Der Wert Europas

,

• Verlag: Bertelsmann Stiftung
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9783867934985
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Thema: Politik

Wie steht es um Europas Zukunft? Wo liegen die Herausforderungen für die europäische Politik der kommenden Jahre? Und wie verändert die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise das "Projekt Europa"? Zentrale demokratische Grundbegriffe müssen von jeder Generation neu mit Inhalten gefüllt werden. Was also bedeuten Freiheit, Gleichheit und Solidarität heute? Der vorliegende E-Book-Reader ergänzt die Schwerpunktausgabe "Der Wert Europas" unseres Magazins change im März 2013. Die Beiträge befassen sich mit den Fundamenten der Europäischen Union, analysieren Prozesse der Integration und geben Reformempfehlungen für die europäische Innen- und Außenpolitik. Bei den Texten handelt es sich um Auszüge aus Büchern des Verlags Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Diplomacy, Development and Defense: A Paradigm for Policy Coherence (Leseprobe)

Auszug aus:

Stefani Weiss, Hans-Joachim Spanger, Wim van Meurs (eds.)

Diplomacy, Development and Defense: A Paradigm for Policy Coherence

A Comparative Analysis of International Strategies

Gütersloh 2009

ISBN 978-3-86793-014-7 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-86793-257-8 (PDF)

ISBN 978-3-86793-258-5 (EPUB)

© Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung, Gütersloh

Preface

Precarious statehood—the inability of a state to enforce public order and to fulfill its international obligations—implies severe challenges to global security. At least since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has become clear that the risks posed by weak or failing states are not limited threatening the life of their own citizens or destabilizing their immediate neighborhood. The failure of a country to govern and control its territory jeopardizes security on a global scale. Such state weakness or failure often abets the emergence of lawless zones, which provide safe haven for international terrorism and organized crime. Just recently, the mounting danger of piracy attacks off the coast of Somalia underscored the international security implications emanating from precarious states.

Over the last ten years, there has been a growing awareness of the threats posed by precarious statehood and the international community has had to admit that its existing policy approaches do not suffice. In the face of the multidimensional and interdependent challenges that precarious states pose, some very basic questions have arisen: Whom should diplomacy address if there is no government present with which the international community could negotiate? What can development policy achieve if its projects within a precarious state fall victim to a hostile security environment repeatedly? And what purpose is served by military intervention if it succeeds in winning a war but fails to establish peace?

In suggesting answers to these questions, policy-makers and scientists in the West have become convinced that foreign-policy-related instruments need to be realigned and a whole-of-government approach needs to be implemented in order to deal successfully with precarious states. This means relinquishing the existing division between diplomacy, development and defense in favor of a comprehensive approach that coordinates and combines civilian and military policy tools.

This book is an attempt to assess the extent to which both international organizations and states have lived up to the new insights of the “3D”-continuum and adopted strategies corresponding institutional settings and policy instruments to provide the necessary culture of policy coherence for tackling the problem of precarious statehood. On the national level, the cases studied are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. All four countries have been, and still are, involved in peacebuilding and reconstruction in precarious states, albeit to different degrees. On the international level, the United Nations and the European Union were the obvious choices for a close scrutiny.

Hopefully, the lessons learned from whole-of-government approaches and the recommendations drawn from this survey will help both governments and international organizations to excel in dealing with weak and failing states, thereby making policy coherence a reality in risk assessment, decision-making and policy implementation.

It was a pleasure for the Bertelsmann Stiftung to work with so many outstanding experts during the project and we are most grateful for the dedication with which the authors of these case studies have supported this project. We are indebted to Reinhard Rummel of the SWP (German Institute for International and Security Affairs) for serving as commentator, especially for the chapter on the European Union. Special thanks are due to the two co-editors, Wim van Meurs and Hans-Joachim Spanger, for their advice and encouragement.

Stefani Weiss

Director

Bertelsmann Stiftung, Brussels Office

EU Responses to Fragile States

Guy Banim

Introduction

It is the nature of the debate on fragile states that there is no international consensus on the appropriate policy response, nor even agreement on whether the phenomenon has been correctly identified. In the EU, the fragile states debate remains ideologically fraught. An answer to the basic question as to why the EU believes states fail remains elusive.

One strand within EU policymaking identifies state failure as essentially driven by a failure in economic development. From this perspective, any state failure strategy amounts to little more than new terminology for an older conflict-prevention approach focused on tackling the root causes of insecurity through addressing socioeconomic needs and promoting protection of human rights. This “new wine in old bottles” argument contrasts with those who maintain that 11 September 2001 was a paradigm shift forcing the EU to pay attention to its own security for the first time, if necessary through the use of force abroad.

Regarding any foreign policy issue, for an institution such as the EU there is the complication of analyzing a multilateral and multi-cephalous actor. The approach in this report is to examine the main developments within the EU concerning conflict prevention and crisis management and highlight the many instruments available to the EU that can be applied to the problem of state fragility. The EU is not short of policy claims to have identified such tools and instruments. Much remains to be done, however, to demonstrate that this analysis is correct and that the EU can live up to its ambition to effectively marshal its capacities to project stability beyond its borders.

Political agenda

It can be argued that the EU has been oriented since its inception 50 years ago toward addressing the problem of fragile states, initially the post-conflict states of Western Europe and later neighboring states emerging from the post-communist era as well as the post-colonial partners in the developing world.

Certainly the aim of stabilizing states beyond its own borders, in particular those affected by conflict, is not new to the EU. Governance, democratization, and development are linked in the general objectives as defined in the Treaty on European Union (2002: Art. 130) and were long part of the agenda of the European Community’s development policy as well as being central to the logic of successive enlargements of the Union. However it was only in the post-Cold War period that a space for the EU on the world stage opened while at the same time events such as the genocide in Rwanda, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the identification of Afghanistan as a safe haven for international terrorists pushed the EU to adopt a more proactive stance in pursuing these objectives.

