European Union Peacebuilding and Policing

Governance and the European Security and Defence Policy

Michael Merlingen, Rasa Ostrauskaite

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415397902
• eBook ISBN: 9781134151790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

This new book provides an in-depth analysis of the projects of improvement carried out by the civilian peacebuilding missions in Bosnia and Macedonia, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to make the case that the EU's (self-) image as a model peacebuilder conceals another side of the European Security and Defence Policy.

The authors explore the double-sided nature of peacebuilding missions, on the one hand, as a way to pacify, democratize, humanize and improve life in societies emerging from crisis or violence and, on the other hand, as a kind of political pastorate that limits the range of acceptable heterogeneity by refashioning, repositioning and reorganizing subjects in line with transcendentalized notions of good governance. The authors develop a limited reform agenda for how EU police missions can fold an agonistic generosity more deeply into their civilizing ethos in order to ensure they have a light expatriate footprint in their host countries. The prescriptive part of the book also discusses generic problems in the implementation of EU police reforms and suggests ways to overcome these challenges.

This book will be of great interest to students of European politics, sociology, political science and theory.

1 Introduction

European foreign policy (EFP) contributes in manifold ways to peace support operations. To begin with, member states of the European Union (EU) are active in international peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peacebuilding, either as members of international organizations, as participants of coalitions of the willing or through unilateral initiatives. As to the European Commission, it has a strong external relations acquis in projecting peace abroad, notably in the form of preventive diplomacy and longer-term civilian peacebuilding. Finally, Union foreign policy, through the deployment of military and civilian operations under the new European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), has become a key contributor to international peace missions.

This book examines, from the perspective of critical social theory, a principal component of peacebuilding carried out under the ESDP: police missions. International assistance for police reforms in countries emerging from instability or violence directly affects both the quality of people’s lives and the contours of political and social order. As such it is central to the construction of peace (Dziedzic 2002; Eide and Holm 2000; Jackson and Lyon 2002; Neild 2001). Its particular focus notwithstanding, both the manner in which the study engages its empirical site and the features it brings into relief can be generalized beyond the policing field and the EU to international peacebuilding as such.

The term ‘peacebuilding’ is often used to denote international military and/or civilian interventions in states aimed at creating the conditions for stable and lasting peace in the wake of civil strife (Paris 2004). Conversely, international efforts to strengthen and solidify peace in the context of a crisis or unstable peace are dubbed as ‘preventive diplomacy’. For the purpose of this book, we depart from this usage. By the term ‘peacebuilding’ we mean international action within states either to prevent civil war or to rebuild peace in the aftermath of violence. The advantage of our conception is that it brings into focus the discontinuity between traditional (Westphalian) preventive diplomacy and non-traditional (post-Westphalian) peacebuilding as well as the fact that both preventive and post-conflict peacebuilding interventions rely on the same toolbox. Thus, ESDP missions may be deployed to countries either suffering from instability or emerging from civil war to make them safe for liberal peace.

The ESDP is significantly more than a vehicle to further narrow European security interests. It is an expression of the EU’s international mission for humanity. With the ESDP, the EU endowed itself with a valueoriented international security policy that privileges peace support operations over war-fighting. It balances limited but increasingly robust military capabilities to enforce and keep the peace in conflict-prone or war-torn countries with strong civilian capabilities to assist countries in building stable peace.

The ethical aspirations at the heart of the ESDP may be described in terms of its contribution to a global civilizing process, which ‘is concerned with reducing cruelty in world affairs and with widening emotional identification to include the members of other societies’ (Linklater 2005: 381). Of course, the peace operations carried out under the ESDP do not only reflect the value-driven foreign policy profile of the EU; as Richard Youngs (2004), among others, reminds us, EFP is invested with strategic calculations and sometimes the instrumental rationality underpinning this calculus weakens or even undermines the normative agenda of the ESDP. While this is an important critique, we believe the engagement with the normative impulse of the EFP in general and the ESDP in particular has to be pushed further and be more constructive. In a spirit that is not alien to Norbert Elias (1996, 2000), who pioneered the sociological analysis of modernization as a civilising process, we argue in this book that ESDP peacebuilding is inscribed in the dialectic of modernity, i.e. the dialectical relationship between the growing emancipation of individuals from violence and external compulsion and the growth of new forms of power.

