EU Crisis Management in the Western Balkans

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the countries of the former Yugoslavia have experienced a series of violent conflicts leading to the break-up of a country that had been praised as a model for the management of ethnic diversity. On top of that, the self-determination claims that were at the heart of the conflicts in the 1990s continue to strain relations between ethnic groups within and beyond the region. Kosovo may be the most obvious case at the moment, but there are latent tensions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Southern Serbia, Sandjak, Vojvodina, and Montenegro, and it is unclear what impact the resolution of Kosovo’s final status will have on them.

Against this complex background the European Union, and its predecessor the European Community, sought to assert its emerging political and economic power in the management and resolution of the region’s various overlapping conflicts. But despite attempts from the early 1990s onwards to broker a settlement that would have prevented the violence that ensued in the disintegration of Yugoslavia, much of the Union’s engagement with the region during the last decade of the twentieth century was anything but a success. The policy of conditional recognition of new states was unable to influence actions on the ground, while various EU-sponsored and co-sponsored peace deals for Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as the Lisbon Plan (1992), the Vance-Owen Plan (1992-1993), and the 'principles for future constitutional arrangements for Bosnia and Herzegovina' (1993-1994), floundered. It was only after the Dayton Accords of 1995, and even more so after the NATO intervention over Kosovo in 1999 that the EU began to play an increasingly important and successful role as regional peace maker and mediator of conflicts in the Western Balkans. No matter which perspective one takes on the Union’s crisis management policy, it remains the largest donor (with over €6 billion spent in the region since 1992) and the organisation with the biggest presence throughout this region. The stabilization thus achieved over the past years, partly in cooperation with third parties, is no least a result of the EU’s ability and willingness to offer credible prospects of association and eventually membership to all countries of the region.

Current EU capabilities appear to be sufficient to take on tasks of the kind required in the Western Balkans–limited peace-keeping operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia, and police support and training missions in these two countries. In addition, the EU has a significant military and police presence in the region and is a major player in the Kosovo final status negotiations under the auspices of the UN. The EU has been able to mobilize the personnel, hardware and funds needed to sustain these various missions. It has put in place the institutional framework and instruments required to make the necessary decisions and proved itself capable of cooperation and coordination within its own structures as well as with third parties. It is equally important in this context to bear in mind that since the failure of crisis management in the early and mid-1990s, the Union’s capabilities have improved significantly, enabling it now to undertake both civilian and military operations. In contrast to the early 1990s, the EU is now much better able to back up its diplomatic efforts with credible threats of force where necessary.

This relatively positive assessment of EU crisis management capabilities in the Western Balkans after 1999, however, must not be taken as a general indication of the readiness of the Union to manage crises elsewhere with similar degrees of success. While it is undoubtedly true that the Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy has improved in its coherence, this does not necessarily translate into significant increases in effectiveness. In Macedonia, for example, it could be argued that early-stage crisis management, despite the mobilization of significant resources, failed, and that it was only after violent conflict had erupted that crisis management succeeded in brokering a deal–and even then only with the backing of NATO, precisely because the EU’s military capabilities at that time were not yet operational and it had to rely on NATO for credible back-up. Likewise, the EU’s more recent relative successes in the Western Balkans do not reflect only improved crisis management capabilities. The EU’s policy conditionalities are much more effective vis-à-vis countries for which the promise of closer association with, and potentially accession to, the EU is credible, and where political elites and publics are ready to make compromises in order to facilitate accession.

In other words, the success of EU crisis management in the Western Balkans must be seen in a broader context, in which crisis management is only one element in a comprehensive approach to a region. Without a clear long-term commitment of the EU to the Western Balkans, the incentives for cooperation by political elites and the various ethnic groups they represent would be less powerful. Without this commitment the Union’s ability to elicit short- and long-term compliance with its goals, which has been a major factor in the success of its crisis management operations so far, would be seriously diminished.

The commitments to build effective crisis management capabilities made by EU member states on paper have not yet been tested to the full. The two police missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia are operating with only about 10 percent of the total number of police officers committed by EU member states, and the two military operations in these two countries similarly are operating with only around 12 percent of the total troops promised. At the same time, the EU is now, for better or worse, locked into a framework of cooperation with NATO which will perpetuate its dependency on NATO resources. This may significantly reduce the Union’s capabilities for autonomous action in situations where NATO resources are stretched, or where disagreement within NATO prevents the use of certain resources by the EU.

A final factor limiting the generalizability of the relative success of recent EU crisis management operations in the Western Balkans is at the same time one of the very reasons for the EU’s success there–familiarity with, and sensitivity towards, the situation in the region and the countries concerned, long-standing networks of information sources, and previous experience in dealing with the political elites and populations in the area.

Nevertheless, even the limited crisis management operations that the EU is currently conducting in the Western Balkans are very valuable for the Union’s future role as a serious international actor. While it might be too early to proclaim the overall success of EU conflict management in the region of the former Yugoslavia, there are some indicators suggesting that success might not elude the Union on this occasion. First of all, institutional reforms within the Union (such as the revisions to the Common European Security and Defence Policy by the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the agreement, and gradual implementation of the Helsinki Headline Catalogue, the establishment of a rapid reaction funding mechanism, and institutionalized cooperation with NATO on sharing assets and information) have furthered the development of credible crisis management policies and instruments. Second, the EU’s overall approach to the conduct of international affairs–combining multilateralism (both within and outside the EU), capacities for short-term crisis management with long-term structural conflict prevention, and appropriate balance between civilian and military strategies–has been shown to be effective. Third, by highlighting the remaining deficiencies in EU crisis management capabilities, the Union’s experiences in the Western Balkans offer lessons for the future that should be considered before engaging in more ambitious and demanding operations elsewhere in the world.

Yet, there are also some important global lessons to be drawn from the EU's crisis management experience in the Western Balkans. First among them is the necessary recognition that crisis management without credible military back-up is likely to fail in the face of adversaries on the ground determined to realize their maximum goals by military means. Second, and equally importantly, coercive diplomacy, and military intervention, alone are unable to offer long-term peace and stability. What is needed additionally is a strategy for post-conflict reconstruction and peace building that, while it may still rely on military enforcement mechanisms, also provides incentives to erstwhile adversaries to engage constructively with one another and with the international community. A third lesson extends to the need for multilateral cooperation. The resources, skills, and knowledge that the international community collectively brings to the table are invaluable for successful crisis management and conflict resolution. Influence on local actors, knowledge of particularities of specific conflicts, and intelligence on the intentions of various factions are as important as the military hardware and diplomatic personnel necessary to succeed in crisis management and conflict resolution.

The microcosm of the Western Balkans thus can be seen almost as a laboratory of crisis management and conflict resolution. The policies developed and employed here since the 1990s may not be directly transferable to other conflict-ridden regions such as the Caucasus, the Great Lakes Region, the Horn of Africa or the Middle East, but they offer valuable lessons from failures and successes that the crisis managers of the future will ignore at their peril.