ABSTRACT
In April 1993, the civil war was raging in Bosnia. Soldiers were killed on the battlefield, civilians fled, and the country was devastated. In that context, the European Union strived to bring the conflict to an end through mediation. The mediators, the former British member of Parliament and Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen, together with a representative from the United Nations, former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, facilitated communication between the parties, held meetings with the leadership and designed a peace plan, called the Vance-Owen Plan. The belligerents initially signed the plan, but the Bosnian Serb Assembly soon after failed to ratify it. The mediators were deemed inefficient and unsuccessful (Greenberg and McGuinness, 2001). The failure was partly due to the fact that the third party mediators possessed very little leverage over the belligerents. Although a strategy for the mediators to increase the leverage over the belligerents would have been to threaten to disengage from the conflict and leaving the parties to their own destiny, such a strategy could not be used since their commitment to the mediation effort itself hindered them to withdraw. Indeed, Burg (2005) argues that the right response of the mediators to the failure of the conflicting parties in Bosnia to accept the Vance-Owen plan should have been withdrawal from the third party efforts. However, ‘the sponsoring states had committed troops, treasure, and prestige to the mediation effort, leading them to block any alternative other than to continue that effort’ (Burg, 2005: 206). Paradoxically, the mediators’ commitment to the mediation process made them in some sense less efficient as mediators.
