After the Fall of Wall: A Report Card on Post-Cold War European Integration - SPIEGEL O... - 0 views
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When it comes to a common foreign policy, Europe's most tragic failure was its long hesitation to intervene in the former Yugoslavia, where the continent's first genocide since the Holocaust took place during the 1990s. It was only in 1995 that the European Union decided to intervene militarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- and then only under the leadership of the United States. The Europeans finally became more active in Kosovo in 1998-1999.
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the deficiencies of European foreign policy have also been exposed in the European Union's handling of the genocides in Africa, both in Rwanda in 1994 and in present-day Darfur. The European Union and its member states were very active in expanding the protection of international human rights; they have also given their support to the international principle of the "responsibility to protect," which offers protection from genocide and massive human rights violations to the populations of all countries. But, in the past 20 years, whenever these words had to be backed up with actions, Europe has been content to let other countries, especially the United States, take the lead.
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the era of "permissive consensus" has come to an end: In other words, most Europeans are no longer willing to passively and silently accept European unification. Underscoring that point are the French and Dutch rejections of the 2005 constitutional treaty and the Irish"no" to the Lisbon Treaty in 2008.
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