The Kosovo War

Abstract

The conflict in the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia ensued most dramatically in the years 1998 and 1999. It presented the EU and its main actors, France, Great Britain, and Germany, with a serious security challenge that was magnified even further by Yugoslavia’s geographic proximity. The region had proved to be a powder keg not only in the distant past but also in the recent past, as the world had to witness during the Bosnia War at the beginning of the 1990s. Now again it carried the potential for major ruptures not only in the Balkans but also in large parts of the European continent.¹