The European Union and the former Yugoslavia: the development of European foreign policy?

The successive conflicts in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards represented one of the most significant challenges for the European Union in the immediate post- Cold War context. This experience also coincided with the most intense period of development of the EU's formal external competences. The aims of this thesis are to establish what actions the EU took in relation to four conflicts that broke out in the former Yugoslavia; to determine the extent to which the nature of this involvement changed over time; and to examine how the identified patterns of activity might be best characterised. The objective of this characterisation of the EU's involvement in the fonner Yugoslavia is to consider how it has progressed, as distinct from other international actors, including its own member states. Four periods are considered corresponding with the conflicts in Slovenia/Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and the FYR of Macedonia. The extent to which the EU's policy towards the former Yugoslavia is evidence of an emerging European Foreign Policy is then considered, through a discussion of the extent to which key features associated with the notion of 'foreign policy' are identifiable in this particular case. In conclusion it is argued that by 2001 the EU had developed what can be characterised as a limited and context specific, but nevertheless distinctive, foreign policy.