ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together the findings of the three case studies explored in the book. It argues that a common ‘ethnic conflict’ paradigm underpins the European Union’s approach to conflict resolution in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo, drawing on Brubaker’s concept of ‘groupism’ to describe the lens through which ethnicity is understood by EU actors. This paradigm has informed an approach to conflict resolution that has involved the institutionalisation of ethnic difference, which the chapter argues is a strategy of conflict regulation rather than conflict transformation. The chapter also reflects on the extent to which the EU’s approach in the Western Balkans exhibits evidence of policy learning, suggesting that if learning has occurred, then it has done so alongside a context that was more permissive of less rigid institutional designs. Claims about policy learning can also be seen as part of a strategy of policy legitimation, which is also seen in discourse that the constructs a positive self-image of the EU as a conflict resolution actor and frames the types of institutions it promotes as European through the drawing of parallels with the nature of the Union itself.
