Charlemagne: Back to Bosnia

The European Union's biggest military operation, in a place of previous foreign-policy failure

ON A snowy mountain pass in Bosnia this week, Italian carabinieri set up a road-block to check passing vehicles for contraband. Resplendent in their dark-blue uniforms with red piping - to which many had added the personal touch of a goatee beard and wrap-round dark glasses - the Italians made a striking sight. But to the politically attuned observer, the most significant part of their get-up was the badges on their arms, which bore the yellow stars on a blue background of the European Union. Bosnia, the scene of perhaps the EU's biggest foreign-policy humiliation, is now the venue for the biggest test so far of its military ambitions. Last December, a 7,000-strong force under EU command, known as EUFOR, quietly took over control of peacekeeping operations in Bosnia from NATO.

When EUFOR got going, Geoff Hoon, Britain's defence secretary, declared that “Bosnia is a demonstration in practice that this [EU defence policy] can work.” Such a demonstration is devoutly wished for in Brussels, where there is a gloomy awareness that, for all the energy and resources devoted to efforts to develop the EU's global role, its common foreign and security policy continues to suffer from one troubling flaw: a tendency to collapse in time of crisis. The division between “old” and “new” Europe that opened up over Iraq is the most recent example. But the memory that really haunts the EU is its ignominious failure to deal with the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

When Yugoslavia started to break up in 1990, the EU's first response was to try to bribe its constituent elements to stay together, and to insist that Brussels would act as a stabilising force. As luck would have it, the man in temporary charge of EU foreign policy in mid-1991 was Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, whose assertion that the Yugoslav crisis was “the hour of Europe”, not of America, was swiftly exposed as empty and hubristic. European efforts to control the conflict reached their nadir in 1995, when Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to prevent the massacre of some 7,500 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian-Serb forces at Srebrenica. In the end it took an American-led military intervention by NATO to end the conflict. Symbolically enough, the accords that ended the Bosnian war were negotiated not in Brussels, but in Dayton, Ohio.

Almost a decade after Srebrenica, the EU is now trying again in Bosnia. It could be argued that the switch from NATO to EUFOR is more cosmetic than real. Although a large contingent of American troops has been replaced by Finns, some 80% of EUFOR's troops previously served in the NATO force. They simply took off their old NATO badges and replaced them with EU insignia. Nor has NATO left Bosnia completely; it retains a small force under an American general, and it even shares a headquarters building and facilities with EUFOR.

Even so, many Bosnian Muslims worry that the change from NATO to the EU could prove all too real if a fresh confrontation were once again to build. Senior European diplomats in Sarajevo admit that the Bosniaks, as they are known, regard the United States as a much more reliable protector than the EU. They were correspondingly wary about seeing America's military presence scaled back. The Americans themselves are wary for different reasons. Although their military commitments elsewhere mean that it is helpful if the Europeans take over in the Balkans, American policymakers do not like anything that might seem like a European effort to downgrade NATO.

As a result, General David Leakey, the commander of EUFOR, has a double job of reassurance on his hands. As a Briton who served with the NATO mission in Bosnia, he is well placed to reassure the Americans that EUFOR intends to work with NATO, rather than shove it aside. And as for Bosniak fears that Europe might fail them once again, General Leakey argues that it is highly unlikely that conflict will break out once again - but adds firmly that, if it does, “we could cope.”

The carrot of membership

The deployment of EUFOR is just one part of an overall strategy to stabilise the Balkans. The EU has made clear that, in the long run, all the countries of the Balkans can aspire to membership of its club, with all the stability and prosperity that it is assumed will flow from that. But before they get anywhere near that goal, all the Balkan countries have much work to do. Bosnia suffers from (official) unemployment of 45% and chronic organised crime. The final political status of Kosovo has yet to be determined. And all countries in the region have been told that they must hand over any suspects indicted by the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague before they can begin membership talks with the EU. This week Croatia was dealt a bitter blow, when the previously planned start of its membership talks was deferred indefinitely, because it has failed to hand over Ante Gotovina, a former general wanted by the tribunal.

In recent weeks, a growing number of suspected war criminals have indeed been handed over from across the Balkans. EU officials see this as a demonstration of how far countries will go to pursue the holy grail of EU membership. Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for enlargement, promises that he will make the prospect of eventual membership for all the countries of the Balkans “ever more real and tangible” over the next two years. Even in Bosnia, a country that remains bitterly divided, both emotionally and administratively, between Serb-, Muslim- and Croat-dominated areas, almost all citizens respond positively to the idea of EU membership.

Whether western Europeans, already suffering from enlargement fatigue, are ready to welcome a country as poor and troubled as Bosnia, must be an open question. Indeed the biggest risk now is that, by holding out the prospect of eventual membership, the European Union may, yet again, be making Bosnia a promise that it will find hard to keep.

Commentary feature which considers the European Union's biggest military operation, in a place of previous foreign-policy failure. In December 2004 a 7,000-strong force, EUFOR, took over control of peace-keeping operations in Bosnia from NATO.

EUFOR: Homepage http://www.euforbih.org/

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