europe and peacekeeping · · 2015-05-26europe and peacekeeping ... beginning of what we now...

Europe and Peacekeeping

Rediscovering a Role?

Dr Norrie MacQueen

26th May 2015

Scottish Global Forum ……………………………………………………………………………………………………

2 | w w w . s c o t t i s h g l o b a l f o r u m . n e t

Introduction

The recent call by the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, for

the creation of a European standing army predictably has not met with much

enthusiasm across most of the European Union (EU). This was understandable given

that the proposal was made in the context of the Ukraine crisis and Juncker’s perception

that Russia may have to be faced-down militarily. The issue does, however, resurrect

some basic questions about the nature of Europe’s Common Security and Defence Policy

(CSDP). This was much vaunted at the time of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Article 2 of

the Treaty committed the EU to “contribute to peace, security and sustainable

development of the Earth, and solidarity and mutual respect among peoples”. This has

been interpreted as a call for a properly defined European role in the provision of

international peacekeeping. Although the EU has made some concrete moves on this in

recent years by carving out a distinctive role in United Nations operations in parts of

Africa, and also through position papers on possible scenarios for the future, no formal

EU policy has yet been formulated in any detail.

Recent developments, however, offer both challenges and opportunities for forward

movement. For one thing, a large number of EU states have been freed in the past year

from their commitments to the International Security Force in Afghanistan (ISAF). The

capacity thus released could, at least potentially, be redirected to more mainstream and

less contested “peacekeeping” activities. At the same time, new demands for

peacekeeping interventions in various parts of the world, and particularly in Africa, are

growing again after a period when the general move was for mission draw-down rather

new deployments. New conflicts have erupted in the Maghreb region (in Mali and Chad)

and in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. At the same time, a number of

long-standing conflicts – in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Somalia – remain

intractable with or without continuing peacekeeping efforts. In short, events over the

past year or so have come as a sharp corrective to any temptation towards a new wave

of “Afro-optimism”. Could the EU now step up to the peacekeeping plate in a way that

it has failed to do for most of the past two decades?


The European Retreat from Peacekeeping

European states individually and collectively have drawn back from the role of

peacekeeping “TCC” (Troop Contributing Country) since a high-point in the mid-1990s.

For the past ten years European countries together have never provided more than 8%

of the personnel of UN forces at any single point. This involvement, or absence of it,

reached a low point of 5% in 2013 (though Europe continues to pay some 37% of

peacekeeping costs). In 1995, in contrast, Europe provided 30% of UN troops and police

in the field.

EU member United Nations TCCs (>100

personnel) at January 2015

Largest United Nations TCCs

at January 2015

TCC

Personnel

TCC

Personnel

Austria 183 Bangladesh 9,400

Finland 374 India 8,139

France 923 Pakistan 7,936

Germany 178 Ethiopia 7,807

Ireland 368 Rwanda 5,698

Italy 1,130 Nepal 5,089

Netherlands 618

Slovakia 163

Spain 591

Sweden 155

UK 289

Figure 1: contributions of the European nations to UN peacekeeping operations, when compared to that of other, non-European, nations. ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Europe’s relationship with peacekeeping, of course, goes back far beyond just the past

twenty years. To provide as broad a context as possible to the current situation it is

useful to explore the long relationship between Europe and peacekeeping before

assessing the contemporary options available for a European re-engagement in the 21st

century.


Peacekeeping as a “European” Project

In many respects peacekeeping could be considered to be a European invention, one

designed to meet European needs by employing European resources. Dating the

beginning of what we now describe as “peacekeeping” is notoriously difficult, but a fair

starting point is the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The defeat of the old

continental imperial entities – Austro-Hungarian, Hohenzollern, Ottoman – along with

the new post-1918 imperative of national self-determination required new modes of

international relations. There had to be a fundamental re-drawing of European borders

as well as the creation of entirely new states (such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia).

This process often included international plebiscites, and these required international

oversight. The Allied and Associated Powers (the war-time victors) initially mounted

these operations but the new League of Nations - the direct ancestor of the United

Nations - also provided “peacekeepers” for the management of plebiscites over sensitive

national frontiers.

