Abstract
EU/EC started out as a project to prevent further conflicts in Europe, but along the way it evolved into something much more. Not only did EU/EC manage to build impressive economic relations within its member states, but also the European Community was interested in political cooperation as well. Various attempts till 1980s described EC evolution from economic giant to also a political actor. In the beginning the EC members agreed to a loose let of guidelines for political cooperation, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War, new challenges arise – international conflicts right at the doorsteps of EU/EC. With these new challenges in mind EU/EC the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 was drafted, when EU legally became European Union and on legal basis created the Common Foreign and security policy and with every next Treaty the challenges and instruments for conflict management grew.
The main aim of this thesis is to trace the historical development of institutional changes of EU conflict management and how these changes have shaped the EU conflict management practice. Due to the nature of the research question historical institutionalism, more specifically sociological perspective of historical institutionalism was used as this theory concerned itself with historic development of institutions and institutional change. The analysis of this thesis consists of historic development and analysis of the 4 EU Treaties and 4 case studies of conflicts that took place after each of the Treaties and were in EU´s backyard. The main conclusion in the thesis was the fact that with a mostly incremental institutional change EU conflict management helped shape the EU conflict management in practice and managed to narrow the expectations-capabilities gap since Maastricht Treaty, however, it was clear that many other factors influenced how institutional changes shaped the EU foreign policy, most important one, the nature of the member states and their national interests and the need to reach consensus.