The European Commission has many times played a mediation or negotiation-support role in third countries or sometimes between two member states but, to the knowledge of various sources contacted by EUROPE, including Nicholas Whyte, former government adviser in mediation processes in Kosovo, Montenegro and South Sudan, never between a region and a member state.
“The answer is very simple: no”, said Whyte when asked whether the Commission had previously played a mediation role between a member state and one of its regions. “The only example which seems to me to be closest to this situation would be Cyprus, where the Commission played an active role in finding a reunification agreement”, he said, given that, in the event of reunification, the acquis communautaire would have to be implemented in the north of the island, the Turkish Cypriot part. Currently, the negotiations on the reunification of the island of Cyprus are at a standstill following the latest breakdown in July because of disagreement on the arrangements for the withdrawal of Turkish troops from the north (see EUROPE 11820).
Whyte said that the European Union did not mediate in Northern Ireland in 1998 either – the Americans, Canadians and Finns played that role – but it did facilitate implementation through the PEACE programme.
Another European source would appear to back up that analysis, confirming that the European Commission had already acted as a mediator between two member states but not, to his knowledge, between a region and a member state. At the start of the year, the Commission mediated between Portugal and Spain over Spanish government plans to build a nuclear waste storage plant at Almaraz. In February, during a site visit by the Commission and the Portuguese authorities, Spain agreed to share environmental and security information on the project (see EUROPE 11779), thus breaking the deadlock.
Commission lacking neutrality to be able to play mediation role on Catalonia. For the diplomat, it would be difficult for the European Union, and notably the Commission, to become the mediator, as Catalonia has requested. “As for Catalonia, I don’t think the European Commission will act against the interests of a member state”, he said. “The money comes from the member state, not the region”, he added. This would be problematical, in his view, because to play the role of mediator, one has to be neutral. The Catalan representative to the European institutions Amadeu Altafaj, told a group of journalists a few days ago that the Catalan government was looking for a “European and non-European” solution (see EUROPE 11874).
Expertise in mediation between third countries. The EU has, however, experience of mediation beyond its borders. “The Iranian agreement and the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo are the most famous cases where the EU led or partially led the negotiations, and the EU also played a role in the negotiations in Georgia”, a European source working in the domain of mediation said.
Julian Bergmann, a researcher at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, suggested in an article published on the Sustainable Security internet site on 17 June that the European Union had developed an institutional framework, the “Concept on Strengthening EU mediation and Dialogue Capacities” to formalise the European approach to mediation, which is implemented by the Mediation Support Team (MST), formed within the European External Action Service in 2011. In Bergmann’s view, the EU was “relatively effective” in the case of Kosovo but less so in the case of Georgia. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)