One case in particular illustrates the strikingly forward-looking peacekeeping project

which the League of Nations developed at this time. This involved the Saar territory,

positioned between France and Germany, and its international administration from

1920 to 1935. Predominantly German, the Saar was nevertheless coveted by France for

its coal and iron resources which the French government felt to be due reparation for

the war damage suffered at German hands. But this “spoils of victory” mindset cut across

the new post-First World War thinking on national self-determination (much of it

brought to the “old world” from the “new” by American president Woodrow Wilson, the

architect of the league of nations system). A compromise was reached by which France

would receive the benefits of the Saar’s economic infrastructure for a period of fifteen

years before its long-term future was determined by plebiscite. In the meantime, the

Saar was to be in effect a League of Nations protectorate. The final tense act of choice –

which took place in the first years of Nazi rule in Germany - was overseen by a League

of Nations force comprised of British, Italian, Dutch and Swedish contingents.

Remarkably, this prefigured later UN “deep” peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and East

Timor at the turn of the twenty-first century where the world body exercised


transitional sovereignty. In the Saar case, the level of commitment in fact remains

unprecedented as the final plebiscite included an option for League “statehood” in

perpetuity as an alternative to transfer to France or (the eventual outcome) return to

German sovereignty. In short, these European precedents in the inter-war years set a

framework for really quite advanced forms of peacekeeping for the United Nations to

draw on.

In the new institutional context of the UN, the European emphasis remained as

“modern” peacekeeping evolved. The first secretary-general of the UN who oversaw the

early military observer missions in Palestine and Kashmir in the late 1940s was the

Norwegian, Trygve Lie. More significantly, Lie’s successor, the Swede Dag

Hammarskjöld, was largely responsible for the formal conceptualization of

peacekeeping in the 1950s following the large-scale UN intervention he engineered after

the Suez crisis of 1956. For the rest of his life and time in office, Hammarskjöld remained

a powerful advocate for peacekeeping as a means of conflict management. His death in

1961 occurred, with sombre appropriateness, in the service of the UN operation in the

Congo.

Beyond the personalities shaping the development of peacekeeping, there was another

sense in which it remained very much a European conception designed to deal primarily

with European problems. Conventional wisdom usually considers peacekeeping in the

post-Second World War decades to have been a means of managing threats on the

periphery of the Cold War. It was, so the thinking goes, a way of containing “brushfires”

before they spread to ignite wider conflagrations between the superpowers. But in

reality, each and every peacekeeping operation between the 1940s and 1960s was put in

place to address problems thrown up in the aftermath of European imperialism. In the

late 1940s, the Truce Supervision Organization on Israel’s borders (UNTSO) followed

on the consequences of Britain’s withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate. The Military

Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) came soon after, to deal with the

conflict over Kashmir following Britain’s partition of India and Pakistan. In the following

decade the Emergency Force in Suez (UNEF) followed the Anglo-French “neo-colonial”

invasion of Egypt after its nationalization of the Suez Canal. In 1960, the UN created its


biggest and most complex operation to date (ONUC) when the Congo imploded,

following Belgium’s rushed and botched decolonization. Four years later, another

imperfect imperial withdrawal led to the UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP). These

operations were not, in origin, ‘Cold War problems’, though they all had potential to

spill over into the East-West confrontation; they were crises of European

decolonization.

The emergence of the ‘middle powers’

Appropriately, Europe bore the major part of the personnel burdens imposed by these

operations. During these years the largest and most heavily committed TCCs were

European. For the most part though, they were not the states historically responsible

for the post-colonial problems they were called on to help resolve. By definition, the

former imperial states could not offer the level of impartiality which was both required

by peacekeeping practice and demanded by host states. Beyond this, if peacekeeping

was designed to damp down brushfires threatening to develop into Cold War infernos,

the peacekeepers on the ground could obviously not themselves be major Cold War

actors.

Consequently the role of TCC fell largely on the shoulders of an increasingly self-

defining group of “middle powers”. The word “middle” in this context had two

connotations. Firstly the peacekeepers had to have a certain minimum level of military

capacity, but not to a point where they could be suspected of projecting large-scale

military power. Secondly, they had to be somewhere not too far from the “middle” of

the East-West diplomatic spectrum if they were to be capable of acting as impartial “fire-

fighters”. In this way the traditional European neutrals – Austria, Finland, Ireland and

Sweden - became prominent TCCs. But formal neutral status was not an essential

qualification as long as the peacekeeping state had a generally “trustworthy”

international profile. Thus some of the smaller NATO members like Norway, Denmark

and the Netherlands also qualified.


