ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the European Union’s contribution to conflict resolution in Kosovo. It highlights how the EU’s role has grown significantly since the conflict of 1999, and that the Union is now seen as the main international actor in post-independence Kosovo, tasked with establishing what it describes as a ‘multi-ethnic society’. The main strategy that the EU has followed in pursuit of this goal, the chapter argues, is one of decentralisation of power to Serb-majority municipalities to persuade Serbs to accept the authority of the Kosovo state in exchange for significant autonomy. The vision of multi-ethnic integration that the EU has pursued is therefore a minimal one that accepts a significant degree of social and geographic segregation between ethnic Albanian and ethnic Serb communities, rather than a more transformative one. The chapter also considers the role of funding for civil society organisations, which is sometimes presented as an important facilitator of reconciliation, casting doubt on the extent to which EU officials place faith in this mechanism of conflict transformation. The sort of framing of political institutions as European seen in the Bosnian and Macedonian cases is largely absent from the EU’s discourse on Kosovo, largely because its role has been implementing institutions that were established as a result of the UN’s Ahtisaari Plan, rather than designing them from scratch. EU actors have, however, framed the ongoing process of dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia’s governments through reference to the historical process of reconciliation between EU member states.
