Democracy, security and European Union enlargement: rhetorical articulation in Albania’s accession negotiations

The EU enlargement policy’s ‘geopolitical turn’ has prompted reappraisal of established concepts, including rhetorical action. Originally defined as the strategic use of norm-based arguments to pressure political actors into upholding the EU's liberal-democratic order, this article argues that rhetorical action can also be deployed to pressure them into aligning with the EU's response to external security threats. In turn, the co-existence of two rhetorical action modes – liberal-democratic and geostrategic – opens up the possibility of rhetorical entrapment through articulation, i.e., entrapping political actors into conceding outcomes they would otherwise oppose by holding them to the inconsistencies between their commitments to two potentially conflicting normative sets. Empirically, we draw on thirty-seven interviews with government officials involved in EU-Albania accession negotiations to provide actor-level evidence of two instances of successful entrapment. Our findings show that EU negotiators deployed rhetorical articulation to secure Albania’s geostrategic alignment beyond what accession criteria require, while Albanian negotiators deployed it to secure new rewards in negotiations beyond what merit-based conditionality would warrant. In doing so, this article advances rhetorical action theory, explains Albania's recent rise as accession frontrunner and contributes to relational approaches to enlargement highlighting the agency of candidate member states.