ABSTRACT
Despite the strategic and economic interest in Yugoslavia (guarantee of the geopolitical balance in the Balkans, an important trading partner, an overland link between Greece and other member countries), the EC initially underestimated the gravity of the situation, and was convinced that the crisis could be confined internally and briefly resolved by the federal government. According to the position of the Commission and the Council it was necessary to: maintain the unity and territorial integrity of the country, in compliance with the same EC model in which different peoples lived in peace; not internationalize the crisis; strive to ensure stability in negotiating with the federal government; not suspend aid and encourage the process of political and economic reforms. The EC did not immediately sense the danger of an explosion of the virulent ethnic nationalism and the determination of Milošević to create the Greater Serbia and of the breakaway republics to gain independence. After Slovenia’s declaration of independence, a division emerged within the EC, between Germany (and Austria) – in favour of recognition of the new
Mitteleuropean State, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, open to trade with the German area – and other Member States, opposed to it for fear of the refugee flow, the secessionist contagion within them (especially in the United Kingdom, France, Spain) and in the USSR, the expansion of united Germany’s influence in the Balkans, and the formation of a new area of instability. The European countries were split between supporters of territorial integrity, and consequently of the federal government as a stabilizing factor in the region, and the supporters of the principle of self-determination. The division among the Member States made it difficult to develop a common European policy and an effective solution to the crisis. With the worsening of the situation and the display of the breakaway republics’ determination in pursuing secession and the inability of the federal government to find a solution, it became apparent that the EC had to take on the problem. The President of the Council of Foreign Affairs, Jacques Poos, said optimistically in May 1991: ‘This is the hour of Europe. It is not the hour of the Americans’ an assertion which was met by a wide consensus from international diplomacy and the US itself.
