The EU and ethno-political conflicts: a secure Europe in a more peaceful neighbourhood?

The EU is aware of the fact that promoting peace in its surrounding circle of states is essential for both its internal security and its broader foreign policy goals. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe and assess the EU's activity to build peace in its neighborhood. At present the EU has both short-term instruments to manage conflict escalation and post-conflict rehabilitation, as well as long-term instruments for the prevention of conflict escalation and for building peace. While the EU's crisis management capabilities have developed recently, since the late 1990s, instruments for conflict prevention are part of the first pillar. These are 'structural conflict prevention' tools used by the EU to tackle the root causes of the conflict. The concept of 'structural conflict prevention' is very close to notion of 'conditioned anchoring' on the conflicting parties used in this chapter, which can be defined as a process in which an external actor keeps close to itself a conflicting party, offering some incentives in exchange for the respect of certain conditions for the settlement of the conflict. This chapter describes the EU-conditioned anchoring on the conflicting parties, trying to assess its potential and limits in favoring a positive transformation of the conflict parties' behavior. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the South Ossetia conflict have been selected as case studies because of their relevance in the areas in which they are located.