ABSTRACT
Is Europe doomed to failure in the Balkans? This is the question which analysts could legitimately ask themselves at the beginning of the Albanian crisis of 1997. Throughout the beginning of March 1997, while Albania was sinking into anarchy, the European Union (EU) seemed to be re-enacting the scenario which had already been played out in Croatia in 1991 and then in Bosnia in 1992: the same declaratory activism, the same apparent tendency to delegate to other institutions, in this case the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations (UN), the same ill-disguised spectacle of division between the Fifteen and finally the same delay in intervening, the same absence of the Western European Union (WEU), the same return to the confusion of bilateral initiatives. The difficult construction of a joint diagnosis, rivalries between Italy and Greece, and eventually the emergence of a new international status for Italy have been major stages of the process. The institutional backing which was finally found for intervention, an ad hoc coalition authorised by the Security Council operating on the basis of a humanitarian mandate and in collaboration with the OSCE, is a much more flexible solution than common action by the Union. With the concept of lead nation and the appeal to national contingents, has Europe finally achieved in Albania what it failed to do in the former Yugoslavia, namely to define a pragmatic model of intervention.
