ABSTRACT
Having clean hands – poet Charles Péguy (1873-1914) once pointed out – can also mean having no hands.1 This is a fitting image of the EU handling of the Kosovo conflict. When the Kosovo war broke out, the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) was still in its infancy.2 Although much has been written on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, the role played by the European Union has received notably less attention. This is due, not least, to the increasingly low profile of the EU as the situation came to the brink of, and then descended into, war. As tensions escalated, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) was overshadowed by the Contact Group, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and great power politics. The Kosovo war is of special interest to the study of the American influence on EU security policies since the conflict was the first “live fire” test for the ESDP, which after all had been constructed in response to a near-identical set of conflicts in the Balkans only a few years earlier. It was therefore unsurprising that the EU was eager to redeem itself by playing a leading role in resolving the Kosovo question. This chapter shows that, despite the limited role played by the EU, the crisis was a defining moment in the construction of the European security policy dimension because it strengthened the determination among the member states to make the EU a more effective strategic actor.