This middle power status extended to a few peacekeepers beyond Europe; Canada and

India were prominent among them. But in the period before United Nations

membership expanded to include the post-colonial world, peacekeeping remained

predominantly a European activity. It was, however, a European activity that excluded

some major European states as we have already suggested. Britain, France and Italy

could not qualify as middle powers in either sense of the expression. All three carried

imperial baggage and all three were also prominent actors in the Cold War alliance

system. The domestic political circumstances and colonial activities of authoritarian

Spain and Portugal ruled them out as TCCs as well. West Germany was not admitted to

the UN until 1973; during those post-Second World War decades, it would probably

have been wary anyway about deploying its forces abroad, even in a peacekeeping role.

Further east, deep Soviet suspicions about the entire peacekeeping undertaking - which

Moscow regarded as a mechanism to circumvent the UN Charter in pursuit of western

interests - ruled out any participation by the Warsaw Pact countries (a situation which

changed only with détente in the 1970s - and then only temporarily and to a limited

degree).

Europe and the Post-Cold War Order

This pattern of Cold War peacekeeping participation should, in principle, have changed

fundamentally with the end of the bipolar system. For one thing, this should surely have

meant that participation by the leading NATO states would no longer be problematic.

For another, the main wave of European decolonization was now three decades in the

past. This sanitizing temporal space might have been expected to open the way for

participation in peacekeeping by the former imperial powers. And there was certainly a

need for a broader base of TCCs given that the requirement for UN peacekeeping surged

in the post-Cold War world. The new demands derived partly from the fact that the old

Cold War spheres of influence which had excluded peacekeeping interventions in

“sensitive” parts of the world (like south-east Asia and Central America) no longer

existed. But in addition, the UN was now required to deal with internal problems in

states which hitherto had been kept in check by superpower patrons. The figures speak

for themselves: there were just fifteen UN peacekeeping operations during the thirty-


two years of the Cold War (1947-89); in the twenty-five years since the end of the Cold

War (1990-2015), there have been fifty-three.

Initially, Europe rose to this challenge. Britain, France and Italy now contributed

personnel to a range of operations. Spain and Portugal had been “detoxified” in the 1970s

when they had emerged as liberal democracies. By the practical virtue of their national

languages, they were now particularly valued contributors. But from the mid-1990s, as

we have noted, there was a sharp decline in European participation. To a degree this

reflected the steady arrival of a new collection of TCCs from the global South. There

were a number of motivations involved in this. Some new participants, particularly

among the emerging economies of Asia and South America, saw peacekeeping as a

marker of good global citizenship which could be used to complement their new

economic power. Others became involved with the active encouragement of the UN in

their own regions (typified by the mantra “African solutions to African problems”).

Other small states like Fiji and Nepal saw financial attractions in UN service with its (for

them) generous funding arrangements. But there were other reasons for the European

“retreat” which were connected with the nature of what has been described as the “new

peacekeeping” which was emerging at the time.

The classical – or as it might be called, the “Hammarskjöldian” – model of UN

peacekeeping of the Cold War years was intentionally minimalist in its operational

nature. This was the necessary price of political acceptability. Anything other than the

most low-key interventions would threaten to transform deeply rooted Soviet suspicion

into outright Soviet prohibition. This is in fact what happened when the minimalist

approach to peacekeeping gave way to something much more complex in the Congo in

the early 1960s; peacekeeping barely survived the political and financial consequences.

The classical model was based on three fundamental restrictive precepts: peacekeeping

missions could be deployed only with the consent of the host state; they had to be

entirely neutral towards the conflict they were required to confront; force could be used

only in self-defence and as a last resort. Peacekeeping in other words was about the use

of armed forces without the use of armed force. The underlying assumption was that

the tasks of operations would be restricted to observation and physical positioning


between hostile forces. Moreover, these forces were assumed to be those of

“responsible” UN member countries. These states, having consented to a peacekeeping

presence, would naturally seek to avoid the opprobrium which would be attracted by

obstructiveness. It is questionable how closely this ever truly reflected peacekeeping

reality during the Cold War. But most certainly it was just not a feasible way to approach

intervention in the post-Cold War environment.

