Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, the Copenhagen Voice, 16 October 2009

The European Union sees civilian reconstruction as an essential part of state-building, but the EU is ill-equipped to offer the strategic and development assistance needed, a new report shows. The EU should rethink its entire approach to foreign interventions, appoint senior envoys in each of the countries at greatest risk of instability, and set up a ‘European Institute for Peace’.

Although the European Union extols the importance of civilian reconstruction as an essential part of state-building with the aim of preventing fragile states from becoming failing states, the EU is ill-equipped to offer the strategic and development assistance needed, a new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) indicates.

The report, ‘Can the EU rebuild failing states? A review of Europe’s civilian capacities’, states that most EU missions remain small, lack ambition and are strategically irrelevant. If the European Union is to deliver on its potential, then it will need to rethink its entire approach to foreign interventions.

According to the report’s authors, the EU’s member states lack properly trained civilian experts - from police officers and economic advisors to sanitation and irrigation specialists - that can bring stability to the world’s trouble spots.

The authors ascribe this to three factors:

• The EU breaks its promises and significantly under-staffs key international missions.
• The EU still relies on its ‘Bosnia template’ for its missions and ignores reality on the ground.
• The European Commission and the European Council weaken missions by trying to micro-manage while lacking the necessary expertise to do so.

The EU has a shortage of 1,500 personnel across its 12 ongoing state-building missions. None of the EU member states have deployed half of the civilians they promised in the 2004 Civilian Headline Goal process.

All eyes are on Afghanistan, but the EU’s police mission there is at half its authorised strength.

Models that may have worked in Bosnia after NATO stabilised the country cannot simply be transferred to other regions, the report says.

For instance, when the European Union was planning its 2005-2006 mission to the Congo, it soon became apparent that it had not taken into account the sheer size of the country and the magnitude of government corruption, rendering its mission largely irrelevant.

When Paddy Ashdown was charged with co-ordinating the international community’s efforts in Bosnia as both the EU’s special representative and UN envoy, the European Commission insisted on creating its own plan for the country’s development, ignoring the proposal for police reform seen by Ashdown’s office as central to the country’s development.

The report calls on the EU and its member states to:

• Scrap the ‘Bosnia template’ and rethink its entire approach to foreign interventions, with a focus on speed, security and self-sufficiency, with rapid deployment of the right specialists, officials and administrative staff who must operate closely with local populations.
• Appoint senior envoys in each of the 20 countries that the EU considers to be at greatest risk of instability. This would give the EU a more seamless approach to foreign interventions, preventing crisis before they erupt and offering immediate assistance on the ground when they do.
• Set up a ‘European Institute for Peace’ as the standard-setter of member states’ civilian missions training.
• Ensure each member state devises a national action plan to ensure that all recruitment, training, funding, debriefing and planning targets are met.