EU foreign and security policy in Bosnia

The politics of coherence and effectiveness

Ana Juncos

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719082405
• eBook ISBN: 9781526102423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book represents the first ever comprehensive study of the EU's foreign and security policy in Bosnia. It also sheds new light on the role that intergovernmental, bureaucratic and local political contestation have played in the formulation and implementation of a European foreign and security policy.

1

Introduction

From the beginning of the 1990s, when the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought war back to the European continent, the development of the EU’s foreign and security policy has remained inextricably linked to the fortunes of Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). In June 1991, just days before the war in Slovenia broke out, the Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos famously proclaimed that the ‘hour of Europe’ had come and that the European Community (EC) could and would handle this crisis on its own.¹ This rhetoric was not, however, matched by decisive EC intervention in the former Yugoslavia and many voices were raised to condemn the paralysis of the nascent Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The conflict that erupted in Bosnia became a baptism by fire for the embryonic EU’s foreign and security policy (Ginsberg, 2001) and, for many years, the failure to deal with a military crisis in its own backyard became a bête noire for the EU and its ambitions to play a major role worldwide. Much has changed since then. In response to these criticisms, the European Union (EU) underwent changes in its external action by both enhancing the CFSP – including its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)² – and boosting its economic presence on the world stage through its trade and development policies. In the event, the EU’s intervention in Bosnia, and in the Balkans more generally, resulted in a transformation of its identity from that of a civilian power, to use Duchêne’s concept (1972), to one of a more muscular and multidimensional international actor making use of a comprehensive range of economic, political and military instruments in order to promote its values and objectives (European Council, 2003b).

Despite the fact that more than two decades have lapsed since the beginning of the war in Bosnia, in 2012 the political situation in the country remains fragile and the EU’s engagement is more needed than ever. Should Bosnia recede into conflict again, painful questions would have to be asked about the EU’s ability to act outside its borders, and in particular, in the realm of foreign and security policy. If the EU cannot deal with ethnic conflict in a small country in its own backyard, how can it claim to be a world player? Similarly, if the EU cannot exercise its influence in this case – where it holds out the promise of future EU membership – how can we expect it to have an impact further afield, in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Africa or the Middle East? If EU member states cannot formulate a common position and act in unison in Bosnia, how can we expect the EU to present a common front regarding other complex international issues? Policy failures such as the Libya crisis in 2011 are a constant reminder of the gap between the rhetoric of the EU as a security actor and its ability to shape international conflicts.

To date there are no scholarly analyses of the important role that the EU has played in Bosnia since the 1990s, nor of the implications of EU foreign policy in Bosnia both for the stabilisation of the Balkans and for the development of the EU as a global security actor. Although there are an increasing number of works that analyse the role of the EU in conflict resolution (Coppieters, 2004; Tocci, 2007; Diez et al., 2008), the case of the EU’s intervention in Bosnia has not received sufficient attention. By contrast, those studies that have paid attention to the EU’s role in Bosnia and, more generally, in the Western Balkans, have focused on the role of conditionality and enlargement, rather than on the CFSP proper (Domm, 2007; Noutcheva, 2009). Hence, taking a long view from 1991 to date, this book seeks to fill this gap in the literature and to provide a comprehensive analysis of EU foreign and security policy in Bosnia, using coherence and effectiveness as its main conceptual tools.

There is indeed a significant literature that describes and analyses the performance of the EU in world politics (Galtung, 1973; Sjostedt, 1977; Allen and Smith, 1990, 1998; Hill, 1990, 1993; Piening, 1997; Bretherton and Vogler, 1999; Ginsberg, 2001), utilising a whole range of concepts to capture the substance of the EU’s external activities. These include ‘presence’ (Allen and Smith, 1990), ‘actorness’ (Sjostedt, 1977), ‘impact’ (Ginsberg, 2001) and ‘international identity’ (Whitman, 1998). In particular, scholars have sought to determine ‘what kind of power’ the EU exercises in world affairs, describing the EU as a ‘civilian power’ (Duchêne, 1972, 1973), ‘normative power’ (Manners, 2002) or ‘superpower’ (Galtung, 1973). Christopher Hill (1993), for example, has coined the concept of ‘capability–expectations gap’ to refer to the difficulties of the EU’s foreign policy in responding to internal and external demands and expectations (Hill, 1998: 20–33). In Hill’s words, this capability–expectations gap ‘was seen as the significant difference which had come about between the myriad hopes for and demands of the EU as an international actor, and its relatively limited ability to deliver’ (Hill, 1998: 23). With the improvement of foreign and security capabilities undertaken in subsequent Treaty reforms, observers have argued that the concept of a ‘consensus–expectations gap’ can better encapsulate the difficulties surrounding the formulation of a successful foreign policy. From this perspective, Europe’s foreign policy problems stem from a ‘lack of cohesiveness, the capacity to make assertive collective decisions and stick to them’ (Toje, 2008: 122).