The new peacekeeping challenges

The features of this “peacekeeping mk.2” presented TCCs with a new set of calculations

and potentially new threats to their broader national interests. These features gradually

affected European attitudes to the peacekeeping role and contributed to a general

retreat from UN service. The new UN interventions were almost exclusively “intrastate”,

involving civil conflicts, rather than between sovereign states as on the old Cold War

model. Difficult questions now arose about the nature of “consent” to UN operations

and the acceptance of their legitimacy by all parties at all times. Moreover, interventions

in this ‘new’ type of conflict carried much greater risk of antagonists perceiving political

bias among the peacekeeping TCC.

Peacekeeping had also become “multifunctional” to an extent unthinkable in the earlier

period. During the Cold War, peacekeeping and “peace-making” had been largely

separate activities. This allowed the peacekeeper to remain above the political issues

involved in the conflict. The UN operation in Cyprus, for example, has now been in place

for more than half a century, yet it has been a perfectly successful “peacekeeping”

operation. Only in the parallel and separate peace-making process has the intervention

self-evidently failed. In the new operations of the post-Cold War years, the two

processes have generally been integrated. Achieving the norm of “democratic

governance” has become an objective of peacekeeping missions since the early 1990s

but during the Cold War this would have been an “ideological” statement which would

have been politically unthinkable for a peacekeeping mission. The effect of this new

“political” dimension to peacekeeping has been to expose TCCs to much greater political


risk. It was a risk that European states in particular became increasingly unwilling to

run.

Finally, the military operational aspects of peacekeeping have moved far beyond the

observation and interposition functions associated with the original concept. UN

Security Council resolutions setting out mission objectives have become more “robust”.

Mandates authorizing the use of “all necessary means” have become common, with

peacekeepers being required actively to protect civilians and confront armed groups in

breach of cease-fire agreements. The physical risk to peacekeepers on the ground in this

type of intervention is obvious. The domestic political implications of this are inevitably

felt most keenly in countries with responsive political systems and engaged electorates,

as in Europe. The so-called “CNN effect” can be capricious in relation to peacekeeping

participation, forcing governments to act and then punishing them when the full

implications of the action unfold.

The cumulative impact of these changes in the nature of peacekeeping began to make

itself felt in Europe from the mid-1990s. The enthusiasm and optimism of the first wave

of post-Cold War peacekeeping - the sense that the “new world order” might have some

reality - was beginning to fade. A sequence of more or less disastrous peacekeeping

failures had also occurred by that stage. The UN (and US) presence in Somalia had

unravelled dramatically by 1995. The peacekeeping option had also proved largely

useless in managing the wars around the break-up of Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia.

Repeated UN efforts to help end the Angolan civil war had proved futile. Perhaps most

shockingly, an inadequate peacekeeping presence had failed to halt or even mitigate the

1994 genocide in Rwanda. The fact that many of these “failures” were less to do with

peacekeeping as a technique than with the fundamental intractability of the particular

conflicts could not distract from a public perception of peacekeeping as a failed project.

This perception shaped European states’ attitudes to how their military resources

should (or should not) be employed.

Soon, other demands for those resources helped settle the issue. NATO intervention in

Kosovo in 1999 required considerable European capacity. The formation of the NATO-


based ISAF in Afghanistan also drained European resources. More importantly though,

Afghanistan put in question the fundamental place of multilateral interventionism in

world politics, whether in the form of peacekeeping or in “expeditionary” campaigns.

The 2003 Iraq invasion sharply increased anti-interventionist feelings and impacted on

attitudes to peacekeeping which was now tainted in public perceptions, however

unjustly, by the projection of western power in the Middle East.

Yet there were also some countervailing forces at play in Europe. Just as the credibility

of the United Nations as an agent of multilateral intervention was declining, the

prospects for a quite distinct European peacekeeping contribution appeared to be on

the rise. The post-Cold War era saw a steady rise in EU membership, from twelve in

1990 to twenty-five by 2004. The 1995 enlargement on its own brought in three “middle

power” neutrals with long and distinguished peacekeeping credentials: Austria, Finland

and Sweden. This widening of the EU went along with an impetus to deepen its level of

integration. The development of a shared approach to foreign and security policies was

an obvious component of this. Within this broader aspiration peacekeeping as an

essentially benign and consensual form of intervention offered a relatively “easy” initial

focus for this CSDP.

