I had a Bulgarian student in yesterday asking me questions for her thesis about the EU’s role in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Macedonia. An interesting trio, and I think it will not be an easy task for her to pull parallels out of them.

Very often people come to me and ask what the master solution for conflicts like these is. I reply that countries are a bit like families, as Tolstoy described them: “Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему” – “All happy families are alike; all unhappy familieies are unhappy for different reasons”. There is no systematic reason as to why power-sharing / consociationalism has worked best in Macedonia and worst in Cyprus. Consider the following :

Really the biggest determining factors are local political culture and the personalities of the leaders. The one factor on which Macedonia does score better than the other two is the violence of the conflict, at least in its most recent phase, which was clearly worse in Northern Ireland and worst in Cyprus. However there are