European Approaches to United Nations Peacekeeping

Towards a stronger Re-engagement?

Joachim A. Koops, Giulia Tercovich

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351382885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume provides a comprehensive analysis of European approaches to United Nations peacekeeping by assessing past practice, present obstacles and future potentials related to nine core European countries' contributions to blue helmet operations. By providing in-depth case studies on Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom, this book offers an evaluation of European approaches as well as a wide range of facilitating and constraining factors related to the above mentioned countries' future involvement in UN peacekeeping. The book places particular emphasis on the recent involvement of European countries in the UN operation in Mali (MINUSMA) and explores to what extent this experience might lead to further marked increases of European supplies of troops and capabilities and thus a broader 'European return' to UN peacekeeping. Each chapter offers an up-to-date case study on key countries' policies, challenges and opportunities for a stronger re-engagement in UN Peacekeeping It provides a comprehensive analysis of the main challenges and concrete ways ahead for overcoming institutional, political, financial and military obstacles (both at European capitals and within the UN system) on the path towards a stronger re-engagement of European troop contributing countries in the field of UN Peacekeeping. Furthermore, each chapter includes a set of policy-relevant recommendations for future ways ahead. The chapters in this book were originally published in International Peacekeeping.

France: the unlikely return to UN peacekeeping

Thierry Tardy

ABSTRACT

French policy towards UN peacekeeping reflects the ambivalence of what France wants to achieve in the field of conflict management and through which institutional frameworks it prefers to work. On the one hand, France is greatly involved in the design and decision-making process of contemporary UN-led peacekeeping operations. On the other hand, after having been present in the field during the early 1990s, France underwent a major policy shift that led it to distance itself from UN operations. This chapter offers a narrative of French policy and perceptions vis-à-vis the virtues and limits of UN peacekeeping operations in the twenty-first century. It examines the French level of contributions, decision-making process, motivations and lessons learnt from past and current operations. It also analyses the dichotomy between the political role that France plays at the Security Council and its absence from UN-led operations. It seeks to determine how coherent this dichotomy is, its rationale, and how likely – and under what conditions – it will change in the near future, in particular through a hypothetical French return to UN-led peacekeeping operations.

1. Introduction

France is one of the most politically involved countries in UN peacekeeping operations. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a country with strategic interests and a certain conception of its role in sub-Saharan Africa and furthermore, Francophone countries where quite a few peacekeeping operations are deployed, France has been over the last 20 years a key actor in UN peacekeeping politics. This has been illustrated most recently by France’s commitment to get the UN involved in Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR) through multidimensional peace operations. Furthermore, as of 2013, France has been the third largest financial contributor to the UN peacekeeping budget, outstripped only by the United States and Japan.

Yet, as is the case for most European states, France’s direct contribution to peacekeeping operations in terms of troops is low, with fewer than 900 personnel as of June 2016, for a total number of 102,000 blue helmets deployed worldwide. Twenty years ago though, France was among the top troop contributing countries to UN operations, with contingents being deployed in Somalia, Cambodia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina among others.

Today, France does contribute to crisis management operations on several continents and through different types of operations, but has developed an institutional preference for frameworks other than the UN, namely NATO, the European Union, and national operations. In Mali and CAR, France even participates in operations run in parallel to UN missions, while its own commitment to the latter is confined to a few key headquarters positions.

This article is part of a broader project on the theme of a ‘European return to UN peacekeeping’, and suggests that the path recently taken by some European countries to re-commit to UN peacekeeping is unlikely to be a policy option for France in the coming years, because of a combination of lasting mistrust towards the UN and the presence of alternative models for operational engagement in crisis management.

The article looks at this issue in three sections that present and analyse the evolution of French policy vis-à-vis UN peacekeeping, from engagement to retrenchment. It first examines past commitments to the UN and its peacekeeping policy, both before and in the immediate post-Cold War era, at a time when France looked at the UN as an operational framework for its own security governance engagement in favourable terms. The second part examines France’s changing institutional preferences induced by the lessons of its engagement in the early 1990s operations, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Because of evolving perceptions towards the UN France remained politically engaged in UN peacekeeping as a Security Council permanent member but largely stopped to contribute troops. Finally, the article looks at what it calls the ‘unlikely return’ to UN peacekeeping by shedding light on how France sees the division of labour in crisis management and its own positioning within the evolving environment. The section presents the French ‘alternative model’ of acting, if need be, in support of UN operations but not directly through them. Twenty years after the Bosnian episode, mistrust vis-à-vis the UN is still present, and there is little in the recent evolutions and operations that hint to a possible French return to UN peacekeeping.

