EU Missions and Peacebuilding

Building Peace through the Common Security and Defence Policy

Vladimir Kmec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032057286
• eBook ISBN: 9781000520026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the European Union's (EU) approach to peacebuilding in its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions, and explores how this approach impacts the EU's role in international conflict management.

Peacebuilding carried out through CSDP instruments has become central to the self-conception of the EU as an actor in international conflict management. EU missions and operations have, for the most part, been deployed to promote peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict situations, in particular through capacity-building, reforms and rebuilding of state structures. This book focuses explicitly on the peacebuilding dimension of the CSDP while exploring why and how the EU has adopted peacebuilding in its CSDP actions as a norm and a practice. It analyses how peacebuilding in EU missions is conceptualised, designed, governed and implemented. The book examines the extent to which EU missions and operations reflect a normative and practical commitment of the EU to peacebuilding – that is to say, the extent to which CSDP instruments have been shaped by international peacebuilding norms and EU foreign policy. Drawing on empirical insights from decision- and policymaking processes in Brussels as well as from missions in Mali and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book offers critical perspectives on the EU's role as an international peacebuilding actor.

This book will be of much interest to students of European security, EU policy, peace and conflict studies, security studies and international relations.

1IntroductionA quest for the EU’s role in (post-)conflict management

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198901-1

In his memoirs, Winston Churchill framed World War II as “‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle” (Churchill 1948, iv). Churchill argued that World War II could have been prevented, including through diplomacy and the reconstruction of post-World War I Germany and Europe. While historians have disputed about the extent to which Churchill was right in his statement, history has taught us that the possibility remains to resolve a violent conflict, prevent a war and reinstate peace. Building stable peace is an ambitious undertaking; it is more difficult than starting an armed conflict or signing a peace accord that marks the end of violence, at least on paper. And yet, it is still a viable task. As societies fought wars, so have they also succeeded in building peace.

The belief that stable peace can be built gained attention, especially in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, the outbreak of intrastate conflicts with multiple security challenges and international ramifications emphasised the need for the development of new ways of dealing with conflicts. Intrastate conflicts are often results of failed states characterised by the devastation, weakening, malfunctioning or breakdown of state institutions, economy and infrastructure. Violent conflicts have urged millions of people to flee their homes and countries. Failed states can easily become breeding grounds for terrorism with international reach. The surge of recurring violence in intrastate conflicts emphasised that neither military intervention nor peacekeeping alone can prevent a country from sliding into a war. Traditional peacekeeping utterly failed to prevent genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Furthermore, the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq cast a shadow of doubt over the ability of military actions to achieve lasting peace. Unprepared to deal with the complex challenges of post-conflict situations, the international community was exploring how to best assist countries emerging from violent conflicts.

In this environment, peacebuilding emerged as a novel practice of international assistance to states recovering from conflicts in their quest for sustainable peace. Peacebuilding generally refers to a form of conflict management aimed at creating conditions for durable peace and preventing a post-conflict society from sliding into violence. Peacebuilding combines conflict prevention and the reconstruction of stable peace in the post-settlement phase. Peacebuilding that focuses on the post-conflict stabilisation, reform, reconstruction and building of state institutions has become the dominant approach of state actors and intergovernmental organisations (Richmond 2011; Richmond and Mitchell 2012). This form of peacebuilding addresses the immediate consequences and structural causes of conflict while building social, political, judicial, economic and security state sectors (Doyle and Sambanis 2000).

Intergovernmental organisations have become key actors in international peacebuilding. While peacebuilding has mainly been associated with the UN, the EU¹ also identified it as one of the priorities of its foreign policy (Council of the EU 2008). The EU and its member states contribute with financial assistance, personnel and resources to international peacebuilding efforts. The EU also undertakes its own peacebuilding actions. The Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)² has become the EU’s most significant contribution to international peacebuilding efforts. Launched as an instrument for managing conflicts outside the EU’s borders, the CSDP stands primarily for civilian and military missions in third countries. These instruments can be utilised for a full range of conflict management measures, known as Petersberg Tasks, as outlined in the Treaty on European Union (TEU): “joint disarmament operations, humanitarian and rescue tasks, military advice and assistance tasks, conflict prevention and peacekeeping tasks, tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking and post-conflict stabilisation” (European Union 2016, Art. 43(1)).

