THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE YUGOSLAV CONFLICT: CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND RE-INSTITULIZATION IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE

The critical foreign policy and security challenges which the European Union faces in the 1990s are the result of the tense co-existence between a highly institutionalized West and disintegrating regions in its periphery. Given the traditions of European rivalries in the historical Balkans, the Yugoslav conflict presented the emergent European defence and security policies with a particularly demanding test. This paper is a brief and tentative examination of the difficulties encountered by the EU in its pacifying efforts in the Yugoslav crisis and of the prospects for future crisis prevention and crisis management. A number of conditions have allowed national foreign policies to take precedence over the pursuit of coherent EU policies, and these conditions are unlikely to change significantly in the foreseeable future. The EU's role in preventing and regulating conflict in its periphery will depend (a) on the institutionalization of mechanisms which will prevent or restrain the "re-nationalization" of European foreign policies, and (b) on the outcomes of internal EU debates about the relations between deepening and widening.