The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories

State-building without a state

Dimitris Bouris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138187580
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915287
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This book analyses the present European Union (EU) approach to state-building, both in policy and operation. It offers a review of the literature on peace-building, EU state-building and conflict resolution, before examining in detail the EU's role as a state-builder in the case of the Occupied Palestinian Territories following the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and over 140 interviews carried out in Brussels, London, Jerusalem and Ramallah with EU, Palestinian and Israeli officials as well as academics, members of NGOs and civil society, the author evaluates the present approach of state-building and offers a framework to test the effectiveness of the EU as a state-builder. Examining security sector reform, judiciary sector reform and the rule of law, the book brings the 'voices from the field' to the forefront and measures the contribution of the EU to state-building against a backdrop of on-going conflict and a polarised social setting.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, EU politics, Middle Eastern politics, conflict resolution and state-building.

1 The concept of state-building

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the debate about liberal peace, liberal peacebuilding and state-building. Although there is an extensive literature on peace-building and state-building (Fukuyama 2005; Richmond 2007; Paris 2003, 2004; Paris and Sisk 2009; Chesterman 2004; Hehir and Robinson 2007; Call and Wyeth 2008; Newman and Richmond 2006; Waldner 1999) this literature is mainly UN-centred. Most of it analyses state-building dilemmas, the ways in which the international community can practice state-building, the institutional aspects and their problematic components in state-building and the general issue of the so-called liberal peace model. Moreover, most of this literature pays attention to state-building in post-conflict societies and uses case studies such as East Timor, Angola, Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, Bosnia, Croatia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Namibia, Mozambique and more recently Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Consequently, the aim of this book is not just to give a different perspective on the UN’s role or the role of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund in state-building, but to investigate the distinctive EU role in the state-building project. This role has not really been investigated except for some cases such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.¹ But even in these cases there is not a systematic study of the distinctive EU role as a state-builder. Moreover, this literature devotes just a part on the role of the EU in state-building, using it as a case rather than as a comprehensive study.

This chapter starts by offering a description of the liberal peace and peacebuilding debate, from which state-building derives, and explains the principles promoted by the liberal peace model and how this idea is linked with the debate on state-building. The chapter continues with an overview of what state-building means and how it is used as a broader peacebuilding mechanism. It concludes by providing a summary of the critiques of the liberal peace model, peacebuilding and state-building. As such, this chapter is to be used as a platform that will help the reader understand the EU’s distinctive role in the state-building project in the next chapter.

Towards the liberal peace and peacebuilding

The end of the Cold war found the international community ready to engage with an experiment named peacebuilding. The central aim of peacebuilding operations was to stabilise fragile states, which were emerging from civil war, and to prevent any possible recurrence of violence. While these missions were supposed to involve lightly armed military forces, sometimes they included troops with enforcement rather than peacekeeping duties and powers (Paris 2004: 38). In 1989 the UN deployed the first such mission in Namibia,² with the aim of monitoring the conduct of local police, disarming the fighters and preparing the country for its first democratic election and the drafting of a new constitution (Paris and Sisk 2009: 4).

In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, UN Secretary General at that time, in a policy statement entitled An Agenda for Peace tried to conceptualise all these new missions. He defined peacekeeping as the ‘deployment of a United Nations presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all the parties concerned, normally involving United Nations military and/or police personnel and frequently civilians as well’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: para. 20). His second category of operations included peace enforcement missions, which would have to be ‘more heavily armed than peace-keeping forces and would need to undergo extensive preparatory training within their national forces’ (ibid.: para. 44). The last category of missions would be the post-conflict peacebuilding missions, which would ‘tend to consolidate peace and prevent the recurrence of violence’ (ibid.: para. 55). According to the same document, peacebuilding would include actions such as:

disarming the previously warring parties and the restoration of order, the custody and possible destruction of weapons, repatriating refugees, advisory and training support for security personnel, monitoring elections, advancing efforts to protect human rights, reforming or strengthening governmental institutions and promoting formal and informal processes of political participation.

(Ibid.)

In the 1990s, more missions were launched³ and ‘postconflict peacebuilding developed into something of a growth industry’ (Paris 2004: 3). The common denominator of all these missions deployed between 1989 and 1997 was that in general they had limited-period mandates and they were primarily focusing on organising a post-conflict election with little attention being paid to longer-term goals such as constructing or strengthening the institutional structures necessary for democratic governance and market-oriented reforms (Paris and Sisk 2009: 4–7). As a result, the lack of mechanisms to promote power-sharing arrangements before the elections and the inability of institutions to uphold election results led to renewed violence in places such as Angola, Cambodia and Liberia.

