During the last twenty years, all the countries of Southeastern Europe have been engaged in reforming their judicial systems under Europe’s influence, exerted throughout the Enlargement process. The aim of this article is to analyze judicial reform paths and trajectories in four countries of this area: Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and Serbia. In each country, in fact, the effectiveness of the EU ’s leverage was conditioned by some intrinsic properties of EU conditionality (namely, credibility of the membership prospective and determinacy of the EU ’s recommendations). Moreover, some domestic factors and conditions coincided to strengthen (or contrarily, to hamper) the efficacy of the EU ’s influence at a national level. After reviewing the main theoretical approaches used to study EU -driven judicial reforms, this article aims to identify some explanatory factors and conditions that could account for the reform paths and outcomes in the four case studies. In conclusion, some reflections on current and future challenges to the EU rule of law promotion strategy will be presented.

中文翻译：

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欧盟驱动的东南欧司法改革十年：欧盟的杠杆作用和国内因素的利害关系

近二十年来，东南欧各国都在欧洲的影响下进行了司法体制改革，贯穿了整个扩大过程。本文旨在分析该地区四个国家的司法改革路径和轨迹：斯洛文尼亚、克罗地亚、罗马尼亚和塞尔维亚。事实上，在每个国家，欧盟影响力的有效性都取决于欧盟条件的一些内在属性（即成员资格预期的可​​信度和欧盟建议的确定性）。此外，一些国内因素和条件恰逢加强（或相反，阻碍）欧盟在国家层面影响的效力。在回顾了用于研究欧盟驱动的司法改革的主要理论方法之后，本文旨在确定可以解释四个案例研究中的改革路径和结果的一些解释性因素和条件。最后，将对欧盟法治促进战略当前和未来面临的挑战提出一些思考。