EU Conflict Management

James Hughes, James Hughes

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987413
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia militar y marítima

The EU's self promotion as a 'conflict manager' is embedded in a discourse about its 'shared values' and their foundation in a connection between security, development and democracy. This book provides a collection of essays based on the latest cutting edge research into the EU's active engagement in conflict management. It maps the evolution of EU policy and strategic thinking about its role, and the development of its institutional capacity to manage conflicts.

Case studies of EU conflict management within the Union, in its neighbourhood andfurther afield, explorethe consistency, coherence, and politicization ofEU strategyat theimplementation stage. The essays examine the extent to which the EU can exert influence on conflict dynamics and outcomes. Such influence depends on a number of changing factors: how the EU conceptualizes conflict and policy solutions;the balance of interests within the EU on the issue (divided or concerted) andthe degree of politicizationin the EU's role;the scope for an external EU role; and the value attached by the conflict parties to EU engagement – a value that is almost wholly bound to their interest in a membership perspective (or other strong relationship to the EU) rather than to 'shared values' as an end in themselves.

This book was based on a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Paying for Peace: Comparing the EU’s Role in the Conflicts in Northern Ireland and Kosovo

JAMES HUGHES
London School of Economics, UK

Over the last decade the EU has steadily developed a narrative about its positive role in bringing the conflict in Northern Ireland to an end. The EU self-image is that it acted as a ‘beacon for positive movement’ and that the peace process demonstrates the validity of the ‘European peace-making model’.¹ The framing of Northern Ireland as a ‘model’ for EU conflict management is frequently stressed by the Commission. At a January 2008 press conference with the First and Deputy First Ministers of the new government for Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, respectively, Commission President Barroso pointedly observed that the region had conflict management ‘expertise’ to be drawn on: ‘Northern Ireland is a success story that can be an inspiration for other parts of Europe—we still have problems in our continent—and for other parts of the world’. More recently, Commissioner Hubner stated that ‘The Commission has always maintained that the experiences of the International Fund for Ireland, as well as those of the PEACE programme should be recorded with a view to sharing them with other regions facing similar problems’.² Similarly, the author was recently told by a Commission official: ‘Northern Ireland is on our radar screens as a model for the Western Balkans’.³

The Northern Ireland conflict had many distinctive features compared with the kinds of conflict that the EU engaged itself in managing from the late 1990s. It was a conflict within an existing member state, the UK. The increasing cooperation of the British and Irish governments, in particular following the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, meant that two member states were deeply involved in the management of the conflict. Until the landmark shifts towards European Union and the development of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in the mid-to-late 1990s, the EC, later EU, lacked the legal and functional capacity to engage in any conflict management, let alone interfere directly in the internal politics of a member state. It was only in the latter 1990s—by which time the Northern Ireland conflict was in the final stages of resolution—that the EU established keyinstrumentsthatbecamethefoundationforitsconflictmanagementstrategy,suchasthe strengthened High Representative for CFSP,the Special Representatives system, the accession process andits conditionalityleverage, including the EnlargementDirectorate-General (DG) and its annual monitoring and reporting mechanism for the Commission. Thus, in the case of Northern Ireland, the EU not only lacked the toolbox of instruments that came to shapeandcharacterizeitsroleinconflictmanagementintheWesternBalkans,theCaucasus and elsewhere, but also there was no legal basis for direct engagement. That the conflict occurred within a member state was an enormous political constraint.⁴

Yet, Northern Ireland is presented by the EU and others as a ‘model’ for conflict management. What is evident is that the EU played a pivotal role in paying for the peace. If funding levels to aid conflict management are an important measure of the political significance of a conflict, then the conflict in Northern Ireland played a major role in the development of the EU’s capacity in peace-building and reconciliation. Between 1995 and 2004 the EU committed over €1.66 billion to its Peace I and II Programmes in Northern Ireland, while Peace III (running to 2013) involves an additional €2.25 billion. Moreover, several hundred billion euros have been injected into the British and Irish government’s vehicle for promoting peace—the International Fund for Ireland—since the mid-1980s.⁵

This article assesses the role of the EU in the peace process in Northern Ireland, and attempts to analyse whether the EU had any substantive role in shaping the peace process. It evaluates critically the argument that this case is a ‘model’. Comparisons are made with theKosovo conflict toexplorewhether the EU, infact, is applying transferable lessons and benefits from Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland and Kosovo: Comparing Root Causes of Conflict

