Ten Years of EU-Driven Judicial Reforms in Southeastern Europe: The EU Leverage and Domestic Factors at Stake

During the last twenty years, all the countries of Southeastern Europe have been engaged in reforming their judicial systems under Europe’s influence, exerted throughout the Enlargement process. The aim of this article is to analyze judicial reform paths and trajectories in four countries of this area: Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Serbia. In each country, in fact, the effectiveness of the EU’s leverage was conditioned by some intrinsic properties of EU conditionality (namely, credibility of the membership prospective and determinacy of the EU’s recommendations). Moreover, some domestic factors and conditions coincided to strengthen (or contrarily, to hamper) the efficacy of the EU’s influence at a national level. After reviewing the main theoretical approaches used to study EU-driven judicial reforms, this article aims to identify some explanatory factors and conditions that could account for the reform paths and outcomes in the four case studies. In conclusion, some reflections on current and future challenges to the EU rule of law promotion strategy will be presented.