EU conflict management in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia

The failed European attempts to handle the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were, according to the large majority of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) scholars, the first real push for European foreign policy makers more actively to seek to develop a common European Union (EU) approach to dealing with violent ethnic conflicts in the Union’s near abroad. The atrocities in the Western Balkans had illustrated the inadequacy of the tools available to the Union at the time and left the EU embarrassed. After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came to the rescue of the EU for the second time over Kosovo in 1999, the EU was eager to develop its own conflict management capabilities, and consequently did so with the Yugoslav experience in mind and reflecting past and present failures, as well as a few successes, in the Western Balkans. The EU’s approach to violent ethnic conflicts thus arguably being born and bred in the Balkans, the Union’s experience in this region is therefore an important aspect of any debate on the EU’s potential future global role as a conflict manager. This chapter examines the EU’s capabilities and recent track record in dealing with the ethnic conflicts in the Western Balkans and demonstrates how the EU’s successes and failures in this respect are a function of its own capabilities as well as the specific contexts in which the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Macedonia have evolved.