Soft Power of the EU and Montenegro

This thesis is based on a soft power theory as introduced by Joseph Nye, jr. and its use by the EU in relation to Western Balkans and particularly Montenegro. The extent of the EU's soft power is compared by means of its attitude to the country during the three key events of the recent Montenegrin history. EU's soft power cannot be associated with the introduction of euro in 2002. However, it was fully in force while the Montenegrin Independence referendum was held in 2006. The negotiations on the EU candidate country status showed that the soft power could be strongly limited by the country's inner political and institutional barriers. The thesis deals with the distribution and effectiveness of the EU's financial support to Montenegro. It focuses mainly on CARDS and IPA instruments as the main resources for institutional building and judicial reform. The EU's official evaluation of the reform is compared to opinion polls and the experience of Montenegrins that prove a high level of corruption in the country and very slow institutional change. This experience in the field is further confronted with New Development Economics theory and confirms that anti-corruption initiatives and institutions cannot be easily exported from the EU. The last part of the thesis is devoted to the soft power and its future in the field of higher education and international student mobility that could change the current exogenous character of the institutional building into endogenous. This part focuses on Montenegrin and Western Balkan participation in international mobility programs, such as Tempus, Erasmus Mundus and CEEPUS. It comes to a conclusion that the current exchange and mobility numbers in the region have not been high enough to observe an influence on the institutional change and that is why for this region the Nye's hypothesis still remains a theory.