A clear example of the risks inscribed in international efforts to liberate people from oppression and to advance the global civilizing process is the overthrow by an international coalition of the dictatorship in Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing turmoil bedevilling the international construction of liberal peace. From the perspective of realist international theory, this case serves as a reminder that those who want to better the world in most cases end up making it worse. There is no room for emancipation in the realm of the international short of its structural transformation from anarchy to hierarchy. Hence, realists suggest, in politics beyond the state it is kind to be cruel. Liberals reject this dichotomy between normatively based politics within the state and brutish international relations. A series of factors ranging from the increased cognitive capacities of individuals to the growing importance of international organizations transform the global into an institutionalized heterarchy in which cross-border morality flourishes. Liberals, thus, are more likely to argue that the manner in which the Iraq policy was decided and executed, say, without approval by the United Nations (UN), is to be blamed for the problems of bringing democratic peace to conflict-ridden Iraqi society.

Both realist pessimism and liberal optimism fail to do justice to the dialectic of the international civilizing process. The former denies against all evidence the gradual and uneven domestication of the international, positing a law of anarchy, or human fallibility, that produces an inevitable conjunction of good intentions and bad outcomes in anarchical action contexts. The latter celebrates reason as a barrier against injustice both in domestic and in global settings and thus attributes setbacks in the betterment of world politics to political, technical or administrative shortcomings, say, badly thought-out plans and slippage in the implementation process. Against both international theories, we argue that there is a more fundamental issue at play in the international politics of harm reduction. Peacebuilding is made up of elements that are in tension or opposition with each other, and it entails positive and negative tendencies. Successful interventions in which everything goes according to plan, in which the liberal-democratic norms infusing policy are fully implemented on the ground and the target society is effectively pacified, may lead to new forms of unfreedom. This is what we mean when we say that the ESDP, understood as an ethical project to promote the international civilizing process, is inscribed in the dialectic of modernity. We develop this thesis by engaging the ESDP through a dialectical critique that looks at strengths and weaknesses with a view to amplifying the former and limiting the latter. To this end, we mobilize the work of Michel Foucault.

What can an exotic Parisian theory possibly tell us about the mundane world of ESDP peacebuilding operations? It enables us to see them as a mechanism of power projection that is inevitably both enabling and constraining. Peacebuilders empower conflict-ridden societies to change themselves in an improving direction yet in doing so they necessarily impose political limits. We argue that the ethos of care at the heart of the ESDP, even while it promotes ethical security policies that downplay the moral and political significance of the difference between citizens and foreigners, licenses practices by virtue of which the European comes to reside within and discipline societies in crisis or emerging from violence. In its normalizing mode, peacebuilding brings into play microphysical and non-sovereign forms of power that circulate through opaque capillaries that link foreign peacebuilders and local populations. The risk is that these constraints congeal into patterns of paternalism and domination, which stifle what David Scott (1999) calls the local demand for a future constructed in its own vernacular image. To explore this argument, we examine a dimension of the ESDP that, its crucial relevance for peacebuilding notwithstanding, is largely overlooked by the media and rarely discussed in public policy debates. The case for an analysis of ESDP interventions into the policing field is compelling, both conceptually and empirically.

