The EU’s Involvement in Conflict Prevention – Strategy and Practice.

Rummel, Reinhardt. (2004) The EU’s Involvement in Conflict Prevention – Strategy and Practice..

Abstract

[From the Introduction]. The European Union is both a pioneer of and a latecomer in conflict prevention. It is a pioneer with regard to advancing the idea of conflict prevention among the European nation states. In fact, the main purpose of the fifty year old unification process in Europe was to bind France and Germany as well as other states of the continent together in order to ensure that they would not go to war again as in the centuries before. By pooling their sovereignty around a supranational core the Member States of the EU decided to entangle their future in commonly agreed rules and institutions and to invite other European states to join the enterprise. The union has grown to fifteen and will witness the accession of ten more members in 2004, increasing the population of the EU to almost half a billion. 2 Thus, European states have turned from a tradition of belligerency and repeated fighting to a culture of co-operation and peaceful conflict resolution among themselves.