Institutionalism, intergovermentalism and beyond: Compromise building mechanisms in EU enlargement processes EU Council negotiations on Serbia's EU accession

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the negotiations at the technical level in the EU Council and to determine how all 27 EU member states eventually accepted compromise solutions during these negotiations. For this purpose, I discuss the negotiations taking place in 2015 and 2016 in the Council’s Working Party on Enlargement (COELA) regarding several key negotiating chapters for Serbia’s accession to the EU process. Having participated as an active actor in these negotiations, I use Participatory Action Research (PAR) as my primary methodology, while I revisit my findings through semi-structural interviews in 2019 and 2020. I examine negotiations taking place in COELA using theories of intergovernmentalism, institutionalism and power from Moravcsik, Thomas and Foucault. I use Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism to analyse the formation of national preferences and the configuration of national mandates, on the basis of which member states interact in the working party. I also argue that Thomas’s normative institutionalism can help in our understanding of what moves member states towards compromise solutions to be identified and away from divergent national preferences. However, I conclude that, particularly in the technical negotiations, this is not sufficient. Based on the work of Foucault, I show that procedural coercive instruments need to be used and that these played a significant role in the negotiations I discuss regarding Serbia’s key accession chapters.