The thesis deals with the selective involvement of the European Union (EU) in bilateral disputes within the accession process. It does so through a comparative analysis of two vertical bilateral disputes between a member state and a candidate country, namely the border dispute between Slovenia and Croatia and the identity dispute between Bulgaria and North Macedonia. The empirical part of the thesis, based on a qualitative content analysis of primary EU documents, is structured through three explanatory mechanisms, namely rationalist institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and the theory of rhetorical entrapment. The results show that EU involvement does not depend on the severity of the bilateral dispute, but on the overlapping of the three explanatory mechanisms. In the Croatian case, the mechanisms operated in a complementary manner, which enabled active mediation and the procedural separation of the dispute from the accession negotiations. In the case of North Macedonia, however, the mechanisms operated in a constraining manner, as the identity-based nature of the dispute nullified the possibility of effective strategic and rhetorical pressure, leading to a politically positioned involvement of the EU and the partial institutionalisation of Bulgarian demands within the common negotiating framework. The results of the thesis show that EU’s involvement in bilateral disputes is selective and structurally conditioned. The current EU enlargement framework does not have a reliable institutional mechanism for addressing bilateral disputes, which reduces the predictability of the accession process and creates a risk of further bilateralisation.
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