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Debate
Ban on torture: Europe’s responsibility
EU consensus: overdue but incomplete
Kenya: the president’s defeat
Climate protection: Kyoto progress
01/2006 |
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[ Comment ]
EU consensus: overdue but incomplete
After long negotiations, the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament agreed on a development consensus (see D+C/E+Z 12/2005, p. 454). While defining healthy principles, the paper does have a crucial weakness. It does not say how Europe’s lack of policy coherence is to be remedied.
[ By Hartmut Ihne ]
The European Consensus on Development aims to react to several international changes since 2000, the year in which the Commission’s Development Strategy Paper and the Barcelona Declaration were adopted. Globalisation is advancing and there are new threats to global security risks linked to development challenges. Moreover, Europe has accepted new international obligations (Millennium Development Goals, environmental protection, development funding), which make it necessary to sharpen the profile and improve Europe’s efforts. The Union must become more efficient, synergies should be made use of and coherence of EU and member state policies needs to be enhanced.
This is especially so in the field of development, because it cross-cuts almost all other fields of policy and is subject to shared jurisdiction under European law. The consensus does not change any of this, but it does emphasise the importance of subsidiarity. With the consensus, Europe is also reacting to the growing relevance of its official development assistance, which currently accounts to 56% of all international aid. When presenting the consensus to the public, Development Commissioner Louis Michel said that Europe’s self-confidence and sense of responsibility had grown.
The consensus emphasises three already known “Cs”: coherence, coordination and complementarity. But the paper devotes too little attention to coherence, the most important “C” of all. The Commission’s original draft last summer had outlined three levels at which progress was to be achieved: (1) at the level of the member states by strengthening the procedures and instruments enforcing policy coherence, (2) at the Council level by actually respecting development issues in all sectoral deliberations and (3) at the Commission level by increased impact assessment from a development point of view, among other things.
The respective paragraphs, which would have been politically meaningful, were dropped from the final consensus and the details on coherence have been diluted accordingly. There probably wasn’t any real desire to rise to the challenge resonating in the Commission’s original draft to check all European policy in terms of compatibility with development. The omissions feed doubt concerning both the political will of EU members to improve cooperation among one another and their determination to pay development the attention the issue deserves.
Perhaps general consensus papers are not the means to design detailed procedures. In this case, however, doing so would have served clarification. Lack of coherence is the central problem of Europe’s development efforts. It would have been helpful, had Commission, Council of Ministers and Parliament agreed on tangible proposals, for example, to improve coherence of development-related instruments and procedures. Instead, the paper leaves much scope for the old and all too well-known practice of working side by side or even against one another. It is also impossible to make out how the inherent fragmentation of EU development financing will be sorted out so long as the Council cannot agree on including the European Development Fund in the budget.
Nonetheless, the consensus is still an important document. It gives common European development policy a sharper profile, defines fundamental principles, identifies focal areas and defines policy guidelines for member states. Hopefully, it will also help to strengthen development actors against the egoism of conventionally dominant portfolios such as foreign affairs, security or trade. The consensus outlines a vision of Europe’s international responsibility, which is based on freedom. If member states take it seriously, it could be more than just another concept in a concept-generating world.
Dr. Hartmut Ihne
is the director of ZEFConsult
at the Centre for Development Research
in Bonn.
ihne@uni-bonn.de
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