ABSTRACT
European foreign policy (EFP) contributes in manifold ways to peace support operations. To begin with, member states of the European Union (EU) are active in international peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peacebuilding, either as members of international organizations, as participants of coalitions of the willing or through unilateral initiatives. As to the European Commission, it has a strong external relations acquis in projecting peace abroad, notably in the form of preventive diplomacy and longer-term civilian peacebuilding. Finally, Union foreign policy, through the deployment of military and civilian operations under the new European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), has become a key contributor to international peace missions. This book examines, from the perspective of critical social theory, a
principal component of peacebuilding carried out under the ESDP: police missions. International assistance for police reforms in countries emerging from instability or violence directly affects both the quality of people’s lives and the contours of political and social order. As such it is central to the construction of peace (Dziedzic 2002; Eide and Holm 2000; Jackson and Lyon 2002; Neild 2001). Its particular focus notwithstanding, both the manner in which the study engages its empirical site and the features it brings into relief can be generalized beyond the policing field and the EU to international peacebuilding as such. The term ‘peacebuilding’ is often used to denote international military
and/or civilian interventions in states aimed at creating the conditions for stable and lasting peace in the wake of civil strife (Paris 2004). Conversely, international efforts to strengthen and solidify peace in the context of a crisis or unstable peace are dubbed as ‘preventive diplomacy’. For the purpose of this book, we depart from this usage. By the term ‘peacebuilding’ we mean international action within states either to prevent civil war or to rebuild peace in the aftermath of violence. The advantage of our conception is that it brings into focus the discontinuity between traditional (Westphalian) preventive diplomacy and non-traditional (post-Westphalian) peacebuilding as well as the fact that both preventive and post-conflict peacebuilding interventions rely on the same toolbox. Thus, ESDP missions may be deployed
to countries either suffering from instability or emerging from civil war to make them safe for liberal peace. The ESDP is significantly more than a vehicle to further narrow European
security interests. It is an expression of the EU’s international mission for humanity. With the ESDP, the EU endowed itself with a valueoriented international security policy that privileges peace support operations over war-fighting. It balances limited but increasingly robust military capabilities to enforce and keep the peace in conflict-prone or war-torn countries with strong civilian capabilities to assist countries in building stable peace. The ethical aspirations at the heart of the ESDP may be described in terms
of its contribution to a global civilizing process, which ‘is concerned with reducing cruelty in world affairs and with widening emotional identification to include the members of other societies’ (Linklater 2005: 381). Of course, the peace operations carried out under the ESDP do not only reflect the value-driven foreign policy profile of the EU; as Richard Youngs (2004), among others, reminds us, EFP is invested with strategic calculations and sometimes the instrumental rationality underpinning this calculus weakens or even undermines the normative agenda of the ESDP. While this is an important critique, we believe the engagement with the normative impulse of the EFP in general and the ESDP in particular has to be pushed further and be more constructive. In a spirit that is not alien to Norbert Elias (1996, 2000), who pioneered the sociological analysis of modernization as a civilising process, we argue in this book that ESDP peacebuilding is inscribed in the dialectic of modernity, i.e. the dialectical relationship between the growing emancipation of individuals from violence and external compulsion and the growth of new forms of power. A clear example of the risks inscribed in international efforts to liberate
people from oppression and to advance the global civilizing process is the overthrow by an international coalition of the dictatorship in Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing turmoil bedevilling the international construction of liberal peace. From the perspective of realist international theory, this case serves as a reminder that those who want to better the world in most cases end up making it worse. There is no room for emancipation in the realm of the international short of its structural transformation from anarchy to hierarchy. Hence, realists suggest, in politics beyond the state it is kind to be cruel. Liberals reject this dichotomy between normatively based politics within the state and brutish international relations. A series of factors ranging from the increased cognitive capacities of individuals to the growing importance of international organizations transform the global into an institutionalized heterarchy in which cross-border morality flourishes. Liberals, thus, are more likely to argue that the manner in which the Iraq policy was decided and executed, say, without approval by the United Nations (UN), is to be blamed for the problems of bringing democratic peace to conflict-ridden Iraqi society.
