Why Europe appears on the margins of mediation in major conflicts

Bridge diplomacy during the Cold War

The Cold War produced a type of conflict that European mediation had not managed previously. It was not a conventional territorial dispute between sovereign states but a structural confrontation between two blocs, sustained by nuclear deterrence and fought through proxy wars across the decolonising world. 

In this relatively new geopolitical environment, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act was seen as marking a turning point in Europe’s mediation role. For the first time, Europe did not merely provide a space for adversaries to negotiate security arrangements; it helped develop a framework of mutually agreeable norms and normative commitments that the two ideologically opposed blocs accepted, although for strategic reasons.

The Helsinki Final Act was signed by 35 states, including the two superpowers and every European country except Albania. It emerged from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and was structured around three main areas, often called “baskets”:

1. Political and military security.

2. Economic and scientific cooperation.

3. Human rights.

The Soviet Union welcomed basket one as belated legitimation of its postwar territorial gains. But what it conceded in basket three proved far more consequential. As Daniel Thomas argues in The Helsinki Effect (2001), the human rights commitments transformed the normative landscape of East-West relations in ways neither side anticipated. 

Mediation of a different order

Dissident movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 (a human rights petition) used the Final Act as an internationally recognised platform to hold their own governments accountable. It contributed, as Thomas Risse has observed in The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (1999), to the mobilisation that helped bring down Communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989.

This was mediation of a different order. Vienna had largely treated a state’s domestic politics as outside the scope of mediation; the Helsinki Final Act made a government’s treatment of its citizens a subject of international pressure. It also created a template Europe would increasingly generalise: that mediation could serve procedural and normative ends at once, that Europe could broker agreements while conditioning them on values-based outcomes. But the assumption was tested in the post-Cold War era. 

Normative mediation in the post-Cold War era

The collapse of the Soviet Union largely changed the nature of conflicts that Europe was asked to mediate. The wars in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s were intrastate and ethnic, entangled with questions of recognition, sovereignty and minority rights. Europe’s initial response was institutional. The European Community deployed its first ceasefire monitors to Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and convened a peace conference at The Hague. The effort failed: thirty-four ceasefires collapsed before the Bosnian war ended. 

Rudolph Perina, a senior US diplomat involved in the eventual negotiations, recalled that the Europeans were present at Dayton in 1995 (for the peace agreement between Bosnia and Herzegovina) largely for reconstruction funding; the actual negotiators were American. “Dayton was a U.S. show,” he said, “and really Holbrooke’s show” (Richard Holbrooke, an American diplomat).

The lesson Europe drew was that it needed stronger institutions. But there was a deeper problem: Europe was both a party with interests in the Balkans and a claimed neutral mediator. The Serbia-Kosovo dialogue facilitated by the European Union (EU) since 2011 shows the same tension. The Brussels Agreement of 2013 was a genuine achievement. But the EU itself offered a framework, financial assistance, and mediation that both parties aspired to join. Implementation remains largely stalled over a decade later.

How the Iran nuclear file tested this model 

The Iran nuclear file tested this model most ambitiously and exposed its limits. From 2003, the E3 (Britain, France, and Germany) negotiated with Iran over its nuclear programme, initially without the US and later under the EU High Representative’s formal coordination.

After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, was signed in Vienna in July 2015, Federica Mogherini, then High Representative of the European Union for Foreign and Security Policy, told the UN Security Council that it was hard to imagine another actor that could ensure the deal. She was largely correct. 

But the JCPOA embedded a contradiction: Europe was simultaneously a party that maintained sanctions on Iran, a normative actor committed to nuclear non-proliferation, and the claimed neutral coordinator of the agreement. Scholars largely agree that effective mediation needs perceived impartiality.

The contradiction became unmanageable after the US withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018. France, Germany, and the UK set up the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) in January 2019 to facilitate trade with Iran while shielding European firms from American sanctions.

In four years, INSTEX completed exactly one transaction, a shipment of German medical supplies, before being dissolved in March 2023. EU-Iran trade fell by 71.5 per cent in 2019 alone. This suggests that Europe lacked the required leverage to sustain and enforce the agreement it had facilitated.