EU in 1990 Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Greece, Germany, Ireland,

Italy, Luxemburg Netherlands, Portugal, Spain

1995 Enlargement Austria, Finland, Sweden

2004 Enlargement

Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary,

Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.

Figure 2: potential TCCs following the post-Cold War growth of the European Union. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Europe’s Re-engagement: the options

Broadly speaking, there are three options available to the European Union in re-

embracing its peacekeeping role. These are, firstly, the development of a clearly

autonomous function in which the EU acts separately from the UN as a provider of

peacekeeping. Secondly, the EU could develop a mid-range role by which it would


operate within the structures of UN peacekeeping but carry out specific functions.

Thirdly, and most simply, each EU member state could re-commit itself on a unilateral

basis to act more frequently and more extensively as an individual TCC in future UN

peacekeeping operations.

These three options have been actively discussed within the EU in the context of the

CSDP. The bases for these discussions have been two policy proposal papers: the Joint

UN-EU Declaration on Cooperation in Crisis Management (adopted by the European

Council in June 2004); and the EU Plan of Action to enhance CSDP support to UN

peacekeeping (adopted by the European Council in June 2012). The three options will

be considered more fully below.

Option 1: Autonomy – the EU as an independent peacekeeping actor.

In the immediate post-Cold War years when optimism about the advance of European

integration was at its greatest, the prospect of a distinct and separate peacekeeping role

for the EU seemed both feasible and desirable. The experience of the EU during the first

phases of the break-up of Yugoslavia, however, quickly blunted that feeling. EU

monitors were deployed in what many saw as the first tentative steps towards a more

substantive peacekeeping role, but they were quickly pushed to the margins and

disregarded by the protagonists. There were no further forays into fully autonomous

action and there is little to justify this option for the future.

For one thing, in following this route the EU would simply be duplicating the

peacekeeping functions of the United Nations. Arguably, regional military

organizations such as NATO could have an interventionist capacity quite distinct from

that of the UN. NATO has, after all, acted independently in “humanitarian

interventions” in both Kosovo and Libya. Earlier it had effectively supplanted the UN

force in Bosnia in 1995. But the EU is a fundamentally different type of institution. Its

approach to crisis intervention is essentially the same as that of the UN. There is also

the politico-legal issue of legitimacy. UN peacekeeping itself has an uncertain place in

international law but it can be given located loosely in the UN Charter (Chapters VI

and/or VII). Moreover, the authorization of peacekeeping operations by Security


Council resolution gives those operations a sound basis both in terms of global political

consensus and international law. This would not be so straightforward in the case of EU

interventions. These would have to be legitimized by the clear and continuing consent

of all parties, direct and indirect, to a conflict. There are restrictions on the EU’s

potential areas of operations as well. While claims that we have slipped into a new Cold

War are alarmist and overheated, an element of that polarization has certainly re-

emerged in recent years and there is little doubt that the EU as an institution is clearly

identified with one side. While at the moment a UN peacekeeping presence in eastern

Ukraine, for example, would seem improbable, this might well be feasible at some stage.

In contrast, a European Union military presence in the region, however “benign” its

mandate, would be unthinkable at any stage.

There is also a potentially serious set of problems around leadership in any EU

intervention. Control of United Nations operations stays firmly with the Department of

Peacekeeping Operations, headquartered in New York. UN Force commanders, almost

always selected from small or middle powers, operate within a more or less tightly

controlled framework. In contrast, the likelihood is that the EU would adopt a so-called

“lead-nation” approach to intervention. This involves primary responsibility for

command-and-control and strategic direction lying with a single dominant contributor.

The Australian-led non-UN (but UN approved) interventions in East Timor between

1999 and 2012 adopted this model, for example. In the case of the EU, the tendency

would be for this role to devolve on one of the larger, more militarily capable members,

most likely France or Britain. Neither of these nations has a strong peacekeeping

tradition within its military culture and both have shown a tendency to unilateralism

even when operating in a multilateral environment.

