The European Union as a Global Conflict Manager

Richard Whitman, Stefan Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415528559
• eBook ISBN: 9781136293603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years the European Union (EU) has played an increasingly important role as a manager of global conflicts. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of how the EU has performed in facilitating mediation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding across the globe.

Offering an accessible introduction to the theories, processes and practice of the EU's role in managing conflict, the book features a broad range of case studies including Afghanistan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cyprus, Israel-Palestine, Macedonia and Moldova and examines both the institutional and policy aspects including the common foreign, security and defence policy.

Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this will be of great interest to students of European Foreign Policy, the EU as a global actor and conflict resolution and management.

Part 1

Conceptual Perspectives

2 The institutional nature of the EU as a global conflict manager

Carmen Gebhard

Introduction

In recent years, the European Union’s (EU) nature as an international actor and global conflict manager has undergone considerable changes - changes in the foundational objectives, the raison d’être of its external action as such, and changes in the institutional set-up supporting and enabling it. First it was the formal establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) for the EU with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 to mark the beginning of a new phase in the history of European Community (EC)/EU external action. Until then, the EC/EU’s external portfolio had been mainly composed of its external trade policy, development cooperation, humanitarian assistance and regional cooperation as well as of loose intergovernmental coordination in the framework of the European Political Cooperation (EPC). The CFSP formalized the newly emergent conviction of the then EU-12 to substantiate the Union’s external agenda with new institutional arrangements and, not least, with the establishment of a political union. Pushed by the rapidly changing global circumstances, the EU started to develop and assume a more proactive role on the international scene. In 1999, the inception of the European Security and Defence Policy (now Common Security and Defence Policy, CSDP) then added a security and defence political element to this new external profile of the Union, providing the basis for the EU to develop distinct operational capacities for the management of crises and conflicts in its immediate neighbourhood, the European continent and, ultimately, in the world.

The creation of an operational element for the Union’s foreign and security policy had a major impact on the internal institutional balance of the EU. As the CSDP started to materialize, the most immediate challenge was to accommodate the newly established set of governing bodies within the wider institutional structures of CFSP, and to administratively enable and prepare the new operational tasks ahead. What proved to be much more controversial and problematic, however, was the functional allocation of CSDP in the broader context of the three pillars of the EU. How should the new policy field relate to and affect other more traditional portfolios of EU external action and, in the first place, the external policy realm governed by the European Commission? If the EU really were to develop genuinely global actorness, which institutional arrangement would be most convenient to ensure optimal performance on the continent and in the world? Which institutional entity would ideally be taking the lead in the newly redrawn external profile of the EU? The enduring divide over these fundamental questions has frequently taken the inter-institutional dialogue away from the actual task at hand - the functional recalibration of the EU’s external profile to the service of effective external action, most importantly in the realm of conflict management. As this chapter will show, the respective treaty provisions could not have been more ambiguous and confusing about the relationship and functional ratio between the Community-led and supranational domain of external action covered by the first pillar, and the second pillar of CFSP as its newly substantiated intergovernmental counterpart, then newly featuring CSDP. Preoccupations voiced by the Commission side about a hierarchic order creeping into the single set of institutions and about CFSP/CSDP subtlety infringing on the Community’s terrain of external action competences gave rise to considerable inter-institutional frictions, and as such constituted a major challenge to the EU’s capability to coordinate its actions internally.

From a conceptual and strategic point of view it was clear from the beginning that the operational elements of external action established within the framework of CSDP were to functionally complement the set of external policy instruments the Community already had at its command. The political and organizational road map to operationalize this idea of complementary agendas, and to complete the inter-institutional task of reconciling the respective portfolios accordingly, however, had yet to be formulated and designed. This chapter seeks to answer why this internal reconciliation exercise between the pillars is so important for the EU’s overall performance as a global conflict manager, how the EU’s institutional nature has affected progress in this regard, and in what respect there has been progress towards increased synergy across the institutional boundaries at play.

The Importance of Coherence in the Twenty-First Century

Conducting security policy in the twenty-first century is a complex challenge for any mternational actor. Since the late 1980s, the international strategic environment has seen a multiplication of non-conventional types of threat and aggression. Today, international organizations and single nation states alike have to provide for a very broad range of potential security challenges instead of limiting their efforts to the traditional range of conventional security political concerns, i.e. those inherently state-centric and military in nature. Present-day conflict management is an intricate venture in that it demands inclusive solutions and comprehensive approaches that transcend the realm of high politics to cut across various other policy fields. Security is now conceptualised as a matter of environmental balance as much as of economic stability or sustainable development. While the conventional core aspects of security remain relevant, other policy fields are gaining importance and have to be taken into account. Providing security as an international actor has thus become a multifactorial challenge. A set of policy fields is to be coordinated to fulfil this functionally indivisible task, and as it is the case with any combined institutional arrangement, ensuring coherence between the constituent parts is essential.

