EU in the Western Balkans: Hybrid Development, Hybrid Security and Hybrid Justice
Publisher: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
Volume: 29 pages, pdf
Description:
Since the late 1990s, and following its early diplomatic efforts to mediate in the conflict that destroyed former Yugoslavia, the EU has been a lead international actor engaged in supporting the peacebuilding process in the Western Balkans1 , after it took over both military missions and civilian roles from NATO and the UN respectively. It has deployed a full array of military and civilian instruments available under the CFSP umbrella alongside enlargement instruments specially tailored to address the legacy of armed conflicts. On the territory of former Yugoslavia, five military and civilian missions mandated to maintain safe and secure environments for the implementation of peace agreements which ended armed conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Dayton PA), Kosovo (UN Resolution 1244) and FYR Macedonia (Ohrid agreement), have been implemented. Those missions were upended by the launch of the Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) as a broader policy framework to support peacebuilding by pursuing an EU member state-building agenda. Although SAP has formally been the main framework for the EU engagement since 2001, in practice it has been paralleled by explicit instances of CFSP action outside and beyond the CSDP missions; moreover, the specifically tailored SAP conditionality works across the CFSP and enlargement policy portfolios.