There is an anecdote – probably only partly true but speaking to a greater truth – about

the French contingent in the UN force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in the early 1980s. During

one of Israel’s frequent incursions into southern Lebanon, for which UNIFIL had

security responsibility, an Israeli column simply pushed through Irish and Nepalese

checkpoints, meeting with no physical resistance (which in classical peacekeeping

doctrine was of course entirely appropriate). Finally, however, the column was stopped


at a French position when the “UN” personnel there placed the French flag across the

road. At a stroke, the dynamics of the situation changed and the Israeli force retreated.

The retreat was effectively essentially down to a French national action rather than a

UN one. As we might put it: c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le peacekeeping.

Less colourfully, but still tellingly, a palpable shift in morale and self-image was reported

among British forces in Bosnia when overnight in 1995 they ceased to be part of the UN

Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and changed their blue berets for their own regimental

symbols to take part in the NATO-led Operation Deliberate force against the Bosnian

Serbs. The dangers inherent in the pursuit of effective peacekeeping in such a world of

confused military identities are obvious.

Finally, there is the issue of finance. The UN reimburses TCCs for their participation.

As we have said, this has been an incentive for some small states to put themselves

forward as peacekeepers. While the European states would hardly expect to turn a profit

from peacekeeping, they would naturally be reluctant to absorb losses to already

stretched military budgets. The financing model for EU operations, however, would

almost certainly adopt a NATO-standard approach in which costs would “lie where they

fall” – in other words, the financial burden would be shouldered by each participant.

For all these reasons – of duplication, of legitimization, of leadership and military

culture, as well as hard economics – there is little likelihood of an autonomous EU

peacekeeping capacity developing. If this were to emerge, its main purpose would be to

advertise and enhance the CSDP rather than to expand the broader international

peacekeeping project. In a climate where national enthusiasm for European integration

in general is at a historic low, the prospects are disappearingly small.

Option 2: Semi-autonomy – EU components are “nested” within UN operations.

The option which has attracted the most favourable attention from the European

Council is one in which the EU would contribute to UN operations but as a distinct,

semi-discrete actor. The EU already has a track record in this. In 2003 it launched

Operation Artemis within the UN operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo


(MONUC). This followed a specific request from Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the

deployment of an “Interim Multinational Emergency Force” to reinforce the main

operation in the Ituri region of eastern Congo. On the ground, France took the lead-

nation role at the head of 1800 troops representing twelve EU members. The operation,

which lasted only for a few months, was successful in stabilising the situation in a critical

area of UN operations.

Within this model the EU could, for example, perform this type of emergency “bridging”

roles on a more regular basis. It could also provide rapid-reaction crisis intervention,

pending the preparation and deployment of substantive UN operations. The EU has

quite recently carried out this type of role in the Central African Republic, Chad and

Mali, again with France (the former colonial power in all three countries) in the lead-

nation role. This model could also embrace a general “over-the-horizon” function for

EU forces. It would permit rapid deployment to UN operations in the event of sudden

deterioration in the theatre of operations or, if necessary, the emergency extraction of

UN components from areas where peacekeeping is no longer viable.

A key advantage of this semi-autonomous role lies in the optimization of the EU’s

capacity to provide specific “strategic enablers” to UN operations. These would include

such specialist provision as transport, logistics and intelligence which smaller less

developed units could not supply. Interestingly, this was a role quietly performed by the

big powers for UN operations during the Cold War. The US Air Force, for example, was

crucial to the logistical and transport needs of the UN operation in the Congo in the

early 1960s, though a more direct American involvement would have been utterly

unacceptable to the Soviet bloc at the time.

Option 3: Individual EU member states in an expanded TCC role.

The attractions for the UN of the semi-autonomous role seem obvious – until a simple

question is posed. What value is actually added to the peacekeeping project by the

involvement of the European Union as an institution? A case could certainly be made

for NATO in this role, on the basis of the alliance’s joint training and interlocking

capacities. But such a level of inter-force operability simply does not exist within the


European Union. If EU member states individually committed themselves to a

redoubling of their national contributions to UN operations, most of the benefits of the

semi-autonomous model could be achieved with the “middle man” cut out, so to speak.

