The European Union has made
fast progress in integrating foreign and security policy into the acquis
communautaire. A doctrinal and institutional evolution has put forward
mechanisms which are envisioned to contribute to global peace and security.
Having dispatched over 20
civilian and military peace operations, the EU seems to be eager to belie Robert Kagan who, in 2002, had concluded
with regard to actor capacity in the external facilitation of liberal order and
security: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus". The EU has
fundamentally modified its approach toward conflict resolution and crisis
management evolving from a ideational actor toward a normative one. Promoting
the capacities for military and civilian interventions, Europe has acknowledged
the need to identify and tackle global challenges like regional conflict,
organized crime and state weakness. Europe has landed on Mars.
This paradigm shift has
generated EU capabilities in the field of peacebuilding and crisis management.
Research that analyzes the EU's actor capacity in these fields is sparse. This
thesis intends to fill this gap by assessing EU peacebuilding actorness. It
relies on a theoretical approximation that incorporates multidisciplinary
insights about the preconditions of successful crisis management.
Insights from the analysis of
the institutional context of EU external action paired with empirical results
from the EU's engagement in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYROM)
reveal that the EU can resort to an institutionalized political will to act on
conflict in the 'European Elsewhere' with effective civilian and military
capabilities. Nonetheless, EU crisis management - especially civilian crisis
management - is impeded by a derailing inter-institutional relationship between
Council and Commission which negatively effects the mission's overall success.
However, as can be seen in the
case of fYROM, bottom-up policy innovations have proven to ameliorate these
effects and may thus serve as a template for institutional reform at
headquarters-level.
Florian Neutze is a graduate of the University of Constance.
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