Introduction: The Next Wave of Enlargement: The European Union and Southeast Europe after 2004

The completion of the Central and Eastern European accession process into the European Union (EU) in 2004 can in broad terms be taken to have been a considerable success in generating an enlarged European zone of peace and stability. But the experience of post-communist transformation within this region is in stark contrast to that in Southeast Europe where the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation at the end of the cold war unleashed a bloody and devastating conflict which necessitated the military engagement of the international community and culminated in a NATO-led military intervention into Kosovo in 1999. Although the EU has aspirations to develop a military dimension to its external identity, its international presence continues to be articulated predominantly through soft power, for example, diplomatic, economic and normative foreign policy instruments. The next wave of EU enlargement—if and when it happens— therefore represents a crucial contribution both to the continued creation of a stable European Order and the credibility of the EU as an effective international actor. The then still European Community (EC) had demonstrated a high degree of misplaced confidence at the start of the 1990s in relation to responsibility for managing the emerging crisis in the Balkans when Jacques Poos, the Luxembourg Foreign Minister speaking on behalf of the European Council Presidency, announced in 1991 that ‘the hour of Europe has dawned’. This statement had come at a time when the EC was negotiating the Treaty on European Union and which would lead to the creation of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). By the end of the decade and in light of Kosovo, the EU’s ability to manage conflict in its own backyard had been exposed as a myth and Europe’s continued reliance upon a US military presence was clear for all to see. Lessons have been learned. The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) established at the Cologne European Council summit in June 1999 acknowledged the need to develop an autonomous military capacity to support its international presence and the policy of common strategies agreed two years previously at the Amsterdam European Council summit in June 1997 recognised the need for greater coherence in EU foreign policy statements and the behaviour which flowed from them. The creation of a High Representative for the CFSP in 1999 as a means of coordinating the foreign policy positions of member states was a further step forward in this direction as was the European Security Strategy