European (as opposed to “EU”) states could still act to provide all the over-the-horizon

benefits proposed as well as supplying the essential strategic enablers. In fact, such an

arrangement could expand the European contribution by bringing in other experienced

and committed non-EU peacekeeping states such as Norway. At the same time, of

course, the evident drawbacks of a wholly autonomous EU peacekeeping role –

including duplication with the UN and politically fraught lead-nation arrangements –

are avoided.

The one obvious “loss” involved in the direct route of increased unilateral contributions

to UN operations is not to peacekeeping as such. The downside relates to the EU’s

standing as an institution. This third way, in contrast to the first and second, would take

place entirely outside of the framework of the CSDP. In other words, there would be no

instrumental advantage to the EU at a time when the institution feels a pressing need

for such advantages. Ultimately, it would seem, the relative attractiveness of the

different options depends on the balance of importance given to the enhancement of

European integration as against the effectiveness of global peacekeeping.

Conclusion: diminished prospects?

It may be, of course, that much of this discussion will remain purely hypothetical. The

post-Cold War momentum that appeared to be driving the European Union to a much

more prominent position in international politics has dissipated – and much of the early

enthusiasm for the CSDP along with it. There was always a potential tension between

expansion and cohesion within the growing EU and the problem obviously deepened

with the post-2008 economic crisis which brought impoverishment and disillusion to

large parts of the euro-zone. And, beyond the EU as an institution, there are difficulties

around the fundamental prospects for peacekeeping itself. The suggestion that, now

free of the commitment to Afghanistan, European armed forces are ready to embrace

peacekeeping as a new raison d’être might well prove to be misplaced.


On the contrary, it may be that post-Afghanistan the public mood in Europe, rather

than embracing a new post-conflict peacekeeping and peace-building role, will not

distinguish between different types of foreign “adventure”. It is possible that after the

costly failure of Afghanistan an expanded peacekeeping role, whether within the EU or

the UN, may be rejected altogether. Although the UN’s peacekeeping record is much

better in the present decade than it was in the 1990s, a residual negativity remains in

the public mind. This has perhaps, paradoxically, been deepened by dubious

“humanitarian interventions” from Kosovo to Libya. Perhaps such an uncertain setting

also speaks for the benefits of the most modest and most direct of the options for

European peacekeeping involvement: a recommitment to peacekeeping on a country-

by-country basis rather than the construction of distinct European Union profile.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Some further thinking on this subject:

EU-UN Cooperation in Military Crisis management Operations: Elements of Implementation of the EU-UN Joint Declaration http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/EU-UN_co-operation_in_Military_Crisis_Management_Operations.pdf

Thierry Tardy, “Partnering in Crisis Management: Ten years of EU-UN Cooperation”: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/EU-UN_co-operation_in_Military_Crisis_Management_Operations.pdf

Thierry Tardy, “EUFOR RCA: tough start, smooth finish” (EU force in Central African Republic): http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/Alert_17_EUFOR_RCA.pdf

Luis N. González Alonso, “Rethinking EU-UN Cooperation in International Crisis Management: Lisbon and Beyond”: http://dseu.lboro.ac.uk/Documents/Policy_Papers/DSEU_Policy_Paper09.pdf

Britta Madsen and Tobias Pietz, “EU-UN Cooperation on Justice and Security in Crisis Missions: a Comprehensive Approach?”: http://www.zifberlin.org/fileadmin/uploads/analyse/dokumente/veroeffentlichungen/ZIF_Policy_Briefing_Madsen_Pietz_EU_UN_Justice_SSR_Nov_2014_ENG.pdf

Tobias Pietz, “The European Union and UN Peacekeeping: Half-time for the EU’s Action Plan”: http://www.zifberlin.org/fileadmin/uploads/analyse/dokumente/veroeffentlichungen/ZIF_Policy_Briefing_Tobias_Pietz_Oct_2013_ENG.pdf ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

About the author: Dr Norrie MacQueen is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews. He has authored several books on the UN and peacekeeping and is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of UN Peacekeeping Operations. During 2012 he was part of the Democratic Governance Support Unit of the UN peacekeeping mission in Timor-Leste in the final phase of its mandate. Dr MacQueen is a Fellow of the Scottish Global Forum.

http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/Alert_17_EUFOR_RCA.pdf

http://dseu.lboro.ac.uk/Documents/Policy_Papers/DSEU_Policy_Paper09.pdf