European commitments to build conflict strategies around development and governance initiatives have been around for over a decade. A long succession of documents has flagged up the ‘security, governance and development’ trinity. The European Security Strategy and its 2008 update both identify these linkages as pivotal to more effective EU conflict resolution.
This paper interrogates the political and developmental dimensions of how Europe seeks to temper conflict and state fragility.
Key findings:
- The EU claims to have a development-sensitive approach to security challenges. Pockets of development assistance have been oriented towards key social challenges and security-related activities in conflict states. The Commission and national donors such as the UK and The Netherlands make much of the fact that a higher share of their aid now flows to states beset by serious conflict. Precise figures are hard to come by, but EU officials insist that the fragile state focus means that development programmes are continuing in insecure contexts where previously they would have been wound down. Additionally, large injections of funds have been forthcoming to underpin security strategies in places such as Kosovo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There has been some shift away from big infrastructure projects to initiatives such as vocational training that can be presented as more germane to reducing societies’ propensity to conflict. Diplomats insist that development aid is now deployed as a tool not just for poverty reduction but conflict resolution too.
- The EU’s commitment to address the root causes of conflict through development and governance has in most cases failed to materialise or have any substantial impact. Member states remain resistant to open self-criticism or revision of their bilateral idiosyncrasies. The Lisbon Treaty is held out as a panacea, but the problems run deeper. It is the political ‘story-line’ that still lacks clarity within European conflict resolution policies. While the standard critique is that Western powers blindly and inappropriately seek to foist one-size-fits-all political templates onto fragile states, the bigger concern is that a policy of ultra-pragmatism has left the EU floundering for effective means of tackling the underlying political causes of conflict.
- European policies in situations of conflict or fragility remain ineffectual, unduly narrow in scope and at odds with the EU’s declared holism. Whilst most criticisms have been on the problematic civil-military link in crisis management, it is in the broader politics of peace-building that European policies are most seriously lacking. A run-through of EU policies suggests that, in some senses, Europe’s commitment to preventing and resolving conflict in distant regions seems to have withered. Doubts among policy-makers have grown that the EU can make much of an impact in many ‘situations of fragility’; that it knows what to do to mitigate conflict; and even over whether it should be intervening in any political fashion at all. Every report and article on EU policies calls for better coordination between different European institutions and policy instruments, and policy documents have promised improved coherence. Evidence however suggests that the familiar problems of disarticulation persist.
