar, exogenous factors have influenced the pace and depth of their evolution. This is particularly the case for the EUSAIR, which is unique in bringing together a majority of non-EU countries from the Western Balkans alongside some EU Member States (i.e. Italy, Greece, Slovenia, and Croatia) in a region characterised by only few established formats of collaboration and strained by post-conflict inter-state relations following the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. Drawing on the analytical framework of experimentalist governance, it is expected that after several institutional innovations the EUSAIR can be understood as an experimentalist governance system. Furthermore, it addresses the research question: How does an exogenous factor impact the unfolding of experimentalist governance in a highly heterogeneous and post-conflict context?

Drawing on interviews with EUSAIR policymakers and document analysis, the article demonstrates that although the geopolitical context initially prevented the EUSAIR from unfolding within the experimentalist governance pattern several institutional reforms have contributed to it. The main finding of the study is that the shift towards experimentalist governance has turned the initial EUSAIR’s scope of functional cooperation into a political framework supportive of the enlargement.

The article contributes to European governance studies enhancing the literature of experimentalist governance and the EUMRS.

Following the opening of all negotiation clusters, Albania has entered a decisive phase in its EU accession process, in which the quality, consistency, and implementation of reforms have become central to the assessment of progress. Within this context, the Fundamentals cluster occupies a crucial role, as it encompasses core areas such as the rule of law, judiciary, public administration, and fundamental rights, which condition advancement across all other chapters.

This paper examines the evolution of the European Commission’s recommendations addressed to Albania within the framework of the EU accession process over the period 2014–2024. Focusing on the chapters belonging to the Fundamentals cluster, the research conducts a comparative qualitative analysis of the Commission’s annual reports in order to identify recurring patterns, shifts in emphasis, and persistent implementation challenges.

The aim is to identify the most frequently reiterated recommendations across the selected acquis chapters, assess the extent to which these recommendations have translated into measurable implementation outcomes, and evaluate the continuity of the EU’s priority-setting over time. Particular attention is paid to whether repetitive recommendations signal structural governance deficits or reflect limitations in the EU’s conditionality mechanism.

Methodologically, the research employs qualitative text analysis of European Commission progress reports, combined with thematic coding and cross-country comparison. The findings are expected to show that recommendations related to the rule of law, judicial reform, and economic competitiveness are the most persistent over time, while actual implementation has often lagged behind formally reported progress. By highlighting discrepancies between rhetorical continuity and practical outcomes, the study contributes to broader debates on EU conditionality, enlargement fatigue, and the effectiveness of the Fundamentals-first approach in the Western Balkans.

The process of European Union enlargement has been a key driver of democratic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, yet its effects are highly uneven across member and candidate states. This paper examines how EU enlargement has influenced democratic resilience in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, two countries at the EU’s eastern border that share historical, cultural, and linguistic ties, but differ markedly in their level of integration. Romania, as a post-accession member, exemplifies how EU membership can consolidate democratic institutions, strengthen the rule of law, and embed democratic norms across multiple levels of governance. In contrast, Moldova’s status as a candidate country illustrates the limits of external incentives and conditionality in sustaining democratic quality amid domestic vulnerabilities and persistent geopolitical pressures.

Democratic resilience is conceptualized as the capacity of political systems to absorb, adapt to, and recover from internal and external stressors without compromising core democratic principles. It operates across interconnected levels—including macro-institutions, political parties, civil society, and political communities—where progress in one dimension may be offset by vulnerabilities in another. Using a longitudinal, systemic perspective, the paper analyses institutional reforms, policy trajectories, and socio-political indicators in Romania and Moldova over the past three decades, capturing the cumulative effects of EU accession, candidate-state conditionality, and regional crises on democratic consolidation.

The comparative analysis demonstrates that EU enlargement can function as both a stabilizing and constraining factor for democracy. While integration creates structural incentives for reform, strengthens norms, and promotes institutional resilience, it also exposes political systems to new vulnerabilities, including dependence on external benchmarks, uneven societal adaptation, and pressures from neighbouring autocratic regimes. By focusing on the EU’s eastern frontier, this study highlights the contextual and relational nature of democratic resilience and the differentiated impact of enlargement processes. The findings underscore that fostering durable democracy in post-communist Europe requires not only formal accession criteria but sustained attention to the interplay of domestic capacities, cross-border interactions, and external support mechanisms.

This paper contributes to critical European studies by linking enlargement and neighbourhood policies to the evolving quality of democracy, offering insights into the mechanisms that sustain or undermine resilience at Europe’s periphery, and suggesting pathways for more effective policy engagement in young democracies at the Union’s eastern edge.

Critical Political Economy (CPE) research has extensively studied Europe’s uneven and dependent development (UDD). Yet, it has overlooked how the Cohesion Policy and its Funds legitimise the EU through its (meta)governance of these persistent core-periphery inequalities, even as that governance regularly fails. This article fills that gap by analysing how the European Commission legitimises EU single market-based integration through its discursive interference in socio-economic catch-up of its peripheral economies via Cohesion Policy. Interpreting the Commission’s Cohesion Reports (1980s-2020s), I identify a double legitimisation practice: the Commission constructs core-periphery performance divides as justification for EU-centred interference to fix them through peripheral catch-up, while simultaneously legitimising the EU itself against their persistence by shifting blame onto domestic governance shortcomings of peripheral states. This practice is illustrated in the limited catch-up of East-Central European economies, where its success is credited to their productive (inter)dependency on foreign direct investment and the EU Funds, while its structural limits are attributed to their continuing domestic institutional underperformance. By tracing this legitimising discourse through the EU’s recurring crises since the early 2010s, I empirically substantiate CPE scholarship and refine it for interpreting how the Union’s political legitimacy is regularly reclaimed in the face of its persistent UDD.

EU enlargements are often viewed as a process involving a ‘rule maker’ and ‘rule taker’, where the EU side is associated with the former and enlargement countries associated with the later. This view has arguably been particularly pronounced regarding post-2000 EU enlargement processes including in the context of the EU Eastern Neighbourhood and Western Balkan (ENWB) countries. This paper departs from this position to explore the role of political ownership in facilitating and legitimising EU enlargements among candidate countries. Political ownership—or lack of same—can be seen as key to understand, not only the political, administrative and societal commitments to enlargements, but also the heterogeneity of enlargement processes, both among and with enlargement countries. Against this backdrop, the paper asks the question: what is the role, if any, of political ownership in facilitating and (de)legitimising EU enlargements among political elites and citizens in candidate countries? In exploring this question, the paper also considers the role of a lack or absence of political ownership in enlargement processes. Political ownership is preliminary viewed as an engagement in the practices, norms, values, and discourses of a political project.

The paper draws on two existing bodies of literature: (1) the literature analyzing the challenges and successes of post‑2000 EU enlargements, and (2) the literature on political ownership and legitimacy.

The paper is organised as follows: after introducing the research area in section 1, section 2 review and critically discuss the challenges and successes of the realisation of post-2000 EU enlargements. This is followed by a conceptual exploration of political ownership and legitimacy in sections 3 and conclusions and discussion in sections 4.