While these are important contributions in their own right, they do not tell us much about how successful EU foreign policy has actually been, in particular in relation to its coherence and effectiveness. This is an important lacuna because problems of coherence and effectiveness have been singled out in political and academic debates as undermining the EU’s aspirations to become a global security actor. For instance, the CFSP has been described, inter alia, as a ‘failure’, a ‘misnomer’, in a ‘state of paralysis’, ‘uncommon’, ‘incoherent’ and ‘ineffective’ (see European Commission, 1995; European Parliament, 1996; Gordon, 1997/1998; Peterson and Sjursen, 1998; Zielonka, 1998a, 1998b). Hence, in this book, I seek to contribute to these debates by exploring how coherent and effective the CFSP/CSDP has been over time. The key questions that this work seeks to address are: to what extent has the EU been able to speak with one voice in the case of Bosnia, or, what degree of coherence has it achieved? And, to what extent has the EU been able to achieve the objectives of its external action in the case of Bosnia, or, how effective has it been?

Any such endeavour should start with a clear conceptual framework. In order to avoid inaccurate judgements about CFSP failure/success and the snapshot analyses that have dominated in the literature to date, in this book, coherence and effectiveness are considered in terms of degree. Moreover, by distinguishing different dimensions and categories of coherence and effectiveness, one can better account for the multifaceted reality of these concepts. More importantly, the analysis set out in this book will show that these two concepts are intrinsically political and that assessments depend on who sets the criteria, when and for whom, as well as on implicit assumptions about the EU’s finalité politique. I will return to these issues in Chapter 3.

This book is not only concerned with how well the CFSP works, but also about why it either fails or succeeds. The explanatory framework of this analysis is informed by the theoretical insights of historical institutionalism. I examine the development of CFSP institutions over time as well as the ability of those institutions to deliver a coherent and effective foreign and security policy. This focus on the impact of institutionalisation processes on policy outcomes promises to contribute to both the extant institutionalist literature and scholarship on the CFSP/CSDP (Menon, 2011a). In particular, the book addresses the following questions: Do institutions matter? Has the institutionalisation of the CFSP, i.e. the development of foreign policy institutions at the EU level, increased the EU’s effectiveness and coherence in Bosnia? Or have we reached the limits of institutions?

Based on the empirical evidence provided by the case of Bosnia, I make three interrelated claims. First, that institutions have had a crucial impact on levels of coherence and effectiveness over time.³ Second, that contrary to rationalist assumptions about the purported efficiency of institutions, the increasing CFSP institutionalisation has not done away with problems of coherence and effectiveness and in some cases it has raised new ones. Unintended consequences, path dependency and obstacles to the institutionalisation of learning can be blamed in this regard. Third, I also argue that intergovernmental, bureaucratic and local political contestation have played a key role in the formulation and implementation of a European foreign and security policy.

In sum, by examining the coherence and effectiveness of the EU’s intervention in Bosnia, this book contributes to the assessment of post-conflict stabilisation and resolution in Bosnia as well as the complex and changing nature of EU foreign and security policy. More specifically, the book defends the position that the EU’s involvement in Bosnia has not only had a significant impact on this Balkan country in its path from stabilisation to integration, but has also transformed the EU and its foreign and security policy, and shaped the development of the EU’s international identity along the way.

The remainder of this chapter provides a brief overview of the conflict in Bosnia and the EU’s role to date. It then introduces the theoretical framework that will guide the analysis of CFSP activities in Bosnia. It is argued that a focus on institutions and political conflict can help us better understand the development of EU foreign and security policy in the past two decades and, in particular, the vexed issues of coherence and effectiveness.

The war in Bosnia: the darkest ‘hour of Europe’

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia not only brought back memories of the brutality and destruction of the Second World War to Europe, but it also challenged established international principles, in particular, those of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Intervention in Bosnia was particularly problematic because of the intra-state dimension of the war, which constituted a departure from the Westphalian principle of non-intervention. The conflicts in the Balkans also contributed to the post-Cold War transformation of the European security architecture, confirming the demise of some organisations such as the Western European Union (WEU), the transformation of other institutions – NATO and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – and the rise of new ones (the EU).

At the time, the response of the Western powers and institutions to the conflict in Yugoslavia was considered by many to have been ‘too little, too late’ (Woodward, 1995: 147; Buchan, 1993) and the ‘greatest collective failure’ (Holbrooke, 1998: 21). In a context of international re-alignment following the end of the Cold War, the international community, and in particular, European and American powers, failed to react in time to the events in Yugoslavia. These were especially turbulent times in the EC, where negotiations on a new treaty were in full swing. At the two parallel intergovernmental conferences opening in December 1990, the member states sought to negotiate a monetary union and a political union to better deal with some of the challenges brought about by the end of the Cold War. For its part, the US, trying to find its own place in the international arena and with its attention turned to the events in Iraq and the Soviet Union, was keen to hand the baton to the EC leaders. Some American policy-makers considered that the time had arrived for the Europeans to assume their responsibility in upholding security on the continent (Almond, 1994: 236).