The guiding standard behind all the missions deployed in the 1990s was singular: that a lasting peace could be created and established only by promoting ‘liberalisation’⁴ in the countries that had recently experienced civil war (Paris 2004: 5). The ethics of liberal democracy were thus made explicit in peacebuilding from the beginning (Heathershaw 2008: 601). Boutros-Ghali, in his Agenda for Peace, had argued that ‘there is an obvious connection between democratic practices – such as the rule of law and transparency in decision-making – and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992: 34). To this end, the liberal peace thesis, especially after the end of the Cold War, has enjoyed ‘a nearly unrivalled ideological hegemony’ (Hameiri 2011: 5).

The antecedents of the liberal peace could be traced in the work of Kant and his Perpetual Peace. Kant came to set specific conditions by which peace could be attained between states. These included the adoption of democracy as a basis of government and the promotion of international trade, which would form the basis of international co-operation and consequently the ending of war (Kant 1795). The Kantian arguments have formed what is now called the ‘democratic peace thesis’, which legitimises the argument of the promotion of democrat-isation as a tool of building the liberal peace. To that end, ‘the defence and construction of the liberal peace … became a legitimate and legitimizing objective in this context’ (Richmond 2007: 27).

This argument gave rise to what Paris (2004: 6) calls ‘Wilsonianism’, meaning that the use of democratisation and marketisation would be the best tools for fostering domestic peace. Thus, peacebuilders in the 1990s were trying to turn war-torn states into liberal democracies without questioning the success of this strategy or the mechanisms and methods for conducting this project (ibid.). It seems that the so-called liberal market democracy had gained triumph over other types of democratic or non-democratic governance. As Sachs puts it:

By the mid-1990s almost the entire world had adopted the fundamental elements of a market economy, including private ownership at the core of the economy, a currency convertible for international trade … and market-based transactions for the bulk of the productive sectors of the economy.

(Sachs 1999: 98)

Gradually, after the end of the Cold War, the main international ‘agents’ started emphasising the importance of Western liberal democracy. In 1996, Boutros Boutros-Ghali defined the democratic state as where ‘the will of the people is the basis of governmental authority … that there shall be periodic and genuine elections … that political opponents and minorities have the right to express their views …’ (Boutros-Ghali 1996: para. 21). In the same line of argument, a few years later in 2000, Kofi Annan argued that ‘support for democratisation has become one of our major concerns’ (Annan 1997: 2) and that ‘good governance and sustainable development are indivisible’ (ibid.). In the words of Richmond, ‘governance became the key and its reform, construction, and restraint integral to this new version of peace’ (Richmond 2007: 56). In the consensus favoured by most Western states, good governance:

essentially means some approximation of liberal democratic government, consisting of free political competition with multi-party elections, an independent judiciary and rule of law, free markets and rights that guarantee juridical equality, property, privacy and freedom of religious belief and political opinion.

(Ignatieff 2005: 69)

But the new liberal peace was not only embraced by the UN. It was also adopted by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE),⁵ which declared that ‘the development of societies based on pluralistic democracy and the rule of law are prerequisites for progress in setting up the lasting order of peace, security, justice and co-operation that they seek to establish in Europe’ (Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe 1990: 2). The World Bank followed the ‘chorus’ and adopted the liberal agenda, making its aid conditional on six key areas of liberalisation, namely: social and ethnic relations, governance and political institutions, human rights and security, economic structure and performance, environment and natural resources as well as other ‘external factors’ (World Bank 2005a: 7).

The new liberal peace gained momentum and it was closely linked with the debate on conflict prevention and conflict resolution. The democratic peace argument, a component of the liberal peace idea, which argues that democracies tend to safeguard peace in their interactions with each other, was inherently linked to political liberalism. Oliver Richmond, reflecting on peace through conflict theory, distinguishes between conflict management, conflict resolution and peace research approaches⁶ (Richmond 2007: 86). In his view, conflict resolution approaches are very important as they highlight the importance of human security over state security and structural violence. In this case, peace is built from the bottom-up by civil society and ‘via a concurrent agreement between state and non-state actors on universal human needs, the provision of which brings a form of peace associated with world society’ (ibid.: 98). He concludes by summarising the ways in which peace can be conceptualised: peace can be viewed as an internal/external binary definition; a hegemonic act of definition; a bottom-up or top-down approach; a temporal concept, geographical or as governance (ibid.: 185–197).