Despite the CSDP including the full range of crisis management tasks, EU missions and operations have, for the most part, been utilised to carry out peacebuilding tasks in post-settlement scenarios. Most missions and operations are mandated with post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction of state structures. They comprise activities such as strategic and legal advice, reform support, sector development, capacity-building and training in the areas of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR); security sector reform (SSR); border management; and the rule of law. Since 2003, the EU has deployed several missions and operations to build peace in third countries. Through these instruments, the EU has contributed to the maintenance of international peace and security, most notably international peacebuilding efforts.

This book turns attention to the peacebuilding dimension in the CSDP. It offers an analysis of the EU approach to peacebuilding in its missions and operations by exploring its theoretical underpinnings, decision- and policymaking processes and operational dynamics. The work examines the extent to which CSDP missions and operations reflect a normative and practical commitment of the EU to international peacebuilding – that is to say, the extent to which CSDP instruments have been shaped by international peacebuilding norms and/or by the EU foreign policy. In particular, the book explores how the CSDP fits the peacebuilding framework and why and how the EU has adopted peacebuilding in its CSDP. To answer these questions, the book analyses how peacebuilding within the CSDP is conceptualised, designed, governed and implemented.

The book argues that peacebuilding carried out through CSDP instruments has become central to the self-conception of the EU as a security actor, in particular as an actor in international conflict management. Post-conflict peacebuilding tasks have become the main area of the CSDP engagements. In this work, I argue that the EU’s role in international peacebuilding has principally been shaped by the international peacebuilding framework and the EU foreign policy. EU peacebuilding missions animate the normative objectives of the state-centred peacebuilding model embedded in the UN standardised practice. At the same time, these actions are results of the interests, concerns and constraints of the EU’s autonomous foreign policymaking. The extent to which one or another dimension becomes stronger depends on contextual circumstances of particular cases.

Turning the focus to peacebuilding

In contrast to what the term “CSDP” might indicate, the policy is not about the territorial defence of the EU. It stands for military and civilian deployments to address crises outside the EU. The CSDP should therefore be better understood as coming within the realm of peace support operations (Freire and Galantino 2015; Howorth 2014; Mérand 2008; Missiroli 2015). EU missions and operations are part of a range of peace operations undertaken by intergovernmental organisations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the African Union (AU), African sub-regional organisations and the UN. While the UN has been at the forefront of peace operations, regional organisations have also engaged in international conflict management. CSDP missions and operations have been modelled on the framework of international peace missions, especially that of the UN (Howorth 2014, 13).

International peace missions originally involved uniformed deployments to manage armed conflicts. They gradually extended into political and civilian tasks as they developed into a range of peace supporting measures, in particular conflict prevention, peacemaking, peace-enforcement, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Conflict prevention activities aim at preventing conflicts from breaking out or escalating. Peacemaking seeks to bring a conflict to an end through settlement, mediation, reconciliation or justice. Peacekeeping supports and monitors the implementation of peace agreements and ceasefire. Peace-enforcement refers to combat operations to establish security in cases when all peaceful means fail to end violence. Peacebuilding involves post-conflict reconstruction (UN “Terminology”). Peacebuilding has been seen as the final element of this spectrum of peace-supporting measures.

Initiated by the Franco-British agreement at Saint-Malo, the CSDP was envisioned as a tool for strengthening all the aspects of the security of the Union, including the EU’s capacity for autonomous military actions in international crises (Joint Declaration 1998). The original Petersberg Tasks, which were incorporated from the Western European Union (WEU) into the CSDP, were designed for military crisis management: “humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping tasks and tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking” (European Union 2001, Art. 1(2.2)). The CSDP was thus expected to empower the EU as a military actor and to strengthen its military capabilities (Salmon and Shepherd 2003). Once established, the CSDP encompassed the full spectrum of military and civilian crisis management tasks to allow the EU to be able to react to all the stages of a conflict cycle.

