The European Union and Humanitarian Crises

Patterns of Intervention

Francesca Pusterla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317033066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last few decades international organisations, national governments, and governmental and private actors have all multiplied their efforts to limit the extent to which natural catastrophes, man-made atrocities and political and economic breakdowns affect civil populations. The European Union and Humanitarian Crises: Patterns of Intervention addresses the allocation of foreign aid within the framework of the European Union's Humanitarian Aid policy and analyses different Member States' intervention strategies designed to cope with these emergencies. Joining the debate about bilateral and multilateral allocation of foreign aid in crisis situations and exploring the cooperative actions undertaken by the European Union and its Member States to cope with them the book questions how the context of the crises themselves impacts on strategies of intervention and investigates how strategies change depending on the characteristics of the crisis.

Chapter 1
The European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy

Introduction

This chapter illustrates the cooperation arrangement of the European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy (EUHAP). Such a policy aims at managing complex external interventions and dealing with international humanitarian crises entailing a high level of interdependence; its ‘activities reflect the proliferation of serious crises around the world’ (European Union, 2010b).¹ The boundaries of the EU external activity – whose humanitarian aid is part of – have always been difficult to define. This is because it is a particularly complex issue-area (MacLeod et al., 1996). The new Lisbon Treaty puts into action a process of normalisation.² The Treaty currently regulating competence sharing within the European Union was signed in Lisbon and entered into force on 1 December 2009. It amends the existing European Union and European Communities treaties and provides a better repartition of competences between actors. It also offers a clear arrangement of EU external activities and, for the first time, provides a specific legal framework concerning the Humanitarian Aid Policy.

The legislation enacted by an international organisation regulates the delegation and the sharing of competences between the organisation itself and its Member States on each issue-area. Entering or creating an international organisation implies a formal cooperation choice. However, Member States keep the right to decide to what extent they delegate and under which form. States can thus decide to delegate their competences only on one or more, but not necessarily all, issue-areas. The treaties regulating the European Union and, more in general, the European Communities provide three different arrangements on competence sharing. First, they list the European Union’s exclusive competences.³ Second, they list the competences shared between the European Union and the Member States.⁴ Third, all competences not included in the two previous lists are considered as Member States’ exclusive competences. The European Union’s exclusivity means that competences on a specific issue-area are completely delegated by the Member States to the Union (O’Keeffe, 2000: 35). On the contrary, Member States keep exclusivity if they do not delegate any competence to the Union. Finally, competences are shared if Member States partially retain their competences, but, at the same time, the European Union gains authority to adopt common decisions through an act of partial delegation. Sharing thus requires deep coordination (Craig and De Burca, 2007).

The legal arrangement makes development cooperation and humanitarian aid particularly interesting because they are not included in the Member States’ or the European Union’s list of exclusive competences, or in the list of shared competences. Rather, the Treaty of Lisbon provides parallel competences.⁵ According to the Treaty, in the development and humanitarian aid sectors, ‘the Union shall have competence to carry out activities and conduct a common policy; however, the exercise of that competence shall not result in Member States being prevented from exercising theirs’ (European Union, 17 December 2007, Art. 2C, Par. 4). In other words, ‘the Union’s measures and those of the Member States shall complement and reinforce each other’ (European Union, 2010a, Art. 214, Par. 1).

In legal terms, both parallel and shared competences recognise the European Union and the Member States the competences to decide and act autonomously. Nonetheless, a difference exists and relies on the pre-emption principle. Such a principle is applied to the domain of shared competences and allows Member States to decide and act only to the extent that the European Union has not yet decided or acted. On the contrary, in the case of parallel competences, such a principle is not enforced; the EU’s competences do not prevent the Member States from exercising theirs (Keukeleire and MacNaughtan, 2008).

In institutional terms, differently from any other European Union external activity, the EUHAP provides states with the possibility of jointly deciding intervention by intervention between: (1) conferring exclusive competences to the European Union (full delegation); (2) conferring exclusive competences to the Member States (unilateralism); (3) sharing competences and acting simultaneously by keeping a certain autonomy of decision and action (partial delegation) (Pusterla and Piccin, 2012). It therefore perfectly matches the two tendencies of the EU integration process: the EU Member States’ inclination in favour of the defence of their national autonomy and the European Union’s effort of centralisation. The EUHAP is constantly called to match the single Member States’ concerns in terms of loss of national autonomy and the European Union’s collective expectations in terms of common external intervention.

In practice, the Commission working in collaboration with the Member States undertake the majority of the humanitarian actions (partial delegation). The European Commission autonomously pursues a more limited number of actions (full delegation). Finally, a large number of interventions is put into actions by the bilateral humanitarian aid of the Member States (unilateralism) (Commission of the European Communities, 29 May 2008). This flexibility aims at responding to the challenges of humanitarian intervention in the best possible manner. In other words, the three possible arrangements are simultaneously present, and the choice between them depends on the specific intervention the policy undertakes. They thus have an impact on the patterns of participation of EU Member States and EU institutions in humanitarian interventions.

