ABSTRACT
Since the deployment of the first EU mission to Africa in 2003, the EU has deployed a total of 18 operations on the continent, more missions than the AU and UN together. EU countries account for 40 per cent of the UN’s peacekeeping budget2 and without the EU’s African Peace Facility (APF) most AU and REC peace missions would not have been deployed. In essence, the EU has become a key facilitator for peacekeeping in Africa through mission deployment, financial support and capacity building to African regional organisations. Unlike African organisations, the EU is able to profit from a peace dividend, economic prosperity and relative political unity on its continent. Despite the ongoing Euro crisis, the EU’s economic and political integration is far reaching and in general can be considered a success story, to which the Nobel Peace Price was awarded in 2012. In contrast to African organisations, peacekeeping is an issue of exterritorial instead of internal affairs. The overwhelming majority of EU missions are located outside Europe. In this regard the position of the EU within the African security regime complex on peacekeeping is a different one compared to the UN, AU and RECs. The EU is neither forced to intervene because the conflict is geographically near, as in the case of African IOs, nor does it have a global mandate, like the UN, to foster peace around the world. The EU’s contribution to the regime complex follows a different script; it has acquired the role of a facilitator but a largely non-dominant actor. The transformation from a primarily economic union to a viable global security actor took more than a decade to fully materialise and Africa played its part in this process by providing the venue for peacekeeping operations. In this sense Africa allowed the EU to establish itself as a foreign policy actor. The development of security structures in its current form was triggered
by the consequences of the Yugoslav war starting in the early 1990s which bluntly demonstrated the EU’s security impotence in handling conflict in its direct neighbourhood. Interestingly, the trend of regionalising security has been chiefly reinforced by Europe and Africa. Increasingly this trend has found more scholarly attention.3