EU engagement in Northern Ireland predates that of Kosovo by about 5 years and I begin by mapping the broad similarities and differences between the two conflicts. Northern Ireland and Kosovo are bi-national small places, where violent conflict is the product of historically rooted antagonisms derived from territorial partitions and repartitions, and systemic political and socio-economic discrimination by privileged hegemonic groups against unprivileged subordinate groups. In both cases politics hinges on a challenge or questioning not only of the legitimacy of government policy, but also of the legitimate authority of the state itself. These contested territories, consequently, should be properly understood within a wider European context of the challenges posed by territorialized minorities to the territorial integrity of states (Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, Northern Ireland as an integral part of the UK), and of the political power of irredentism and national unification projects. The deep divisions in both places reflect reinforcing ethnic, religious and national differences, even though the relative strength of these identities has fluctuated over time and in practice secularism has become more pronounced in the late twentieth century. The two cases have a reverse order of hegemony and subordination. In Northern Ireland a hegemonic majority ethnonational group (Protestant British ‘Unionists’) penalized a subordinate minority ethnonational group (Catholic Irish ‘Nationalists’). In Kosovo a hegemonic minority ethnonational group (Orthodox Serbs) penalized a subordinate majority ethnonational group (Muslim/Catholic Albanians). In both cases sudden socio-economic modernization and raised living standards over a few decades after World War II led to demographic changes that altered the balance of power between the communities. In particular, the surge in demographic growth of the subordinated communities (Irish Catholics, Kosovar Albanians) made an ethnic hegemonic regime increasingly untenable without the use of coercion by mass repression and/or mass expulsion.

There are legitimate questions, however, about the contingent as opposed to the root causes of the conflicts. For some ‘integrationists’ the immediate context from which violence erupted is a better explanation of the dynamics of the conflicts. This approach focuses on the violent state repression of peaceful democratization movements: the Unionist attempts to crush the 1960s civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, and the Serbian oppression of Rugova’s non-violent protest movement, leading to mass expulsions of Albanians from public service employment and the removal of Kosovo’s autonomy status under Milosevic in the 1990s. Most studies of these conflicts treat the competing ethnonationalisms as forms of false consciousness that were contingently mobilized and ensued from the drift into violent conflict. The so-called ‘social transformation’ scholarship, uniting Liberal and Leftist-leaning scholars, tends to argue that the space for a more liberal civic society might have opened had states pursued reforms and removed the causes of antagonism (discrimination and legislating for a more equal citizenship).⁶ The context of discrimination immediately prior to the eruption of violence in both cases, however, was also part of a longer term continuum of decades and perhaps hundreds of years of discriminatory practices, where hegemonic groups penalized subordinate groups because their ethnicity and/or national identity was perceived to be a threat to the existence of hegemony and the state itself.⁷

The structural features and epiphenomena of the conflicts, such as discrimination, inequality, injustice, sectarianism, racism and segregation, are derived from the ‘root causes’ of ethnic and national enmity. If one accepts nationalism as the key driver one must also recognize that national unification projects play a major role, though these may for practical or policy reasons fluctuate in their public salience. The institutional arrangements that have been devised to manage both conflicts recognize ethnic and national enmity as the key drivers. In Northern Ireland, The Belfast Agreement (1998) provided for a complex web of institutions and policies to entrench ethnonationally based consociational structures in government and society. It accepts the fundamental division between the ‘two communities’ as the basis for power-sharing institutional arrangements. In this case, the institutional and governing design is pivoted on a ‘separate but equal’ philosophy encapsulated in the notion of ‘parity of esteem’ for the two main communities. A similar design and philosophy has been incorporated into the design for an independent Kosovo elaborated by the United Nation’s Ahtisaari Plan (2007), which is built around the notion of a ‘multiethnic’ Kosovo. Despite the fact that the Albanian majority in Kosovois estimated at over 90% of the population and the Serb minority was overwhelmingly forcibly displaced in 1999, a concept of state ‘multiethnicity’ has been imposed in Kosovo. However, the institutionalization of ‘multiethnicity’ in a new constitution and several pieces of enabling legislation passed in 2008 is a more diluted form of ethnic power-sharing compared with Northern Ireland and is being implemented in practice in a manner that is informed by a ‘separate but equal’ concept of the state.

