THE QUEST FOR COHERENCE IN EU CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS: THE CASE OF SOUTH OSSETIA

The paper assesses the EU crisis management in the South Caucasus with a particular focus on the South Ossetian conflict. The EU engagement in the South Caucasus dates back to 2003, when the region gained importance for the EU as an energy transportation corridor between East and West, as well as for security purposes, in terms of building "a new chain of friends" outside the EU borders. At the same time the EU introduced a wide range of institutional structures and coordination mechanisms over multiple policy domains of crisis management. In contrast, the increased EU presence in the region did not contribute to coherent crisis management in South Ossetia. The involvement of multiple institutional actors in the planning and implementation phases of CFSP and Development Aid has increased the institutional fragmentation within EU's crisis management architecture creating a need to establish coherence in their actions. The paper argues that the incoherence in EU crisis management is undermined by the overlapping mandates of EU institutional agents in the two main policy areas: the EU's Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP) and Development Aid Policy (DAP). The impact of the mandate overlaps on incoherence is empirically analysed through the prism of the bureaucratic politics theoretical framework.