Peace as governance is undoubtedly a very interesting conceptualisation as it is the most common form applied to peacebuilding as well as to state-building. Peace as governance focuses on the building of a state’s institutions as well as on its society at large, aiming at the construction of the liberal peace in which NGOs and agencies also contribute. As Richmond puts it: ‘the balance of power, hegemony, institutionalism and constitutionalism, and civil society converge in this version of peace in an era of governmentality, which is super-territorial, and multi-layered’ (ibid.: 211). Consequently, nowadays, the debates on peace and state-building have moved into the construction of liberal types of governance as far as economic, political and social aspects are concerned.

John Heathershaw (2008: 604) proposes three different discourses of peace-building:⁷ (1) ‘democratic peacebuilding’,⁸ (2) civil society peacebuilding and (3) peacebuilding via state-building. He characterises democratic peacebuilding as ‘conflict management’, civil society peacebuilding as ‘peace-as-justice’ and peace-building via state-building as ‘peace-as-order’ (ibid.: 604–609). Heathershaw analyses the concept of democratic peacebuilding and argues that it is not just ‘a form of praxis but represents peacebuilding as a process of post-conflict democratisation’ (ibid.: 598). Barnett and Zücher argue that the crucial issue in peacebuilding is ‘whether the local elites accept the peacebuilding reforms as presented or insist on a modification’ (Barnett and Zücher 2009: 33). In the first case, the outcome is co-operative state-building. If the local elites demand modifications and try to alter the content and implementation of these programmes, three outcomes are possible: captured peacebuilding if external peacebuilders accept the local elites’ modifications; compromised peacebuilding if both sides compromise on their demands; and, finally, confrontational peacebuilding, if external peacebuilders do not give in to these conditions (ibid.). The same typology can also be applied with regard to state-building. Trying to make the distinction between peacebuilding and state-building, Richmond argues that ‘peacebuilding … is a much, much bigger task than liberal state-building in its problem-solving, rational-institutionalist, reductionist and parsimonious guise’ (Richmond 2009: 330).

State-building as peacebuilding

According to Paris and Sisk, state-building is a ‘particular approach to peace-building, premised on the recognition that achieving security and development in societies emerging from civil war partly depends on the existence of capable, autonomous and legitimate governmental institutions’ (Paris and Sisk 2009: 4). Similarly, Fukuyama argues that state-building is ‘the creation of new government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones’ (Fukuyama 2005: xvii).⁹ Contrary to these definitions, which focus more on institutions, the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD DAC) definition argues that state-building is a ‘purposeful action to develop the capacity, institutions and legitimacy of the state in relation to an effective political process for negotiating the mutual demands between state and societal groups’ (OECD DAC 2008: 14). Evidently, the latter definition focuses on a broader understanding of state-building that emphasises effectiveness as well as resilience and legitimacy (ibid.).

There are three types of state-building that international politics have witnessed to date; military state-building,¹⁰ post-conflict state-building and state-building in a still-in-conflict society, or state-building as conflict resolution. In the first category, we could allocate the recent examples of Iraq and Afghanistan. While it could be argued that the main aim of these operations was a regime change rather than state-building, the international community had to rebuild everything from scratch after the end of the invasion. While military intervention was criticised as ‘imperialism’ some writers, such as Ignatieff, defended it, arguing that:

Imperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect. Nations sometimes fail, and when they do outside help – imperial power – can get them back in their feet. Nation-building is the kind of imperialism you get in a human rights era, a time when great powers believe simultaneously in the right of small nations to govern themselves and their own right to rule the world.

(Ignatieff 2002: 26)

But, despite being in the same category, international contributions displayed a great deal of variety as far as the state-building project in Iraq and Afghanistan is concerned. In the case of Afghanistan, the international community followed a light-footprint approach (Wilke 2004: 8) and there was an early return of sovereignty to an interim government, while in Iraq the US held the authority for more than 13 months before transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis in 2004 (Fukuyama 2006: 12). To this end, it could be argued that the parameter of l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The concept of state-building
• 2. The EU and state-building
• 3. The European Union’s role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
• 4. The EU and Security Sector Reform in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
• 5. The EU, Judiciary Sector Reform and the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
• 6. Conclusion
• References
• Index