Environmental Security for the Promotion of Pan-European Integration: The OSCE as a ‘Europeanising Actor’ in the Balkans

Abstract

After the conflicts of the 1990s, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) became one of the primary actors working towards the reconstruction and stabilisation of the Western Balkans. Yet while it also considered how to turn countries from the region into potential member states of the European Union (EU), the OSCE was unique in offering the ability to look beyond the binary division of East and West. This was an opportunity about which the OSCE was well aware. Indeed, in the post-Cold War setting it was driven to find new areas of activity to demonstrate its relevance in the new global order: the situation in the Balkans appeared to require a comprehensive security approach of precisely the kind the OSCE could offer. This chapter consequently considers the post-conflict activities of the OSCE in the Balkans through the point of view of environmental security. It shows how the OSCE carved a role for itself as a regional stability provider by launching significant environmental cooperation schemes. Its ability to do so is studied through the way it securitised environmental cooperation. The OSCE used this cooperation to reinforce regional stability and add ecological objectives to security discourse. The work thus also had normative goals that can be seen as a part of the more general efforts for the Europeanisation of the Balkan region. The chapter will therefore discuss the ways in which the OSCE used the environmental security approach for stabilisation but also set its activities to the wider context of European integration.