2. France’s commitment to UN peacekeeping

2.1. The UN, appropriate crisis management instrument

The UN has since its inception played a central role in shaping France’s identity and policy on the international scene. France’s permanent seat at the UN Security Council simultaneously offers an irreplaceable platform for French foreign policy and gives France an international status that it would not enjoy otherwise. This has been particularly true since the end of the Cold War and the concomitant revitalization of the UN Security Council.

France naturally embraced the early 1990s broad UN peace operations agenda. Together with most Western leaders at the time, French decision-makers believed that the UN was the appropriate instrument to respond to the new forms of world instability, and that France had to contribute to these efforts at all levels.

In general terms, French participation in UN peacekeeping operations is one key dimension of the country’s response to security threats. By contributing to peace operations, France intends to meet security challenges such as regional conflicts, refugee flows, organized crime, humanitarian emergencies, violations of human rights, and even, more recently, terrorism. Peace operations thus appear as tools of France’s security policy to influence events in areas where it has strategic or historical interests.¹ At the same time, these operations are a way to raise France’s profile as a political and military power.² In this sense, notwithstanding the propensity of democratic states to participate in peace operations, participation in such missions has appeared to be a political imperative for France.³

Indeed, in the first half of the 1990s France played a key political role at the Security Council and made major contributions to UN operations, mainly in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Cambodia (Table 1). In mid-1993, France was one of the largest troop contributors to UN missions, with more than 8,000 troops deployed in eight operations in May 1993.⁴ The operation in Bosnia concentrated most of the French effort, with up to 7,000 troops deployed in 1994–95.

At the time such commitment reflected an adequate convergence between France’s foreign affairs goals and what the UN as a political and operational peacekeeping actor was offering, or seemed to be offering. Yet this match was not to last, and France’s perceptions of the virtues of the UN severely suffered from the experience of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the difficulties encountered by the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) between 1992 and 1995.⁵

France was, together with the UK, one of the most active countries within UNPROFOR. It was involved at all levels and stages of the design, creation, and conduct of the operation, and provided one of its largest contingents. But the operation was confronted with huge difficulties, relating to mandate implementation, cooperation with the local parties, exposure of the Blue Helmets to humiliations, hostage takings, and even direct attacks.⁶ The culminating point of UNPROFOR’s failure was its passivity while in July 1995 the Bosnian Serb forces entered the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica and slaughtered more than 7,000 civilians.⁷

3. Changing institutional preferences

3.1. Moving away from the UN

France’s general assessment of UNPROFOR – and to a lesser extent of its engagement in Somalia and Rwanda – was severe and has deeply shaped the French perceptions of the UN since, most particularly within the French military. Paradoxically, the French feeling was that France had become the victim of an operation for which it had itself designed the mandate at the UN Security Council, and in which it had secured most of the key positions (such as Force Commanders). The assessment therefore combined well-founded critiques and a scapegoat approach – with the UN taking the blame to conceal France’s own miscalculations about the risks of ‘new’ peace operations.

French criticism concerned both the nature of peace operations and the ability of the UN to run them.

First, the issue of the compatibility of the key principles of UN peacekeeping (consent of the host state, impartiality, and non-resort to force except in self-defence) with the imperatives of decisive military action was raised.⁸ For the French military, the norms of peacekeeping contradicted the principles of military action and therefore increased the vulnerability of soldiers while limiting their freedom of action.⁹ Moreover, the French military came to the view that the principled and rigid distinction between peacekeeping and peace enforcement was problematic. The fact that, by definition, one could not move from the peacekeeper’s impartial posture to a more coercive one without jeopardizing the long-term nature of the international presence – which was by and large the French position throughout the Bosnian war – was contested by the military. This difference of opinion was evident even during the operation in Bosnia, where the ambiguities of the UNPROFOR mandate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A European return to United Nations peacekeeping? Opportunities, challenges and ways ahead
• 1. France: the unlikely return to UN peacekeeping
• 2. The United Kingdom and United Nations peace operations
• 3. Germany and United Nations peacekeeping: the cautiously evolving contributor
• 4. Italy and UN peacekeeping: constant transformation
• 5. A Dutch return to UN peacekeeping?
• 6. Europe’s return to UN peacekeeping? Opportunities, challenges and ways ahead – Ireland
• 7. Denmark and UN peacekeeping: glorious past, dim future
• 8. Sweden and the UN: a rekindled partnership for peacekeeping?
• 9. Between self-interest and solidarity: Norway’s return to UN peacekeeping?
• Index