In the second half of the 1990s, the international donor community, notably the United Nations, identified policing reforms in violence-prone societies as a principal element in the construction of an order of liberal peace and began to act accordingly.¹ In line with the new international consensus, the EU views its police missions as vehicles to advance security sector reforms in support of peace in target countries through the dissemination of best European policing practices. Moreover, police interventions have emerged as the principal component of the ESDP, in terms of both the number of deployed peace missions and the depth of their involvement in reorganizing divided societies. In 2005, the EU had 4 concurrent missions engaged in (re-)forming police forces in Bosnia (European Union Police Mission, EUPM), Macedonia (European Union Police Mission in Macedonia, EUPOL Proxima, which was replaced by the EU Police Advisory Team in Macedonia, EUPAT, in December), Congo (EUPOL Kinshasa) and Iraq (EUJUST Lex). In early 2006, EUPOL Copps was officially deployed in Palestine. Also, at the time of writing, preparatory work was ongoing for the launch of an EU police mission in Kosovo. EU policing, then, is in high demand and the demand is likely to increase further. It is, in short, the most pronounced embodiment of the ESDP’s international mission for humanity.

In this book, we engage EU policing by analyzing in detail the two most important police missions deployed so far by Brussels: the EUPM in Bosnia and the EUPOL Proxima in Macedonia. The purpose of this particularizing research strategy is to identify certain generic features of EU peacebuilding in the policing field with a view to scrutinizing them from the point of view of power relations. Our inquiry into the power in police missions, which has implications for the understanding of peacebuilding more generally, has both an analytical and a prescriptive dimension. Analytically, we are interested in the governmentality of ESDP police missions, i.e. the ways in which they mobilize forms of administrative power to fashion, position, classify and organize indigenous police officers and citizens. Our argument is that even while they develop more humane, professional and effective policing, missions may intensify the relations of dominance installed in the dense network of political, cultural and economic links that bind the Union to its insecure peripheries. Enfolded in contingent forms of knowledge and working through opaque mechanisms of microphysical power far removed from the easily visible exercise of power associated with empire, these civilian peacebuilding interventions evade and undermine the material, juridical and diplomatic limitations of the ESDP. They produce their power effects not through repression, prohibition and censorship but through the discursive production of contingent standards of normality calibrated against eclectic European practices, and their implantation in local subjects and institutions by virtue of inconspicuous political technologies.

Our second intervention into EU policing is prescriptive. Peacebuilding inevitably brings into existence a constellation of social control. To improve conflict-ridden societies, locals who resist the envisaged order of life have to be normalized. Spoilers who prefer a politics by violent means to peace or want to construct a polity unencumbered by liberal freedoms are only the most visible example of this challenge to the logic of liberal peacebuilding. While peacebuilding even under the most propitious circumstances can thus never limit itself to non-adversarial dialogue, it can cultivate what, with William Connolly (2002), we call a care for an enlarged diversity of forms of life. Such care encourages plural visions of politics and order to co-exist in more creative ways than sustained by a communitarian liberal idea of a shared destiny between peacebuilders and divided societies, an idea exemplified by the EU’s commitment to give the countries of the Western Balkans a European perspective.

While the idea of a shared destiny is a welcome expression of EU solidarity with less fortunate societies, it also embodies the temptation to ‘world’ the world as Europe. And this temptation is not accidental, it is rooted in that dimension of modernity which pushes ‘toward an organization of being that posits the same as fundamental and the other as what must be made the same’ (Coles 1992: 94). It is this homogenizing temptation in peacebuilding, and the disciplines mobilized in its pursuit, that we engage normatively by drawing on another dimension of modernity, namely its drive towards the critique and transgression of established truth and foundations. We develop a limited reform agenda for how EU police missions can fold an agonistic generosity more deeply into their civilizing ethos. Our emancipatory agenda also foregrounds the need to address problems in the implementation phase of police missions. We thus identify a series of general operational challenges that endanger the Union’s peacebuilding vocation in the policing field, and we suggest ways to overcome them.

How does Foucault fit into this reformatory project? He was an astute critic of modernity, highlighting how in the name of progress difference was produced, confined and disciplined. As James Bernauer (1990: 6) put it, ‘[n]o other contemporary philosophical thinker possessed Foucault’s acute ability to discover and describe the confinements that imprison human life and thought’. In the course of his engagement with the power/knowledge complex in diverse sites of modernity such as the hospital, the prison and the government of states, he developed a toolkit to examine the micro-physics of power operating in everyday social practices that remain invisible to the naked eye. This toolkit is well suited to bring to light the subterranean workings of power in ESDP peacebuilding. Moreover, contrary to what many critics of his work believe, Foucault did not reject the enlightenment project tout court. He was more than the relentless critic of the dark underside of progress. Running through his work is an affirmative political ethics. We draw on this positive political imaginaire in Foucault to suggest ways to enhance the emancipatory potential of the Union’s growing actorness in international security affairs.

