Europe on threshold of new era

When the Yugoslav wars broke out in the 1990s we watched as our neighbourhood burned because we had no means of responding to the crisis.

We learned our lesson and organised ourselves, acquiring a set of capabilities coupled with decision-making procedures and a security doctrine.

In 2003, we prevented a fresh outbreak of hostilities in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia through our diplomatic efforts and then deployed Operation Concordia.

In 2004, Operation Althea took over from the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Today, we are still deeply engaged in the Balkans, fighting organised crime and building up the institutions of law and order.

The EU’s crisis-management and peace-building activities are not restricted to its backyard.

We have made a real difference in Africa, helping, for example, to provide a secure environment for elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo and protecting refugees and aid workers from the fall-out of the Darfur crisis.

Since 2003, some 70,000 men and women have been deployed in 23 crisis-management operations.

They come from EU member states and non-EU countries that also take part in our operations, including Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Turkey and the United States.

Of these 23 missions, six have been military and the other 17 civilian.

We deploy army or navy personnel when and where they are needed but our business is peace-building not waging war.

The EU is not a military alliance.

The solution to any crisis, emergency or conflict, must always be political and our ESDP actions are always firmly anchored in political strategies, formed by consensus.

Our ESDP missions have taken us as far afield as Aceh, Indonesia, where we monitored the peace agreement reached after the 2004 tsunami, following decades of civil war.

Working closely with the Association of South-Eastern Asian Nations (ASEAN), we mediated between rebels and the government and oversaw the decommissioning of weapons.