Understanding the fragile state EU lexicon

Despite greater ambition and efforts toward a more targeted role regarding the new security challenges, the EU has been slow to address the fragile states issue squarely or in an explicit and direct manner. Despite a multitude of policy papers, strategic concepts and programs that have been launched over the past decade no official analysis report or policy document on the topic has yet been agreed upon by the Council. In part stimulated by external actors, notably the OECD-DAC work on Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States, policy coherence and fragile states is high on the agenda of the Portuguese Presidency program in the latter half of 2007. Central to this will be the need to clearly identify what the EU already understands by the concept and how any new approach might bring added value to existing concepts and strategies.

The pursuit of “structural stability,” a concept that embraces all the key elements of the fragile state debate, was proposed as a core goal of the EU more than ten years ago. In the 1996 Commission communication on the European Union and the Issue of Conflicts in Africa, this was defined as “a situation involving sustainable economic development, democracy and respect for human rights, viable political structures, and healthy social and environmental conditions, with the capacity to manage change without resorting to violent conflict. Working toward structural stability would mean the targeted reinforcement of those factors that enable peaceful change” (European Commission 1996: 3).¹

Policy development and subsequent institutional and budgetary innovation within the EU aimed at delivering structural stability has been driven primarily by the conflict prevention and crisis management terminology. This was clearly set out in the 2001 EU Program for the Prevention of Violent Conflicts, which underlined the EU’s “political commitment to pursue conflict prevention as one of the main objectives of the EU’s external relations” (European Commission 2001a: para. 5). “Conflict prevention” was understood as a cooperative approach to facilitate peaceful solutions to disputes and implied addressing the root causes of conflict in order to alleviate the human suffering and destruction of resources caused by violent conflict (European Commission 2001a: 4).

The concept of “crisis management,” which is peculiar to the EU, evolved in parallel to the conflict-prevention program. It can be broadly defined as any policy or instrument the EU deploys during a crisis, but it is increasingly understood as EU jargon for the deployment of military or civilian peacekeeping operations. In the latter formulation, the development of crisis management capabilities clearly falls within the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) pillar II structure. However the activities of the European Commission are manifestly of direct relevance before, during, and after crisis; and funding instruments, such as the Instrument for Stability (discussed below in the section Funding Mechanisms), are specifically targeted at program assistance in times of crisis. Perhaps the principal definition of “EU crisis management” which might be offered with confidence is that it refers essentially to situations where international personnel intervene in place of local personnel where the latter are absent for one or other reason, that is, in a failed/failing state or in an emerging state.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian and development community have preferred to discuss the same problematics that are addressed in conflict prevention and crisis management under the heading “linking relief, rehabilitation, and development” (LRRD). Specifically in the EU context, LRRD refers to efforts to ensure effective bridging between operations financed from different Community financing instruments in the context of crisis. More recently, “post-crisis stabilization” and “integrated transition strategies” also feature as emerging concepts for EU policy development, particularly since the formulation of the European Consensus on Development in 2006.

Official references to “state failure” began to appear in 2003. The EU Concept for Crisis Management Missions defined state failure as “a situation (usually the aftermath of a civil war or of a long period of foreign occupation) where none of the basic infrastructures of the state are in place and therefore the international community is called upon to lead the (re)construction of the state. At least in an initial phase, the situation might require a high degree of substitution of national and local administration functions” (Council of the European Union 2003b: 5).

Meanwhile the European Security Strategy (ESS) spoke of state failure as “an alarming phenomenon that undermines global governance, and adds to regional instability” (Council of the European Union 2003c: 4). State failure was recognized as one of the five key threats facing Europe (discussed further below). It was not that the concept was unknown before these iterations; indeed, the European Commissioner for External Relations had spoken in 2001 of failed states as “countries where the institutions, coercive power and basic services of national government have simply crumbled away” (Patten 2001). There had, however, been a reluctance to use the terminology in official policy documents. For example, the 2003 communication on Governance and Development instead discussed the issue under the heading of “difficult partnerships” which were characterized as countries lacking commitment to good governance. This made the familiar distinction between weak governance cases, where the government made efforts and was committed but where capacity was weak and outcomes limited, and the difficult partners, where government was unwilling to adopt the policies deemed appropriate to strengthening a legitimate state.

The recent trend has been for a degree of convergence in terminology, with both the development and diplomatic community appearing to settle for the somewhat less ideologically charged label of “fragile state” as opposed to “failed state.” For example, the European Consensus on Development retained the concept of difficult partnerships but explicitly recognized fragile states as a broader concept and including not only difficult partnerships but also crises/post-crises situations (European Commission 2005a: para. 21).

Evolving EU Definitions and Concepts

Structural stability is a situation involving sustainable economic development, democracy and respect for human rights, viable political structures, and healthy social and environmental conditions, with the capacity to manage change without to resort to violent conflict. Working toward structural stability would mean the targeted reinforcement of those factors that enable peaceful change (European Commission 1996: 3).

The international community has a political and moral responsibility to act so as to avoid the human suffering and the destruction of resources caused by violent conflicts … Conflict prevention calls for a co-operative approach to facilitate peace...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• Vorwort
• Freiheit, Gleichheit, Solidarität (Leseprobe)
• Europa wagen (Leseprobe)
• Transformationsindex BTI 2012 (Leseprobe)
• Diplomacy, Development and Defense: A Paradigm for Policy Coherence (Leseprobe)
• Strategies for Combating Right-Wing Extremism in Europe (Leseprobe)
• Europa-Handbuch (Leseprobe)
• Die Europäische Verfassung verstehen (Leseprobe)