Situating the book in the literature

Our book sits at the intersection of and contributes to different lines of research. It is angled towards readers interested in international relations, the EU and the Western Balkans. To begin with, it invites a novel engagement with liberal peacebuilding. It brings into focus its potential to produce relations of domination and subjects them to an immanent critique using what Kevin Stenson (1998) calls a normatively committed form of governmentality research. The international construction of liberal peace in violenceprone societies licenses forms of micro-power that, although they reach deep into domestic orders, remain largely unnoticed by the literature. They are masked either by the humanistic theme of the peacebuilding discourse or by the forceful interventions through which metropolitan actors impose their humanitarian empire on target countries. The mainline literature shares with practitioners a pronounced will to improve societies that violently differ from those of the West. This ambition and the inscription of locals in relations of domination it facilitates are not interrogated, though the manner in which international peacebuilders implement what Michael Pugh calls the New York consensus is extensively scrutinized.

As to more critical readings of contemporary peacebuilding, they, too, pay insufficient attention to the mechanisms in peacebuilding through which the international comes to reside within transitional societies. While such works criticize the high-handed use of illiberal power by the international administrators of liberal peace – censorship, the manipulation of elections, the removal of democratically elected officials and so forth – they fail to theorize and analyse the humble and mundane practices through which unfreedom operates in such international projects of improvement. However, without a thorough analysis of the elements of domination in peacebuilding, it is difficult to see how this critical research can realize its dream of imagining new practical forms that minimize the power of internationals over locals.

In contrast, we use Foucault to bring into focus the opaque workings of power/knowledge in peacebuilding. Moreover, we elaborate a critical strategy to rearticulate peacebuilding as a terrain of political possibilities rather than a political limit. On a more empirical level, our book provides new insights into the involvement of the EU in building peace in the Western Balkans.

Yet another added value of our project is that it is the first book-length exploration of a key development in the field of European security and European integration: the deployment of ESDP capabilities. Research so far has widely scrutinized the political, legal, financial, procedural, doctrinal and capability-related accomplishments, challenges and shortfalls faced by the ESDP.² Conversely, little attention has been paid to interrogate its actual functioning in the field (Grignon 2003; ICG 2005a: 47–53, 2005b; Keane 2005; Mace 2004). One important explanation for this disjuncture is that the ESDP was put into action only in 2003. Sufficient evidence to systematically explore its performativity is just now becoming available. EU police missions, however, have not escaped the attention of students of the ESDP altogether. There are a number of scholarly publications which mention them en passant, even a few which are devoted to certain aspects of the subject (Merlingen and Ostrauskaitė 2004, 2005a,b; Novak 2003; Osland 2004; Rummel 2005). Yet none of these inquiries provides a comprehensive analysis of police interventions, ranging from their conception in Brussels to the deployment to the field and their manifold reform activities.

More generally, our examination of ESDP peacebuilding contributes to the conceptual debate in EU studies about the normative power of the EU. Our intervention provides a new angle on this debate by making it possible to rethink the notion of normative power Europe in Foucauldian terms as normalizing power Europe. Such a shift in perspective has important consequences both in terms of how we study norm projection by the EU and the ethical judgements we make about this form of seemingly soft power. Finally, the book complements research on international police assistance. Much of this work focuses on bilateral aid and UN police missions and operates with a truncated concept of policing that conceals that the police inevitably produce the security of a historically situated, particularistic order of domination.