Aside from the international military intervention by NATO and UN administration in the case of Kosovo, perhaps the key difference between the two conflicts in terms of their internal dynamics is in the scale and intensity of the forced displacement of populations. In the case of Northern Ireland, forced ethnic displacement was temporally confined to the early years (1969–1971) of the conflict, was small scale (a few thousand), and was aimed at a consolidation of ethnic territories within the confines of the state (i.e. there was no attempt to expel the subordinated minority community to the Republic of Ireland). This simply reflected the fact that the two communities already lived in a high degree of segregation. In Kosovo, by contrast, ‘ethnic cleansing’ was on the level ofthe populationas a whole. It involved attemptsfirst by the Serbs and then by Albanians to homogenize Kosovo in their favour. The end result was that Kosovo’s Serbian population (some 200,000–250,000 strong) was almost totally expelled in 1999–2000 in the wake of the NATO military intervention, the withdrawal of Serb security forces and the establishment of a UN mandated Kosovo Force (KFOR) in June 1999.⁸ This fact makes institutional and policy fixes based on multiethnicity, consociationalism or integrationism redundant, as there is no longer a minority community of any significant strength.

The Meaning of the Northern Ireland ‘Model’

Politicians have presented the Northern Ireland conflict as a ‘model’ of conflict resolution, but what kind of ‘model’ do they have in mind? As noted earlier, Commission President Barroso referred to Northern Irish ‘expertise’ on conflict management and dialogue and its lessons for other conflicts, but without specifying what this entailed or how it could be deployed in practice. The EU narrative at root appears to emphasize the role of economic success in promoting peace, for as Barroso has stated: ‘Northern Ireland has now emerged as an example to the world on how to succeed in promoting peace and reconciliation in a deeply divided community. Its political leaders have recognized the importance of economic success in this process, and of the role of the European Union in the drive for growth and jobs. Just like the emerging European Community of 50 years ago, the story of Northern Ireland shows that people from different communities, sometimes with fundamentally different opinions, can overcome the divisions, work together and share a common future’.⁹ For EU leaders, the connection between Northern Ireland and peace appears to confirm and reinforce the EU’s own developmental model. The origins of the EC lie in the attempt to overcome the European divisions that caused World War II by building interstate cooperation around the notion of economic ‘common interests’, and thereby creating a functional logic for political integration. As a Commission official told the author, this is the ‘European way’ and it informed the Commission’s thinking about how to advance peace in Northern Ireland.¹⁰

Many of the key political actors at the heart of the peace process were less certain of the lessons of Northern Ireland beyond the symbolic importance of bringing a protracted violent conflict to an end. President Bill Clinton, for example, at a time when he was deeply engaged in negotiations in the Middle East conflict, was one of the first to point to the international demonstration effects of the Belfast Agreement. Clinton stressed the symbolic importance of the fact that the parties to one of the world’s mostprotracted conflicts had reached a settlement:

And let me tell you, you cannot imagine the impact of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland on troubled regions of the world—in Africa and the Middle East, in Latin America and, of course, in the Balkans, where the United States has been heavily involved in my time. Peace continues to be challenged all around the world. It is more important than ever to say: but look what they did in Northern Ireland and look what they are doing in Northern Ireland.¹¹

British and Irish political leaders, however, have shied away from explicit endorsements of consociationalism as the key conflict resolution instrument. For rather than attest to the value of the complex institutional engineering, they have emphasized the importance of the process of mediation itself (the ‘peace process’, ‘dialogue’, ‘talking with terrorists’, etc). Former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Hain, for example, in a speech at Chatham House in London in June 2007 promoting Northern Ireland as a ‘model’ of conflict resolution, identified four main components: the role of personalities, the aligning of international influence, the political framework and dialogue. According to Hain, the ‘detailed structures are secondary to a basic political will to agree’, and developing dialogue in the peace process was ‘arguably . . . its ultimate objective’.¹² For Hain, Northern Ireland offered lessons for conflicts as diverse as Iraq, Sri Lanka, Basque Country, Kashmir and Western Sahara. A key British negotiator and Blair advisor, Jonathan Powell, has also recently argued that the importance of the Northern Ireland agreement lies in the way that engaging and ‘talking to terrorists’ moved them from violence to democratic politics. Contr...