Democracy and Judicial Reforms in South-East Europe: Between the EU and the Legacies of the Past

This book analyses judicial reforms in five countries of South-East Europe, focusing on two specific factors influencing the outcome of reforms: the role played by the European Union in the light of the pre-accession process and the legacies of past communist regimes. It aims to explain how these two factors have interacted in the last ten years in Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, accounting for similarities and differences in their paths to reform. In some cases, national factors representing the legacies of past authoritarian regimes have challenged judicial reforms and hindered EU influence; in other cases, these legacies were overcome following the route suggested by the EU. The book presents cases of new EU member states, candidate as well as potential candidate countries, allowing investigation and comparison of the power of EU conditionality in different phases of the EU pre-accession process.