American and European policy-makers thus took no notice of the worrying signs that were coming from the Yugoslav Federation or were simply preoccupied with events elsewhere.⁴ Among these signs one could mention the rise of Slobodan Milošević to power and his nationalist policies, including the abolition of the autonomy of the Vojvodina and Kosovo; the economic crisis and the tensions between the wealthier republics of Slovenia and Croatia, and the federal government; and the progressive weakening of the federal institutions, under increasing Serbian control (Biermann, 2004).

The dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation had devastating consequences for the multi-ethnic republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Until then, the three main ethnic groups, Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats had peacefully coexisted under the federal structures of Tito’s communist Yugoslavia. When Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence, tensions arose over the future of the republic, with Bosnian Serbs determined to stay within the Yugoslav Federation while maintaining their formal links to Belgrade, and with Bosniaks and Croats strongly in favour of declaring the independence of the country. A referendum on independence was held on 29 February and 1 March 1992. An overwhelming majority of Muslims and Croats voted yes (99.7 per cent); by contrast, the Serbs boycotted the referendum en masse. The EC recognised Bosnia a month later, after some hesitations among the member states and under pressure from the US. What would follow was one of the most violent European conflicts of the post-Cold War period, with more than 100,000 people killed and the creation of over two million refugees and internally displaced persons.

For most of the duration of the war, European and American policymakers disagreed about the best way to deal with the war in Bosnia. After active engagement during the early stages of the conflict under the umbrella of the EC (see Box 1.1), European countries supported UN efforts to achieve a peace agreement among the parties in the context of the International Conference on former Yugoslavia (ICFY) launched in September 1992 in Geneva. However, both the Vance-Owen and the Owen-Stoltenberg peace plans were rejected by the conflict parties. European countries also remained the main troop contributors to the UN peacekeeping mission, UNPROFOR. This caused tensions with the US who advocated a policy of ‘lift and strike’, meaning the lifting of the UN arms embargo imposed on the Yugoslav republics (which was seen as maintaining the military supremacy of the Bosnian Serb Army), along with the threat of NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. European countries, and in particular, the UK and France, rejected such a policy arguing that it would endanger their troops on the ground.

Box 1.1 Timeline: EU–Bosnia relations

• 25 June 1991: Slovenia and Croatia declare independence. Slovenia’s Ten Days War begins.

• July 1991: EC-mediated Brioni Agreement is signed. Deployment of the EC Monitoring Mission in Slovenia.

• September-December 1991: Croatian war. EC Peace Conference opens in September. Carrington Peace Plan rejected by Serbia.

• March 1992: Bosnia’s referendum on independence. The country declares its independence on 3 March.

• April 1992: EC member states recognise Bosnia. Bosnian War starts.

• January 1993: Vance–Owen Peace Plan.

• July 1993: Owen–Stoltenberg Peace Plan.

• March 1994: Washington Agreement establishes the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• July 1994: The EU Administration of Mostar commences its operations.

• July 1995: Srebrenica massacre.

• August 1995: NATO strikes against Republika Srpska’s army.

• December 1995: Dayton Peace Agreement signed in Paris. EU launches the Royaumont Process.

• April 1997: Council of the EU adopts the Regional Approach for the Western Balkan countries.

• 1999: Stability Pact and Stabilisation and Association Process launched.

• June 2000: Feira European Council endorses Bosnia’s status of ‘potential candidate’ and the prospect of EU membership.

• January 2002: Paddy Ashdown appointed as first EU Special Representative/High Representative in Bosnia.

• January 2003: European Union Police Mission launched.

• June 2003: Thessaloniki European Council confirms membership perspective for Bosnia.

• December 2004: EU military force (EUFOR Althea) deployed to replace NATO’s SFOR mission.

• 2005: Negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) between the EU and Bosnia begin.

• December 2006: Bosnia joins NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme.

• April 2008: Bosnian parliament approves police reform plan.

• June 2008: SAA signed between EU and Bosnia.

• November 2010: Visa liberalisation agreed for Bosnia.

• July 2011: Peter Sørensen appointed as Head of Delegation and EU Special Representative in Bosnia.

In 1994, the Contact Group, consisting of the US, Russia, the UK, France and Germany, was established, taking the lead in the peace negotiations. That year also saw th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and boxes
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The institutionalisation of EU foreign and security policy
• 3 The politics of coherence and effectiveness
• 4 The ‘hour of Europe’? Struggling for peace in the Balkans
• 5 The EU’s intervention in the aftermath of the war
• 6 CSDP in Bosnia: from stabilisation to integration
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index