The contemporary test

The renewed Iran-US negotiations of 2025-26 crystallised what the JCPOA had foreshadowed. Talks began in Muscat in April 2025, moved through Rome and Geneva, and were mediated throughout by Oman’s foreign minister Badr Al Busaid. The EU, which had coordinated the JCPOA for over a decade, was not the mediator, nor even a primary interlocutor.

Having triggered the UN snapback mechanism in August 2025 to reimpose sanctions, Europe was, from Tehran’s perspective, a party with a position, not a neutral facilitator. Oman stepped into that space.

Oman’s facilitation is seemingly quiet and discreet, smoothing communication rather than shaping the substance of any agreement. In essence, it appears like the Swiss model applied to a Gulf context, where credibility was derived from having no stake in the outcome. It does not condition its facilitation on human rights compliance or non-proliferation norms, and maintained that channel even through the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 and the instability that followed.

Europe’s normative conditions, however well-founded, narrowed the space in which it could act as a credible third party; when Iran needed a mediator without a predetermined outcome in mind, it turned to Muscat, not Brussels.

A similar dynamic is evident in the Russia-Ukraine war, although in a different form. Europe is not a mediator but a stakeholder, funding and arming Kyiv, coordinating sanctions on Russia, and defining its own security interests in the war’s outcome. Therefore, the ceasefire process, such as it is, runs through Washington and Moscow. Europe is present, not leading, for the same reason it was sidelined in US-Iran talks: deep investment in an outcome limits its credibility as a neutral mediator.

What the path from Vienna to Geneva reveals

Taken together, the path from Vienna to Geneva says something about the relationship between normative ambition and mediation effectiveness: the two are not always complementary. The Concert of Europe succeeded because it demanded nothing beyond procedural agreement. Helsinki succeeded because its normative content rode in on a framework neither side fully reckoned with as binding. The JCPOA succeeded partially, then failed, once that framework collapsed with one of its architects walking away. INSTEX did not succeed at all.

The neutral strand of European mediation – Switzerland’s good offices, Norway’s back-channel facilitation, Austria’s role as a permanent diplomatic host – has survived largely because it was separate from the normative goals. As scholars of EU foreign policy, including Simon Duke and Fraser Cameron, have noted, a mediator’s credibility depends on perceived impartiality, hard to sustain when the same actor is simultaneously a norm promoter, a sanctions authority, and a security guarantor with declared interests in the outcome. 

But for Europe, maintaining that perception became increasingly difficult because it has accumulated all three roles. The result is that a mediating actor of considerable institutional sophistication finds itself, in the most consequential conflicts of the moment, on the margins of negotiations it once aspired to lead.

A choice Europe has not yet made

Nonetheless, Europe’s normative contribution, its insistence on human rights, multilateralism, and rules-based governance, is of genuine value. Yet, Europe faces a choice it has not yet made: between being a normative actor that participates in conflicts on the basis of its values, and a mediating actor that resolves them on the basis of its impartiality. The two are not impossible to combine, but they require a discipline of role European diplomacy has rarely sustained.

The Congress of Vienna worked because its architects understood what mediation required and designed accordingly. Two centuries later, Europe seems to grapple with the same fundamental question: can a mediator advance normative goals and remain impartial to broker lasting peace?

Post read questions

1. Recent conflicts in West Asia have revived interest in third-party mediation. Discuss the principles of effective mediation with suitable contemporary examples.

2. Can a normative power also be an effective mediator? Discuss with reference to the European Union’s role in the Balkans, the Iran nuclear negotiations, and the Ukraine conflict.

3. Evaluate the role of middle powers and small states such as Oman, Norway, and Switzerland in international mediation. Why do they often succeed where major powers struggle?

4. Explain the significance of the Helsinki Final Act (1975) in the evolution of European security governance and mediation.

5. Is neutrality a necessary condition for successful mediation? Critically examine with examples from Europe and West Asia.

(Sanket Kumar Prajapati is a Doctoral candidate at the Centre for European Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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