Total delegation implies a general consensus on the common intervention at the European Union level. Accordingly, as will afterwards discussed more in details, the EUHAP institutional setting does not require unanimity in order to delegate the intervention competence to the EU. Nonetheless, total delegation is only possible if any Member State does not decide to intervene unilaterally outside the EU institutional context.⁶ If this were the case, two scenarios would be possible. First, it is possible to speak of partial delegation if both the EU and one or more Member States unilaterally intervene. Second, it is possible to speak of unilateralism, if one or more Member States intervene, but the EU does not. This clarification is particularly important as it underlines how the intervention preferences of a single Member State can make the difference between total and partial delegation. On the other hand, unilateralism is avoided if just a majority of Member States delegate the competence of the intervention to the EU.

In theoretical terms, this specific institutional arrangement re-launches the debate on cooperation and delegation and the implications that the occurrence of interdependent events such as international crises have on states’ inclination for and against cooperation and delegation. In order to understand the EU and the Member States’ attitudes vis-à-vis a common intervention in the humanitarian aid context, the concepts of cooperation and delegation therefore deserve attention. This is the main aim of the next chapter. Before doing it, in this chapter the main features characterising the European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy are highlighted with the aim of explaining how this policy concretely works.

History

The arrangement of the European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy has a long history, and its current cooperative structure is the result of a long process of negotiation between the European Union and its Member States. After the difficulties met in the management of the Gulf War and the former-Yugoslavia crisis, the European Union decided to establish an administrative apparatus devoted to the management of external humanitarian interventions. Such an apparatus is the Humanitarian Aid department of the European Commission (ECHO) (Versluys, 2008). ECHO was provided with a legal basis in 1996. The objectives and general principles of the EUHAP’s activities have been stated by the Council Regulation 1257–96.

The Community’s humanitarian aid shall comprise assistance, relief and protection operations on a non-discriminatory basis to help people in third countries, particularly the most vulnerable among them, and as a priority those in developing countries, victims of natural disasters, man-made crises, such as wars and outbreaks of fighting, or exceptional situations or circumstances comparable to natural or man-made disasters. It shall do so for the time needed to meet the humanitarian requirements resulting from these different situations. Such aid shall also comprise operations to prepare for risks or prevent disasters or comparable exceptional circumstances. (Council of the European Union, 20 June 1996, Art. 1)

Nonetheless, the existence of the EUHAP was not mentioned in the EU treaties before 2006 when, for the first time, the treaty establishing the European Community made reference to humanitarian aid and the necessary coordination between the European Union and the Member States.⁷

In spite of the undeniable step forward, several points still needed clarification. In particular, the European Union and the Member States asked for more precision concerning cooperation and intervention. Ten years of negotiation rounds led to a ‘Commission call for a consensus’ about humanitarian aid (Commission of the European Communities, 13 June 2007b). The European Commission asked for an enhanced cooperation between the European Union and the Member States in order to put into action a more efficient and coherent policy. This document, along with the Council conclusions on 22 June 2007 (Council of the European Union, 22 June 2007), represents the basis on which drawing up the new consensus on humanitarian aid and the consensus action plan. Two specific points have been stated. The first one arranges the institutional framework of cooperation between the European Union and the Member States and, in particular, the power resources conferred to the humanitarian aid policy. The second one concerns the goals of such a policy and the humanitarian engagement in responding to crises.

Power Resources and Decision-making Procedure

Concerning the first point, power resources of the humanitarian aid policy, four aspects are considered: competences, budget, decision-making and institutional arrangement. The attention put on such resources allows investigating all the aspects of the intervention in a humanitarian crisis, from the negotiation until the implementation, and thus getting a precise overview of the policy functioning.

The Council Regulation in 1996 provided shared competences in the humanitarian aid domain.⁸ The successive pieces of legislation just pointed out the implementation of such an arrangement. The European Union acts through the Commission’s Directorate General for Humanitarian Aid and the Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO). Member States intervene by bilaterally allocating foreign aid directly to recipient countries. The improvement and effectiveness of humanitarian aid is guaranteed as long as the European Union and the Member States coordinate their actions. The ‘Commission call for a European consensus’ supported the enhancement of cooperation with the aim of strengthening the overall activities, supporting the organisation, sharing information to improve needs and appropriate responses and arranging coordination (Commission of the European Communities, 13 June 2007b). The enhanced cooperation became even more important as the intensity and frequency of humanitarian actions increased (Council of the European Union, 22 June 2007). Despite the enhanced cooperation, nonetheless, the ultimate consensus action plan shows important differences between the European Union and the Member States’ engagement in terms of contributions, expertise and capacity. The Commission, working in collaboration with the Member States, carries out the majority of actions. Still, a large number of interventions are put into action by the bilateral humanitarian aid of Member States. The number of actions pursued by the Community alone is much more limited (Commission of the European Communities, 29 May 2008).

