Europe’s foreign policy supremo, Federica Mogherini, is off on a mission even more difficult than getting Iran and the US to agree their nuclear deal, writes Denis MacShane.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Minister for Europe and the Balkans who visits the region regularly.

Mogherini is in the Western Balkans which still more than 20 years after the worst post-war mass murder of innocent citizens at Srebrenica remains Europe’s most problematic region.

Foreign ministers and leaders from the big EU countries have gradually lost interest in helping the Western Balkans find a way out of their enduring conflicts.

As long as there is no war or violence Berlin, London, Paris and Rome switch off. Instead it is down to Mogherini to try and show that Europe has a foreign policy that can bring a final peace settlement to the region of Europe

In the 1990s it showed how nationalism could spiral into open war and more than a million asylum-seekers cascaded across the Alps – the first great movement of people now duplicated by those fleeing violence in the Middle East or poverty and tyranny in Africa.

She is not helped by EU member states like Spain which refuse to recognise Kosovo even as 120 UN states now have. The fiction that Kosovo is some kind of integral part of Serbia that has temporarily left rule by Belgrade can no longer be asserted with a straight face.

http://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/opinion/balkan-mission-impossible-for-mogherini/