INFORM asked to what extent the harmonisation and transposition of EU rules and regulations within the national, legal, political and economic systems of Western Balkan (WB) societies lead to substantive changes in practices and procedures, or alternatively, to what extent the imported rules remain ‘empty shells’ with little influence on social life. We proceeded from the hypothesis that informal practices derive from a number of sources, including experience with superficial or incomplete reform, compensating for formal systems that do not function, and preservation of informal power in the economic and political spheres.
What we, and other researchers (e.g. Mungiu-Pippidi 2005, Richter and Wunsch 2019) noticed is that as WB countries move closer to the EU, the gap between formal and informal institutions is not getting smaller, but, in fact, ever wider. On one hand, this originates from the increasing need of these countries to harmonize their own legislation with the EU acquis communautaire and to adapt themselves to the way the EU functions. And on the other hand, it derives from the inability of the governments of these countries to substantively apply legal, political and economic solutions imposed by the process of joining the EU.
The gap between legal resolutions in the formal sphere and actual informal practice presents the risk that the process of transition and European integrations might represent yet another incomplete and abandoned attempt to transform Balkan societies. Without understanding “how these societies really work” there is a real danger that this transformation attempt will end with construction of the “modern” façades of “market” economy and political “pluralism” (fully in line with Copenhagen criteria), behind which the everyday life, still burdened with informal economy, political clientelism, ethnic tensions, gender inequalities, and social exclusion, will continue to unfold. This represents the key challenge to the European integration of Balkan societies.
What we encountered in all our studies is the existence in WB of a system of clientelist relationships on a mass scale, at the core of which stand political parties. The precondition for the immersion of the entire society in a network of clientelistic exchange is the domination of party and financial oligarchies over the executive branch of government, exercising control over the parliament, judiciary and the media, and the systematic dismantling of democratic mechanisms which are meant to provide oversight for the executive branch of government. Some people and some groups use this situation of “captured resources” to extract their profits (in public administration, healthcare, the public sector, police, courts, the educational sector…), while others develop alternative informal networks (friends, relatives, local connections, pseudo-tribal networks) to get access to resources or to self-govern their life outside of the formal institutional system. The result is the omnipresence of informal practices in the societies of the WB.
So we might say that the main source of informal practices in the societies of the WB and the basic obstacle to the European integrations of these societies is the practically limitless influence of the political field over all other social fields, for which laws often do not represent a hindrance.
The project goals were both scholarly, to advance research in the area of informality with detailed data on Southeast (SE) Europe, and practical, to provide policy recommendations to the states of the region and the EU.