Finally, a note on methodology. As it has become apparent by now, we are not engaging in what Foucault (1991a: 58) somewhat flippantly calls the ‘uniform, simple activity of allocating causality’. Rather, in a postmodern version of middle-range research (Simon 1992), we excavate/map the power/knowledge complex in ESDP police aid and reveal its contingent nature. To support our empirical argument, we use documentary evidence concerning the ESDP in general and the police missions in particular. In addition to this textual analysis, we conducted extensive interviews, on a not-for-attribution basis, with EU Council decision-makers and mission planners in Brussels and ESDP police managers and operatives on the ground in Bosnia and Macedonia.

Organization of the book

In the next chapter, we briefly but critically engage the three literatures that are most closely related to our subject matter. We argue that the reading of power produced by much of the peacebuilding literature and the normative-power-Europe scholarship is seriously incomplete, and we show how research into police aid mobilizes an understanding of policing that foregrounds apolitical claims about functionality. The conceptual gaps in these literatures can be addressed, we wish to argue, by governmentality theory, whose added value is its capacity to bring to light non-sovereign forms of micro-power. However, in many governmentality writings little attention is paid to reformatory practices. Drawing on a number of political theorists, we inscribe an ethico-political horizon in the theory, and we argue that such a move enables researchers to propose measures that limit the risks engendered by the daemonic coupling of the political pastorate and liberalism that is contemporary peacebuilding.

Chapter 3 examines the contingent political, material and ideational dimensions of the development of the ESDP and the peacebuilding vocation it embodies. Much of the chapter is devoted to an inquiry into how the EU developed a particular conception of itself as a security actor against the backdrop of its conduct in the Western Balkans and into the dynamics at play in the build-up of operational capabilities and decision-making structures. Beyond this, we show how distinct rationalities were inscribed in this material and organizational infrastructure so as to render it usable in civilian peacebuilding missions. We briefly discuss these rationalities, sorting them into two types, one concerned with securing bare life, and the other with transforming life in an improving direction. The latter rationality, we argue, licenses a governmental deployment of ESDP peacebuilding capabilities. Working in and through complex political crises, it addresses itself to the strategic reordering of the molar bodies of local populations, the microbodies of human beings and the institutions of security enframing them.

In Chapters 4 and 5, we explore in detail the first two ESDP police missions ever deployed: the EUPM in Bosnia and the EUPOL Proxima in Macedonia. We pay particular attention to the transformation of the local policing fields into problem spaces requiring ESDP interventions, and we chronicle the manifold, often seemingly banal reforms pursued by the missions. The focus in these chapters is thus squarely on the programmes, projects, strategies, devices, calculations, knowledge claims and arguments deployed by EU peacebuilders to conduct the conduct of local police officers, governmental officials and citizens. However, operational aspects related to the planning and build-up phase of the missions as well as to their coordination with other EU actors on the ground are also covered.

In Chapter 6, we argue that appearances notwithstanding, there is significant power in ESDP police missions. We bring into focus the repertoire of inconspicuous political technologies they employ to reform wayward police forces in transition countries in an improving direction, and we show how precisely these technologies produce and circulate power through capillaries that link mission experts, local police officers and citizens. Moreover, we inquire into the universalizing knowledges that program these technologies, highlighting their contingency as well as their practical effects on the visualisation and transformation of policing.

In Chapter 7, our normative intent is brought to the forefront as we emphasize the double-sided nature of power in international police reforms. Peacebuilding interventions into the policing field enhance human security by disciplining, regulating and reorganizing the police, but they also bring into play a structure of social control that may congeal into pastoral dominance and restrict the options available for the construction of a local order of law enforcement. We draw on the Foucauldian political ethics identified in Chapter 2 to develop concrete proposals on how to amplify the emancipatory impact of ESDP police missions (current and future) and to c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Power and governmentality
• 3 The EU’s peace support agenda: The development of ESDP policy machinery, capabilities and styles of thought
• 4 The EUPM in Bosnia
• 5 EUPOL Proxima in Macedonia
• 6 Power/knowledge in ESDP police aid
• 7 Towards peacebuilding lite: A limited reform agenda for ESDP police missions
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography