Europe's peacebuilding hour? Past failures, future challenges.

• Author: Smith, Dan
• Position: Regional Perspectives

"The hour of Europe in enforcing, keeping and building peace seems to have come and gone ... Europe failed to demonstrate its independence as badly as it failed at everything in the first few years of its Balkan engagement. But that failure has not removed the aspiration."

Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg when the duchy held the presidency of the European Community Council of Ministers in 1991, will probably never be allowed to forget his moment of hubris. Arriving in Yugoslavia as it entered its era of disintegration and a decade of multiple wars, he famously said, "This is the hour of Europe." (1)

The comment came early in the current era of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. In the decade after the end of the Cold War, the United Nations authorized twice as many peacekeeping operations as it had in the four previous decades. Along with increased frequency went broader mandates, and in the early 1990s a new terminology emerged encompassing preventive diplomacy, peace enforcement and peacebuilding as well as peacekeeping. (2) This all reflected an international consensus for taking on new challenges of conflict management. The massive human tragedies caused by wars in Northern Iraq, the Balkans and Rwanda demanded not only a humanitarian but also a political response.

Though Poos's remark was later held up to ridicule, it did not seem ridiculously out of place when he made it. Following the end of the Cold War and the US-led coalition's victory over Iraq, there was confidence and a sense of readiness for the new challenges of the new age. Western European diplomats trekked off to the Balkans convinced that the problem of Yugoslavia's disintegration was easily amenable to treatment by stern diplomacy--just a matter of banging a few heads together. (3) In that spirit of new tasks and new possibilities, the UN Security Council decided in 1991 to establish safe havens for Kurds in Northern Iraq; US Ambassador Thomas Pickering memorably characterized it as the refusal of Iraq's right to "the sovereign exercise of butchery." (4) Sadly, such refusals of extreme sovereignty or extreme cruelty did not always carry force. The United Nations nominally established safe havens in Bosnia-Herzegovina but never backed them with enough military strength. The result was the 1995 massacre of Bosniaks (5) in the so-called safe haven of Srebrenica.

The hour of Europe in enforcing, keeping and building peace seems to have come and gone. But Poos was by no means alone among European politicians and commentators in his views. He saw the conflicts in the Balkans as an arena where what was soon to be the European Union could demonstrate its independence from the United States. He not only said, "This is the hour of Europe"; he added, "It is not the hour of the Americans." (6)

Europe failed to demonstrate its independence as badly as it failed at everything in the first few years of its Balkan engagement. But that failure has not removed the aspiration. EU policies on major issues tend to be created in part as exemplars of what the European Union is, or could or should be. Policies address specific problems but are laden with messages about other more generic issues. It is on the broader issues bound up in peacekeeping and peacebuilding in Europe that this essay is focused. It asks whether the peacebuilding hour of Europe may come again.

CONFLICT MANAGEMENT AFTER THE COLD WAR

Europe's age of innocence about peacekeeping ended in disaster in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as did that of the United States in Somalia. Policymakers turned out to be unprepared for the new challenges. The United States abandoned Somalia, while the mandate of the UN operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was altered 10 times in the first 20 months. The blue helmets spent three years merely trying to limit the damage, unable to solve the problems and sometimes being not much more than bystanders to catastrophe. (7)

The research community was no better prepared. A survey of the literature early in the new era found little movement toward a general scholarly understanding of intervention. (8) Over the years, however, the quantity of literature has piled up as the basis of experience has continued to develop, broaden and diversify. The literature contains contributions from practitioners as well as observers. It contains theoretical inquiry, operational evaluation and analyses that attempt to marry the two. The areas of disagreement have been refined and reinterpreted, and the area of broadly accepted conclusions is enlarging. (9)

On the broad operational level, familiar themes include the need for clarity and consistency in mission definition and for both a clear division of labor and adequate coordination between implementing agencies as different as the professional military and international nongovernmental organizations. Arising from the critiques of Western peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, emphasis falls on the argument that intervention must come early, before crisis escalation is out of control; that it must have clear and consistent objectives, which should be pursued coherently; and that it must recognize more than purely diplomatic and military modes of intervention. (10)

At a more detailed operational level, there are problems of fragile societies being flooded by the "internationals," both nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations, which employ many of the best and brightest, often in relatively modest jobs; well-trained English teachers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, for example, can earn up to six times as much as translators as they can in schools. Beyond this, there is the risk of creating a culture of dependency in a war-torn society. Outsiders can encourage but cannot create peaceful relations in a society.

Both of these issues are closely connected to and give rise to speculation about the moral and legal question of whether there is a right or a duty to intervene, an issue we shall revisit below. Allowing for the variations of problem and response that necessarily arise in countries and conflicts with very different histories, similar issues and challenges are familiar in most ambitious peace support operations. These are the general dilemmas of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. There is nothing about them that is regionally specific.

They are well aired in Europe, which is, after all, the site of two of the largest international peace support operations, IFOR/SFOR in Bosnia-Herzegovina and KFOR in Kosovo. There are signs that the European Union has absorbed and attempted to apply the lessons of the crises in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in its approach to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYR Macedonia) during 2001. Whatever else may be wrong about EU policy in FYR Macedonia--for example, it repeatedly gives many people there the feeling that peace is being forced down their throats--the European Union cannot fairly be criticized for being slow, unclear, disunited or narrowly focused in its actions. It has, indeed, often been quicker, more flexible and more comprehensive in its approach than either the Skopje government or the insurgents.

The main operational challenges in peacebuilding are timeliness, ensuring the clarity of any demands made of local political players, maintaining unity of purpose in the international community and making sure that policies are aimed at solving the full range of problems. Improving the response to these challenges will remain an issue at the forefront in Europe for some time ahead. The peacekeeping and peacebuilding work in the Western Balkans is by no means complete. There may be more demands upon the EU's conflict management resources elsewhere in Europe's borderlands--for example, in the Caucasus, depending on the evolution of the West's relationship with Russia. There will also be calls on EU member states for participation in peace support operations outside the wider European region: the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan is one example, while for Britain, Sierra Leone is another different but also demanding and difficult case. Clearly, the debate on objectives and methods in peace support operations will continue to be relevant in Europe, and equally, what happens in Europe will be relevant to that debate.

Beyond these issues are others that have a specifically European aspect. They can be summarized under the rubrics of state building, security policy, the Atlantic dimension and the question of law.

PEACEBUILDING AND STATE BUILDING

Reconstruction after civil war is a four-sided box. Each side is as important as each of the others, and failure to sustain one of the four sides makes the other three less stable. The four are security, political stability, economic development and reconciliation.

Security is needed against the resurgence of fighting, recalcitrant combatants, rampant crime and such threats as landmines and unexploded ordnance. The political framework has to provide for...