EU SECURITY ENTERPRISES OF CONFLICT PREVENTION THROUGH STATE-BUILDING IN THE BALKANS: PREPARATION AND RECIPE FOR ENGAGEMENTS IN THE EUROPEAN NEIGHBOURHOOD?

Year 2006, Volume: 11 Issue: 3, 59 - 78, 01.10.2006

Csaba Törö

Abstract

During the recent years of gradually deepened engagements and the parallel development of EU crisis management capabilities some valuable European experience and a pattern of stabilisation methods have emerged. Regional conflicts and states weakened by ethic divisions and secessionist forces represent clear and declared challenges to European security. In the course of the crisis management enterprises in Macedonia and Bosnia, the European Union and its partners in operational and structural prevention have undertaken complex state-building exercises with the rearrangement of the political and constitutional structures of states formerly threatened or devastated by escalating ethnic conflicts. The applied instruments and the sustained results pacified the affected states and provided a certain “recipe” of the requisite and general conditions of conflict settlement. This prescription may be adopted as a reference example for conflict settlement and state-building undertakings in other instances of protracted ethnic separatism and antagonism in the Southern- Caucasus as a hopefully emerging area of increasing European security engagements

Keywords

Prevention, security, state-reconstruction, European experience, transformative effects.