In order to tap the EU’s full security political potential, CSDP as the operational core of its external action profile has to be integrated with the other domains of EU external action. Neither can the comprehensive task of international crisis management and conflict resolution be operated within the limited framework of CSDP, nor can the other structural domains of EU external action be kept strategically and organizationally separate from the CSDP. The traumatic experience of the 1990s, when the EU turned out to be functionally incapable of coping with the Balkan wars, has made it clear that the EU cannot become a credible international player without having any operational assets available. The way the international security landscape has recently evolved, however, also shows that operational crisis management and conflict resolution measures have to be backed by long-term structural efforts to frame the actions on the ground politically, socially and economically. Some of these flanking measures involve diplomatic and political action through the institutional arrangements of the CFSP; in essence, however, the external action instruments governed by the European Commission, such as development cooperation, humanitarian assistance, regional cooperation and external trade are among the most established and thus not least among the most influential policy tools any international actor could have at its command.

The internal institutional tensions that have dominated the EU’s foreign and security policy in recent years have severely affected the credibility of the Union as a bilateral and multilateral partner, and reduced the ability of the EU to interact fruitfully with other organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and, most importantly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This is also what makes ‘horizontal coherence’, i.e. the enhancement of inter-pillar synergy, such a pressing challenge. Despite all internal struggles and the inherent challenge of having to cope with structural complexity, the Union is increasingly perceived as - and not least expected to act like - a coherent if not unitary actor. What has kept the EU and its Member States from overcoming these institutional frictions so far, and why in the first place did they persist despite considerable external pressure?

On various occasions, key figures in EU external policies have underlined the overall conviction of the EU and its Member States to respond to the multiplicity of today’s challenges through the broad range of instruments the EU has at its command. It has become much of a rhetorical platitude indeed that the EU is a security political actor of its own kind as it disposes of a uniquely wide array of instruments for the management of crises and conflicts, and thus reflects most ideally the idea of comprehensive security political action. The principal benefit of the EU having both operational and structural capabilities is often rightly emphasised. However, what is frequently being declared as the EU’s greatest asset as a crisis manager - its holistic predisposition and the wide range and variety of policy instruments it has at its command - in practice poses enormous organizational and institutional challenges. The institutional set-up that is to enable this comprehensive performance does not exactly match with the political ambitions voiced in these contexts. The EU as it presents itself today is made up of a vertically and horizontally multilayered, and thus complex, system of institutional actors, which in principle would not yet compromise the idea of comprehensiveness. Given this multifaceted and sophisticated structural nature, it actually appears as if the Union was virtually meant to act comprehensively. However, the alleged ‘array of instruments’ is spread across the pillars, and thus divided into different procedural channels of policy development, decision-making, implementation and financing. Therefore, the EU’s potential for comprehensiveness in reality frequently constitutes a source of division, and thus, ironically, rather an inherent liability for the Union than a comparative advantage indeed, and this strongly affects the effectiveness and credibility of its actions. It is hence to be noted that the overall success of the Union’s performance in the world stands and falls with the political and administrative ability of coping with the very essence of its uniqueness as an international actor: its versatility and comprehensive nature and, thus, its institutional complexity.

The legal basis: root cause of conflict

In public documents and political debates, internal struggles about external action competencies have commonly been referred to as concerns about ‘coherence’, and the related challenge and ambition to tackle the inherent lack of inter-institutional synergy. As the EU started to prepare for its first crisis management operations within the framework of CSDP, much of the general debate about coherence in external action had started to revolve around the functional role and scope of European security policy, and the way its advancement would affect the internal institutional balance of the EU. The core of this debate lies in the division about which institutional framework - the supranational one of the Commission or the intergovernmental one of the Council - is to provide the primary referent framework for the EU’s external action. While, generally, ‘coherence’ appears to be much of a benign concept for achieving the desirable state of synergy and efficiency, in political terms, however, it bears a very strong power element, which in turn makes it a highly controversial and conflict-prone issue. In a way, establishing coherence is mostly about coordination, and effecting coordination within any administrative system involves the delicate question about who is coordinated and who indeed coordinates. Pointing at a state of procedural or politico-strategic incoherence hence often suggests the necessity of some coordinating or structuring hierarchy or institutional prioritization among the structural actors involved (Nuttall 2001). As for the case of EU external action, this coordinating right and responsibility has so far been shared between the two constituent institutional actors - a coordinating and mediating third party has not been provided. According to article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) (Nice) the Council and the Commission have not only both been entitled and responsible to ensure coherence of external action activities, they have also been bound to cooperate to this end. Article 3 further prescribed that the two institutions would have to ensure the implementation of these policies, ‘each in accordance with its respective powers’. The Treaty of Lisbon, which entered into force on 1 December 2009, has brought slight changes to this arrangement by introducing the role of a High Representative (HR), who is also one of the Vice-Presidents of the European Commission. According to article 18 TEU (Lisbon) it is now the responsibility of the HR to ensure the consistency of the EU’s external action. In a way, this new HR therefore has to assume a mediating role between the two sides while being representative to both. While it remains to be seen how this institutional set-up will work in practice, it appears clear at this point that coordination between the Commission and the Council will remain controversial. As the following analysis will show, the legal framework that so far was to regulate the conduct of EU external action in an effective and concerted way, provides substantial legal grey zones, which in practice have led to considerable coordination problems and conflicts.

