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Due to the fact that the EC/EU declared itself a guardian of democracy and human rights, it has found it difficult to turn its backs on genocides and atrocities that the world faced after the end of Cold War. European armed forces have thus become deeply involved in the international crisis management. How effective these efforts were is a topic of this study, which has attempted to test EC/EU involvement in four major foreign crises that required a full range of crisis management tools to become solved. Conclusions of this study are rather surprising; challenging a conventional thought about an overall weak performance of the EC/EU in foreign policy, and in international crisis management particularly. The result of this study points to the fact that an unprecedented character of the EC/EU can often lead to the serious understatements about its capability to act, and that to condemn its actorness based on the traditional state-centric approaches would be too simplistic.

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Lenka Eisenhamerová, MA MES: Studied European Studies at Maastricht and Aachen University. Currently employed as a PhD research fellow at Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, the Netherlands.

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