When citing, please refer to the publisher version.Evaluating EU actorness as a state-builder in 'contested' Kosovo Elena BaracaniKosovo can be considered a contested state because it has problems of both internal and external sovereignty (Krasner 2001, 2 and 6-12). Kosovo's internal sovereignty is compromised by the fact that the government is unable to govern in the Serb-populated municipalities in the north, and by the fact that it is unable to govern effectively in the rest of the country. Kosovo's external sovereignty is compromised by the fact that the international community is divided over Kosovo's independence. At the beginning of 2018, ten years after its declaration of independence, 80 out of 193 (41.5%) United Nations (UN) member states did not recognize Kosovo, including Russia and China (members of the Security Council), and five EU member states (Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain). Study of the Kosovo case is relevant also from the perspective of the EU's external relations and foreign policy. Even if it has fewer than two million inhabitants and the poorest economy in Europe, Kosovo represents, in terms of the political geography of the EU's external relations, one of the main testing grounds for its renovated foreign policy. Indeed, because Kosovo is geographically and politically closer to the EU than other contested states, it can use a wider set of foreign policy tools to foster the state-building process. Finally, from a EU foreign policy perspective, while at the time of the escalation of the conflict, neither the European Political Cooperation nor the Common Foreign and Security Policy were able to stop it, since the early 2000s Kosovo has become the site of the most comprehensive EU foreign policy approach. The content analysis presented in this article is based on qualitative sources, mainly policy documents by EU foreign policy actors (European Commission, European Council, EU Council, High Representative, and European External Action Service) on relations with Kosovo and the Western Balkan countries for the period 1999-2018, but also official documents by the United Nations on Kosovo and by the Republic of Kosovo. For the phase of EU state-building during monitored independence (2008-2012) I had the opportunity to Author's elaboration * 'Presence' refers to the general perception of the EU as a foreign policy actor and not to the specific perception of the EU by Kosovars.** Even if in the first phase Kosovo cannot be considered as a contested state, because it had not yet declared independence, the contestation issue, in the form of the dispute with Serbia on the status of Kosovo, was already present.
This article presents the main empirical findings of the analysis of the European Union’s activity for conflict prevention in three case studies – Cyprus, Kosovo and Palestine. After having clarified the meaning of conflict ‘resolution’, ‘prevention’ and ‘Europeanization’, it is proposed a classification of the main foreign policy tools at the disposal of the Union to intervene before the escalation of the conflicts, during and after it. Then, the article focuses on the empirical findings of the Europeanization of the conflicts in the case studies, and therefore not only on the instruments used and on the norms promoted, but also on the mechanisms and the conditions that have enabled or not the Union to exert its leverage.
This paper suggests an ideational perspective of new institutional leadership and applies it to the Commission's political leadership role in the policy process on EU-Turkey cooperation regarding migration during the timeframe from 2014 to 2016. For this purpose, we propose a conceptual framework -based on the causal mechanism of 'strategic framing' -, which traces how the Commission's ideas were deployed through specific instruments by its actors and networks. Therefore, this paper feeds into the claim for new institutional leadership and more specifically, regarding the Commission's political leadership, by revealing how the Commission's ideational resources have shaped some of the main policy outcomes in EU-Turkey cooperation at the time of the refugee crisis. In this paper, we understand political leadership as a process in which an actor, with institutional, ideational and personal resources, proactively mobilises to shape the policy processes and their outcomes.
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