First of all, it is important to acknowledge that the issue of coherence as raised in this specific context of conflict management has been a recurrent matter of dispute in European integration history. In fact, the quest for coherence is - as Gauttier (2004: 24) put it -‘consubstantial with the external action of the EC/EU’. The challenge of having to reconcile supranational structures with intergovernmental elements, or economic with political ones, has probably been in place as long as the desire to have Europe exist as an international entity, and thus, as a political actor on the global scene. Recent debates about coherence in EU crisis management can be seen as yet another episode in a long-standing inter-institutional conflict. The inherent dynamism and the proliferation of operational activities under the aegis of CSDP have added new momentum to old struggles between the EU’s main institutional actors, the European Commission and the Council. So far, these struggles have mainly been about (a) conflicts of legal competence and (b) about functional grey zones persistent in the EU’s external action profile.

Looking back, the idea of coherent institutional action has been an issue ever since 1965 when the Merger Treaty established a single Council and a single Commission for the European Communities, and thus ‘a single set of institutions’ to exercise the powers conferred to them by the treaties. Early episodes of the debate on coherence in external action occurred in the course of the 1980s, while the institutionalization of the then informal EPC began to take shape. When the EPC was eventually adopted in the Single European Act (SEA) in 1987 as a first form of ‘political Europe’, the issue arose of how these early intergovernmental attempts of giving the internal market a foreign policy dimension could be reconciled with the then established supranational framework of the Community. Nuttall (2001: 2) has a point when stating that today’s bifurcation of the EU’s external profile originated in this very context, when ‘at the insistence of France, the EPC and the Community were kept as far as possible in hermetically sealed compartments’.

The following Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) did not bring any major improvements. The establishment of CFSP in 1992 with the Treaty of Maastricht rather complicated the picture as the institutional background it provided for the political cooperation among the Member States reinforced the pre-established dualism between supranational integration and intergovernmental cooperation instead of removing it (Gauttier 2004), and thus perpetuated the dysfunctional division between the external economic and the foreign political agenda. The choice for a pillar structure and for the establishment of a ‘Union’ to back the Community politically, determined the course of institutional developments for the years to come. With both consecutive treaty revisions in 1997 and 2000 Member States equally failed to resolve at least part of the problem, and thus left the settlement of institutional fragmentation to practice. The Nice Treaty confirmed the dualist logic, so that the legal basis for the CSDP and its security political portfolio to be functionally integrated across the pillar divide remained weak.

So far, most of the difficulties arising from the existence of legal grey zones in the treaties, i.e. of areas where the competences of the Commission and the Council are not outlined clearly enough to allow the allocation of definitive responsibilities for all instances of external action, have had their root cause in one essential ambiguity, namely the unclear functional ratio or hierarchy between the Community and the Union’s legal framework. The legal provisions offered up to the Treaty of Nice left open whether the external aspects of the Community were hierarchically superior to those of Title V TEU, addressing CFSP, and framing CSDP, or how the two domains functionally related to each other. Article 1 TEU (Nice) indicated that the Union was to be ‘founded on the European Communities, supplemented by the policies and forms of cooperation established by this Treaty’. This regulation clearly conveyed that the Community framework including the external action elements of the respective policies is superordinate to the intergovernmental dimension of external action as contained in the Union’s CFSP. Title V TEU (Nice), in the way it defines the scope of CFSP, however, is said to include and cover all areas of foreign and security policy, while in that the role of the Commission remains limited.

As a result of this legal ambiguity, there have been many cases in political practice where factual responsibilities were not clearly defined by the respective legal frameworks, but where also the treaties did not provide any regulations about which entity was to take the lead in certain foreign and even security political matters. As admitted by the treaties, CFSP instruments were often used in a pervasive way: common positions included objectives for political action that infringed on Community competences, like the consolidation of democracies (through development cooperation), or the promotion of human rights. On a couple of instances (see Gauttier 2004 for examples), CFSP measures have challenged the Commission’s formerly exclusive competence to act by including operational provisions relating to any of its ongoing Community-financed programmes in a certain country, most importantly in the areas of election monitoring, social and economic reconstruction, the handling of dual-use goods, defence industrial aspects, preventive policies, and external representation.

Further legal grey zones between the Community realm and the CFSP were provided by the legal framework regulating the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 Conceptual Perspectives
• Part 2 Case Studies
• Part 3 Comparative Perspectives
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index