The European Union’s approach to difference and conflict: Reconciliation, accommodation and integration

The EU is highly diverse and contested. It draws much of its initial integration rationale from the need to entrench peace through reconciliation. EU institutions and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee all underline the EU’s central role in reconciliation. That strong onus on reconciliation is far less apparent in academic assessments. What accounts for this apparent gap? Is EU overstating the case? Or have EU researchers not paid sufficient attention? Is the debate on EU diversity and contestation couched in other terms? If so, what are these? There is a comprehensive debate on EU differentiated integration, which is not well connected to reconciliation or to a large international body of research on accommodation of difference and diversity. There is undoubtedly a close relationship between differentiated integration and accommodation but neither the EU institutions nor the DI literature couches the problems in the vocabulary of accommodation. Rather than an agreed-upon vantage-point for assessing how EU relates to conflict, difference and diversity, EU institutions, EU researchers, and comparative federalists provide different concepts and different answers. The question this paper addresses is therefore: How do integration, accommodation and reconciliation relate to each other in the European context? The paper starts by providing an overview of each of these concepts through a survey of the relevant literature, proceeds to develop a set of hypotheses for how the phenomena the terms depict are related, and briefly discusses these hypotheses in relation to the EU’s origins, its institutional make-up, and EU Eastern enlargement. The paper ends by assessing the implications for identity and democracy.