EU carrots counterpoise to bombing

When the EU's leaders met on Wednesday to discuss Kosovo they had two strategic political priorities. The first was to launch a political counterpart to the military campaign by reintegrating the UN into the search for peace.

That they did by inviting the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to their meeting and endorsing a strategy aimed at wooing Russia's backing for a UN resolution and then for a multinational force to oversee any peace agreement on the ground.

The second priority had short-term and long-term dimensions - to assume political leadership for the EU itself by placing the Union in the driving seat of any peace process, and to say that European security must now, decisively, become primarily Europe's responsibility.

The humiliation of the EU in Bosnia as a support player to the US has rankled for some time. Now Europe's leaders are determined that it will not be so again. The US will remain the most valued and indispensable partner, but the idea is to reverse the roles.

This ambition poses serious and much more immediate challenges to Irish politicians to re-examine our security strategy and traditional assumptions about neutrality than anyone could have expected even six months ago. Kosovo has transformed the nature of the Union's recently reinvigorated internal debate on a "European Security Dimension" from a theoretical discussion into an imperative.

And it has brought into the heart of its council - and earlier in the day to the meeting of Europe's socialist leaders - the sort of military-strategic discussions which only a few years ago would have been inconceivable - with, it must be said, the full support of Ireland and all the neutrals.

That new ambition strongly coloured the nature of Wednesday's initiative. Hence the offer, emanating from French proposals, that the EU would be willing, if asked, to administer Kosovo on the UN's behalf in any interim peace deal - the French were using the words "EU protectorate".

Hence too the proposals unveiled last Thursday for the convening with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe of a Balkan peace conference and with it the implicit promise of both massive EU aid for reconstruction, a new "Marshall Plan", and the carrot of eventual EU and NATO membership.

And it's not just a question of pumping in money. The EU strategy is more elaborate and subtle and very much coloured by its own history of resolving the post-war conflicts between France and Germany by fostering incrementally regional economic interdependence between former enemies. This is the "European model".

Many of the EU programmes for the Northern Ireland peace package are conditional on cross-community involvement in projects. So too, in establishing a post-war order in the Balkans, the Union will tailor funding to reward regional co-operation.

Although the German paper on Thursday did not elaborate on the costs of such a strategy, a paper by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a Brussels-based think-tank, suggests the costs of a pre-accession aid strategy for the Balkans, if it mirrored the Agenda 2000 proposals for the acceding countries of central and eastern Europe, would work out at some £4 billion a year.

These are serious incentives to all the parties of the region, Serbia included, to begin gradually to develop friendly relations with their neighbours, an important carrot to counterpoise to the stick of military bombing. This weekend's informal Finance Ministers' meeting will take a first look at the means available.