On 12 October 2012, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, announced the European Union (EU) as the recipient of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. In his announcement speech, Jagland pointed to what the Committee saw as one of the EU’s most important achievements: “The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace” (Norwegian Nobel Committee 2012). The Nobel Peace Prize highlighted two main contributions that the EU has made to peacemaking in Europe. Created as a major peace project on its own, the EU and its preceding organisations (the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Community) have been guarantors of stability and prosperity within and among its member states, which had fiercely fought each other in two world wars. Moreover, the European Union has played an important role in stabilising Europe beyond the borders of its member states, particularly in the Western Balkans, but also in many other parts of the globe.
Often overshadowed by the visibility of the EU’s military operations and civilian missions in the framework of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the Union has also engaged in less publicly visible peacemaking endeavours such as shuttle diplomacy and mediation. In fact, the EU had numerous experiences as a mediator in various conflict settings throughout the 2000s, including the Western Balkans and the Eastern Neighbourhood (Ukraine, Georgia).
In 2009, the same year that the Lisbon Treaty came into force and reformed the EU’s foreign and security policy architecture, the Union adopted its first-ever strategic concept on mediation. The Concept on Strengthening EU Mediation and Dialogue Capacities (hereafter: the Concept), reflected the EU’s growing experience as a mediator and demonstrated the EU’s ambition to adopt a more systematic approach to mediation, including the strengthening of its capacities (Council of the European Union 2009). Moreover, the Concept makes a self-confident assessment of the EU’s added value and potential effectiveness as mediator in international conflicts:
The EU has a lot to offer as an actor in mediation. It brings value added and creates new entry points for peace initiatives through its political and financial weight and its comprehensive approach to conflict prevention and resolution, involving CFSP/ESDP [Common Foreign and Security Policy / European Security and Defence Policy] and Community instruments. The EU is in an excellent position to provide incentives to the conflict parties and can rely on its wide field presence. (Council of the European Union 2009, p. 4)
However, despite the EU’s increasing engagement as a mediator in conflicts, the EU’s role as an actor in international mediation—and its effectiveness in particular—is considerably under-researched. This book provides the first comparative analysis of the EU’s effectiveness as an international mediator. The main purpose of the book is threefold. First, it puts forward an analytical framework for investigating the EU’s effectiveness as a mediator in peace negotiations, compiled from theoretical insights derived both from mediation research and EU foreign policy studies . Second, it evaluates the EU’s effectiveness as a mediator within and across three cases: (1) EU mediation in the conflict over Montenegro’s independence, (2) EU mediation between Kosovo and Serbia in the framework of the Belgrade–Pristina dialogue , and (3) EU co-mediation in the Geneva International Discussions (GID) about the conflicts over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Third, it explains different degrees of EU mediation effectiveness within and across these cases and situates the findings both in mediation research and EU foreign policy studies .
The main finding of the book is that EU mediation has a positive, stabilising effect on conflict situations in all three cases, making renewed escalation less likely and contributing to the settlement of conflict issues. This is what I call the stabilising effect of EU mediation. Although the degree of mediation effectiveness differs across cases, this effect is traceable in all case studies. At the same time, the three case studies demonstrate that EU mediation does not automatically lead to a transformation of the relationship between conflict parties. Processes of socialisation and learning in terms of increased levels of trust and confidence-building have largely been absent. There exist significant gaps in terms of the implementation of concluded agreements, suggesting a dilemma for EU mediation effectiveness in the long term.
The empirical findings point to the centrality of mediation strategy and the conflict parties’ willingness to compromise in understanding the EU’s effectiveness as a mediator. The EU’s mediation strategy , which is often based on positive incentives and rewards, is a key instrument to influence the conflict parties’ willingness to compromise. Both factors are necessary conditions of EU mediation effectiveness . EU mediator leverage , policy coherence , mediator coordination , and the conflict parties’ internal cohesiveness all turn out to be conducive to EU mediation effectiveness , but their significance varies across the three cases. Another key conclusion to be drawn from the empirical analysis is that the conflict context has a significant influence on the effectiveness of the EU’s mediation involvement and should not be underestimated. This assessment thus reiterates calls in the literature for EU foreign policy studies to focus more explicitly on the contextual factors for understanding the EU’s effectiveness in the international realm.1
1.1 The EU’s Emergence as an International Mediator
Given the secrecy in which mediation efforts often take place and the small amount of information that is publicly available, it is not surprising that the history of the EU’s engagement in mediation activities has not yet been systematically described in EU foreign policy research. In essence, I argue in this book that the story of the EU’s emergence as an actor in international mediation can be divided into four phases —each of them displaying different EU mediation activities, both in terms of geographical and thematic focuses.
The first phase of mediation activities occurred between 1991 and 1994, when the European Community (EC) and later the EU played an active mediation role in the Yugoslavian civil wars. In June 1991, an EC Troika mission to Yugoslavia—composed of the foreign ministers of Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—supported Austria’s initiative within the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) to step up the CSCE’s involvement in the Yugoslav conflicts. The EC Troika mission achieved brokering the Brioni Agreement between representatives of Slovenia, Croatia, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 7 July 1991. The agreement comprised cease-fire arrangements that resulted in the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People’s Army from Slovenia (Lucarelli 2000, pp. 18–23).
When the implementation of the Brioni Agreement stalled and the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina began to seriously deteriorate, the EU and the United Nations (UN) jointly called the conflict parties to the ‘International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia’ in London on 26 August 1992. Although the negotiations lasted for more than two years, they did not result in a comprehensive peace agreement, as the so-called Vance-Owen Peace Plan, proposed by the mediators David Owen (EC/EU) and Cyrus Vance (UN), was finally rejected by the Bosnian Serbs . The breakdown in negotiations in April 1994 marked the end of EU efforts to mediate in the Yugoslav conflict (Lucarelli 2000, pp. 37–62).
After this period, the EU almost completely withdrew from international conflict management activity. This withdrawal can partly be explained by the EU’s concern about its relatively poor performance in preventing and then ending the Balkan Wars, in part through the perc...