Notwithstanding this vision, the EU has not fully utilised the whole range of the Petersberg tasks. CSDP instruments have mainly been deployed to post-conflict scenarios rather than open conflicts. With the extension of the CSDP tasks into civilian and conflict prevention areas, peacebuilding has become the dominant component of the CSDP. As King noted, although these tasks “included potentially robust forms of engagement, they quickly became associated with softer forms of intervention, and indeed, these were the only missions to which the EU would commit itself” (2015, 256). EU operations have “been small-scale, relatively benign militarily and strategically peripheral” (ibid., 261). Due to their primary focus on post-conflict reconstruction, CSDP missions and operations have been highlighted as examples of peacebuilding (K.E. Smith 2008; Merlingen and Ostrauskaite 2006; Stewart 2011).

CSDP actions helped the EU to enhance its role in international conflict management, most notably in peacebuilding. The CSDP is a demonstration of the EU’s role in the world and the expectations that arise from this role. Biscop and Whitman noted that the emergence of the CSDP was the key aspect in the development of the EU “as an autonomous actor in the field of security, aiming to safeguard European security by improving global security” (2013a, 1). Tardy stressed that CSDP missions and operations “are the most visible manifestations of EU activity in fragile states and the most tangible expression of the EU’s contribution to international peace” (2015, 7). Since most CSDP actions carry out post-conflict reconstruction and capacity-building tasks in countries recovering from war, some scholars claimed that the EU has principally established itself as an actor in international peacebuilding (Merlingen and Ostrauskaite 2006; Stewart 2011).

Although EU missions and operations have primarily carried out peacebuilding tasks, the CSDP has not profoundly been analysed from a peacebuilding perspective so far. Studies on the EU and peacebuilding concentrate mainly on the Commission’s activities (e.g. Castañeda 2014, Spernbauer 2014). The peacebuilding literature focuses on the UN and NGOs. The conceptualisation of EU peacebuilding is widely absent in peace studies literature. Similarly, most works on the CSDP do not resort to critical perspectives from peace and conflict studies. Since the launch of first missions, scholarship on the CSDP has grown exponentially, focusing predominantly on the evolution, procedures, structures and roles of the CSDP (e.g. Biscop and Whitman 2013b; Howorth 2014; Kurowska and Breuer 2012; Merlingen and Ostrauskaite 2008; M.E. Smith 2017; Rehrl and Glume 2015). The CSDP has been situated within the frameworks of conflict prevention and/or crisis management (e.g. Galantino and Freire 2015; Gross and Juncos 2011). Respective EU missions and operations have been analysed extensively with most works focusing on particular components of the CSDP.

Only a few scholars have looked at the peacebuilding dimension of the CSDP, even then only from specific points of view. Merlingen and Ostrauskaite (2005a; 2005b; 2006) were among the first to link peacebuilding and the CSDP, though they studied exclusively police missions in BiH and North Macedonia.³ Richmond, Björkdahl and Kappler (2011) assessed the EU’s evolving peacebuilding framework. Aggestam and Björkdahl (2013) discussed the EU’s peacebuilding practices from the perspective of justice theories. Gourlay (2013) analysed the civilian CSDP as a tool for state-building in post-conflict countries. The volume by Blockmans, Wouters and Ruys (2010) discussed the whole spectrum of the EU’s peacebuilding activities, including the CSDP, but without a deeper analysis of the dynamics behind peacebuilding in the CSDP. Despite the contribution of these studies, the nexus of the peacebuilding framework and the CSDP h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: A quest for the EU’s role in (post-)conflict management
• 2 The EU and the international turn towards peacebuilding
• 3 CSDP machinery and peacebuilding
• 4 Deciding on CSDP peacebuilding actions
• 5 Peacebuilding through CSDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Membership-building
• 6 Peacebuilding through CSDP in Mali: The long road to peace
• 7 Conclusion: Towards and beyond peacebuilding in EU missions
• Index