The Decline of the Western European Union

Abstract

The Bosnian situation was the first important test of whether the West could act collectively to prevent aggression and ethnic conflict in the post-Cold War world. It could be said that this test had gone horribly wrong due to primarily fundamental differences of approach on both sides of the Atlantic. These discrepancies were to have consequences for the UN peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and for European±American relations in NATO, leading in the fullness of time to an agreed military intervention in the Balkans.