The European Community and the Member States have autonomous funding sources. The budget of the humanitarian aid policy has three sources: the EC budget Title 23 for humanitarian aid; the European Development Fund, devoted to emergency assistance to the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of states (ACP); and, as a reinforcement tool, the Emergency Aid Reserve (EAR) (ECHO, 2010a).⁹ The first one remains largely preponderant. During the ’90s, ECHO’s budget suffered a serious reduction as a consequence of an accusation of inefficient funding management. Since 2000, ECHO has been engaged in an operation of improvement of management and professionalism prompting towards a significant increase in the humanitarian aid budget from €491.7 million in 2000 to €937 million in 2008 (ECHO, 2008).

The EU’s overall contribution to humanitarian aid includes communitarian and Member States’ aid: ‘The EU is the world’s leading aid donor. It provides 55% of international humanitarian aid, 30% of which comes from ECHO and 25% directly from the Member States’ (ECHO, 2005).¹⁰ The proportion of funding provided by ECHO is nevertheless decreasing. Accordingly, during the ’90s, it represented more than half of the total (European Commission and Member States). At the beginning of the new millennium it decreased to 40 per cent, while nowadays it does not go beyond 30 per cent (Versluys, 2008). Despite the remarkable contribution of individual Member States to the total amount of foreign aid allocated within the EU zone, the amount of aid directly allocated by the EU institutions was the second highest in the world in 2011, just after the United States of America. Moreover, comparative differences still exist across Member States. So while the UK is the second largest donor country in the world, Portugal only ranks 30th.

In some circumstances, nonetheless, Member States can decide to retain financial autonomy in order to directly carry out activities that improve their coordination with the EU. They then get to keep at least residual autonomy in the management of their humanitarian aid budget, with the aim of totally delegating some humanitarian activities while carrying out others on their own. These latter operations, however, always remain within the scope of the European Consensus on Humanitarian Aid, and enhancing cooperation with other EU Member States and institutions is a key goal. Some examples of this are provided by the two following projects: Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development (LRRD).

In the first instance, several Member States integrated the European RRD project into their national policies on humanitarian aid and development, and as a result were carrying out autonomous activities in tandem with ECHO (in this sense, a good example of partial delegation). Poland allocated aid to priority countries, such as those in Eastern Africa, Central Asia, Georgia and Moldova, to improve their risk reduction infrastructure. The Netherlands and Luxembourg contributed to the development of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR) and the World Bank’s Global Facility for DRR and Recovery by introducing the European DRR project to the UN system. Other countries carrying out autonomous activities within the scope of the DDR are Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain and Finland (Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection, 2011: 18).

The next example under the spotlight is the Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development project. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France and the Netherlands all transposed the project into their national policies. Moreover, some of them also made it a requirement that their governmental and non-governmental aid partners devote a relevant share of their budget to carrying out activities within the scope of the LRRD. They preferred not to totally delegate the competence of undertaking LRRD activities to ECHO, but instead to each get involved through their national humanitarian strategies. ‘Luxembourg requested its NGO partners to dedicate at least 20% of their funding to reconstruction or LRRD projects. Furthermore, Germany reorganised within the German government the division of labour between emergency and transitional aid. Ireland continued to mainstream LRRD throughout its humanitarian and development programmes […]’ (Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection, 2011: 18).

In what concerns decision-making, the particular nature of the humanitarian intervention requires less restrictive procedures than the ones normally adopted by the Commission. Humanitarian aid responds to crises and requires emergency intervention. In 2001, a special procedure was established in order to allow ECHO to make fast decisions (within two days) without prior consultation of Member States. Such a procedure is known as the ‘fast-track delegation procedure’ (Versluys and Orbie, 2006: 12). It can only be adopted for operations lasting, at best, three months and with a budget not going beyond €3 million. It has been adopted on just two occasions: Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Pakistan/India earthquake in 2005. Member States are restive to concede freedom of action, especially in politically sensitive emergencies, to ECHO (Versluys, 2008).

Other than the emergency procedure, two further procedures are commonly used. On the one hand, through the ‘empowerment procedure’, the Humanitarian Aid Commissioner can undertake emergency operations up to €30 million or non-urgent ones up to €10 million for a period up to six months. The previous consultation of the European Commission or the Member States is required for funding beyond €10 million. On the other hand, the ‘written proced...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The European Union Humanitarian Aid Policy
• 2 Cooperation and Delegation in the International Context
• 3 Intervention Strategies in Crisis Contexts
• 4 Data, Measurement and Method
• 5 Intervening in Humanitarian Crisis Contexts: The Choice between Unilateralism, Partial and Total Delegation
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Average Marginal Effects and Predicted Probabilities
• Bibliography
• Index