Judy Batt

After the first round of the presidential election on 20 January, the prospects for Serbia’s European future look as precarious as they have ever been. Not unexpectedly, the Serbian Radical Party candidate, Tomislav Nikolic, beat incumbent President Boris Tadic by 39.96 per cent to to 35.41 per cent according to the official provisional results, which differ slightly.

Lorsque j’ai pris mes fonctions en 2002, l’Union était triomphante (lancement de l’euro, négociations du grand élargissement) et la PESC balbutiante. A la veille de mon départ cinq ans plus tard, le bilan est totalement inversé : l’Union traverse une crise majeure (de confiance, de projet, d’institutions, d’identité), mais la PESC est florissante et rares sont les crises extérieures dans lesquelles Javier Solana n’est pas sollicité.

The European Council in December 2005 welcomed the paper produced by the Council General Secretariat on Implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the context of ESDP (doc.11932/2/05). The EU Institute for Security Studies was invited to conduct a case study on gender mainstreaming in ESDP operations, with specific reference to the missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As a close observer of the short and unhappy history of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, I was often reminded of what I learned from watching the Czechs and Slovaks abandon their common state between 1989 and 1993. Although I had worked for several years on ‘Czechoslovak’ politics, I did not expect this federation to fail.