Conditional recognition as an instrument of ethnic conflict regulation: the European Community and Yugoslavia

Abstract

The European Community's conditional recognition of new states in Yugoslavia in 1991±2 represents the revival of an approach to ethnic conflict management that harks back to the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the minority treaties negotiated at the end of the First World War. Despite the historic parallels, and the continued relevance of this approach to ethnic conflict regulation, scholars have given scant attention to the strategic logic governing the EC's use of recognition. This article seeks to recover the conceptual thinking behind the EC's recognition policy. It argues that however much extra-strategic considerations may have informed EC policy and however imperfectly that policy may have been implemented, conditional recognition represented a genuine attempt to address some of the presumed sources of violent conflict in the region.