The EU has frequently presented Northern Ireland as a ‘model’ for conflict management, especially in the Balkans. The paper questions whether the EU had a strategic and coherent input into the Northern Ireland peace process through its Peace and Reconciliation Programs and argues that the rational logic of its actions hinged more on the goals of the Delors Commission for self-empowerment and competence expansion. Despite EU rhetoric, the development of EU conflict management instruments and policy since the late 1990s do not appear to be informed by the Northern Ireland ‘model’. Indeed, that model’s substantive elements – consociationalism, a lack of transitional justice, embedding sectarian structures – contravene EU norms of conflict management. The lack of transferable lesson-learning and the disjuncture between EU normative rhetoric about ‘multiethnicity’ and the realities of ethnic division are explored in the case of Kosovo.
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