“Rolling Up the Sleeves”1 How EU policy towards Serbia and Montenegro acts as the glue that holds the State Union together?

The most powerful tool of EU foreign policy in dealing with potential candidate countries (and beyond) is that of political conditionality. The successes of this policy, as well as its spectacular failures, have been largely well documented by the political science research community. Far less research, however, goes into explaining the scenarios where the EU goes “beyond conditionality” (Teokarevic 2003) in its dealings with potential candidates for membership in the EU. The goal of this paper is to explain the extremely intensive and pro-active EU involvement in the drafting of the Constitution of Serbia and Montenegro and the subsequent attempts by Brussels to determine the future nature of the union between these neighboring republics. In answering this question the paper looks at the history of EU’s involvement in the region and attempts to provide a theoretical framework that can best provide the explanation for the motivation of EU’s policy makers to utilize such a direct strategy of involvement that goes far “beyond conditionality”.The conclusions of this paper are that EU went “beyond conditionality” in dealing with Serbia and Montenegro on two levels: functional and theoretical. On the functional level, EU did not employ the principle of conditionality per se. Instead of placing conditions on Serbia and Montenegro and then cajoling the two to settle their differences (both pre-State Union agreement and post-Action Plan), EU actually went in and was actively involved, “beyond conditionality”, in resolving problems that arose from the weak State Union (harmonizing the financial systems, parliamentary referendum crisis, independence referendum rules clarification and public declarations supporting the State Union).On a more theoretical level of foreign policy preference formation, conditionality had been replaced by ‘high politics’ (similar to the cases of Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia). This can be explained both by a bureaucratic/institutional approach that draws upon neo-functionalism and the constructivist approach, in particular in terms of how the EU constructs its foreign policy preferences. The case of Serbia and Montenegro, which because of its volatility is probably the most important accession case, shows us that high politics indeed rule out in the end of the day and that the EU is read and willing to “look the other way” on a number of its own conditions, for the sake of realpolitik.