ABSTRACT
The number of intrastate conflicts in the world has reduced from a high point at the end of the 1990s. However, civil conflicts remain numerous and present serious challenges to European security policies. Some of the most intractable conflicts continue to have a damaging impact on European interests. Many ‘fragile’ states tread the borderline of open conflict. It is true that definitions of ‘state fragility’ are contested; state failure and violence are not synonymous. But conflict raises clear policy challenges. The issue of how to help resolve or at least temper violent conflict and state fragility is a core question for liberal internationalism. The question of military intervention has long divided liberals. For many, a core tenet of liberal power is utmost caution in the use of military power. For others, to decline to assist in combating violence and aggression in other states is rather a travesty of the liberal cosmopolitan spirit. There is more agreement that fundamental to a liberal approach is a respect for international law, allied with the argument that Europe should play its main role on the civilian side of conflict resolution. This chapter shows that Europe’s commitment to conflict mitigation exhibits
serious shortcomings. European policies are at odds with the spirit of cosmopolitan internationalism in the nature of engagements undertaken and the type of conflict resolution solutions supported. Both military and civilian policy instruments have multiplied and resources have increased. But the European Union (EU) remains circumspect in their deployment. Moreover, the illiberal drift in European policy is seen not only in its quantitative limits but also in its qualitative aspects. The way in which EU engagement has been undertaken represents not so much a liberal but more a ‘status quo’ form of interventionism.Most focus in conflict resolution debates is on the EU’s supposed distinctive advantage in forging a civilian-military nexus, rather than what this nexus is actually used for in political terms. Criticisms that the EU’s approach to conflict resolution is based on an overly rigid liberal template are not fully substantiated by the facts.
The lesson that European governments have taken from the tragedy of events in Iraq is that even greater circumspection is required in the projection of
military force. At the same time, however, the EU has committed to enhancing and uniting its military capability in order to permit a more pro-active contribution to cosmopolitan internationalism. In practice, it has not done so. In formal terms, the EU as a collective entity has indeed become less of a strictly civilian power. But it has not harnessed its military capability in any significant way to help resolve violent conflict. The characterization of the EU as a purely ‘soft power’ has never been accu-
rate. The EU spends over 200 billion euros a year on defence. This is the second highest defence spend in the world, after the US. And in recent years, much focus has been on the gradual deepening of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), initiated in 1998. The ESDP has launched a range of defence capability-building initiatives. Joint procurement projects are slowly picking up, including the Eurofighter jet, a UK-French aircraft carrier programme and the Galileo satellite navigation system. The defence sector has begun to be brought into the internal market, offering the prospect of more efficient spending. France’s integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has triggered stronger US support for the ESDP. Some long-standing ‘brakes’ have been addressed: Spain, for example, removed its ceiling on troop deployments abroad at the end of 2008. The Lisbon Treaty provides for some majority voting in the ESDP and an expansion of Petersberg tasks to include post-conflict stabilization and military assistance. In practice, however, the EU remains ill prepared for contemporary challenges
in conflict resolution, in particular that of protracted counter-insurgency in places such as Afghanistan. European armies are still geared towards territorial defence against an attack, not mobilizing for conflict operations and complex insurgencies in places such as Africa, Afghanistan or the Middle East. The EU spends 55 per cent of its defence budget on personnel, the US only 20 per cent. The EU spends 19 per cent on investment (weapons plus R&D), the US nearly a third. The US invests five times more per solider than the EU, and six times more on defence R&D.1 EU member states have nearly two million personnel under arms, but only 100,000 of these are deployable to conflict zones. The UK, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have taken steps to correct this situation, but overall European deployability remains lamentable. Familiar shortcomings persist. The EU remains way behind the US in its
capacity for network-centred warfare; specialization between EU member states remains limited; intelligence-sharing is still seen as highly sensitive, especially for the UK given its arrangements with the United States; and the inter-operability of equipment is an increasing problem. Some progress has been made in reconfiguring equipment from defensive to intervention-oriented requirements: fewer tanks and more transport capacity being one key trend. But the A400M project to enhance European military transport capability has encountered recurrent delays and financial problems. And a full half of EU deployable capacity comes from the UK, reflecting the limited investments made by other states – all the more significant as the UK seems to have gone cold on the ESDP. London has vetoed a strengthening of the European Defence Agency
and an EU Operational Headquarters, and has declined to contribute to recent ESDP missions, citing its deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Desperately needed EU-NATO cooperation to improve technological capability has proven difficult because of differences between Turkey and Cyprus. European governments missed the 2003 ‘headline goals’ stipulating, inter alia,
that a 60,000 man rapid reaction force would be up and running. A new set of capacity-building goals was agreed for the end of 2010, which were less ambitious. They may also be missed. The focus has switched to the smaller, more modest ‘Battlegroups’ initiative. These small, flexible units became operational in 2007. They will be useful only for basic crisis-moment protection – controlling airports, evacuating European citizens – and do not offer the prospect of being integrated into longer term rebuilding and development efforts.2 Experts lament that, rather than being used as a de facto strategic reserve to help sustain long-term peace-building strategies, the Battlegroups have been conceived as vehicles only for the one-off crisis response.3 The original plans for 60,000 deployable personnel under the Battlegroups were cut to 25,000. The EU’s understanding of a ‘rapid’ reaction force is, at the very least, elastic: the 2006 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) mission took half a year to get going, while the 2008-9 Chad mission was delayed by eight months partly because of a shortage of transport and logistical equipment. European military deployments to states in conflict have remained at modest
levels. And member states have baulked at contributing even these limited levels of troops on many occasions. The twenty-three EDSP missions carried out by 2009 have not been ambitious and have been mostly tangential to core EU interests. Most of the missions have constituted little more than symbolic gestures. Only six ESDP missions have had a military component: those in Macedonia, DRC (in 2003 and 2006), Bosnia and Chad, in addition to the 2009 anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. Only seven have involved over 200 personnel. There is no apparent overarching strategic rationale behind the deployments. Five have been to the DRC, but it is not clear why. The European Gendarmerie agreed upon by five EU member states in 2004 has only recently commenced a first operation in Bosnia and remains well short of its promised complement of 5,000 officers. All EU police missions except that in Kosovo have offered training rather than direct policing.4
