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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
No security without proactive
development policy
Poor performance on poverty eradication
The Arab world
demands coherence
Europe closes its doors
Too many voices
11/2004
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No security without proactive
development policy
The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy is conceptually geared towards development cooperation (DC). It offers a chance development actors must take advantage of. Their strengths include a wealth of experience, local knowledge and long-term commitment. These need to be harnessed or else the making of EU policy will be left to the military and diplomats.
[ By Jörg Faust and Dirk Messner ]
The European Union drew up its first common security strategy in December 2003. Based on a report by Javier Solana, the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), it identified three fundamental threats:
– terrorism directed against Europe, perpetrated by internationally networked groups prepared to commit extreme acts of violence and often linked to religious fundamentalism;
– the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which could lead to new arms races in strategically important regions as well as to a dangerous combination of proliferation and terrorism;
– the failure of state systems in many parts of the world, because areas beyond the reach of state and law tend to become organisational bases for terrorists and traffickers in people, drugs and arms.
The EU strategy is based on the concept of “extended security”. It acknowledges that insecurity and escalating violence can have complex economic, power-political, socio-cultural and environmental causes. Accordingly, security policy is no longer seen just a matter of military capability. Rather, it needs to be based on the ability to mobilise both civil and military resources to defuse political and socio-economic crises as swiftly as possible and prevent them from erupting into violence. This includes employing a broad spectrum of instruments conventionally applied by development, foreign, economic and environmental policy. The mix transcends the traditional security tools of police cooperation, secret service cooperation and military activity.
Conceptual integration
Against this background, the European concept rightly calls for the various instruments to be more closely coordinated and geared towards security objectives. In this context, development policy has a major role to play. Crisis prevention, the stabilisation of weak societies and the reconstruction of institutions in post-conflict situations have long formed part of its brief. However, its security relevance has only gradually become clear in the wake of September 11. Development promoters now need to channel their experience proactively into shaping Europe’s external relations and, to this end, should draft a strategy to flank the “Solana concept”.
Traditional security organisations are already a step ahead. The EU Institute for International Security Studies (EU-ISS) in Paris recently presented a “European Defence Paper” setting out the conditions, means and possibilities of implementing the security strategy adopted in 2003. The paper is interesting for two reasons. For one thing, it identifies the military capabilities needed in the EU to translate the Solana strategy into action. For another, it shows that EU-ISS has not yet adopted the philosophy of the new European concept – which lies in integrating military, diplomatic, economic, law enforcement and development policy. This important think tank tells us a great deal about aircraft capabilities, helicopters, submarine warships, target-seeking missiles and troop levels. However, the report hardly elaborates on how military dimensions and multifold civil instruments should be linked. Doing so, however, is fundamental to the Solana strategy.
There are four reasons for European development actors to get involved in the debate on future security policy. Their engagement is essential
– to ensure that the concretisation, further development and implementation of the Solana strategy are not left to the “traditional” security actors alone;
– to draw attention to development cooperation’s strengths and the potential to contribute to the pacification of crisis countries and regions outside the European Community;
– to tackle rapidly the major conceptual, manpower and financial challenges that arise from the overlaps between security and development remits and from the coordination of civil and military assistance for the containment of conflicts;
– to prevent development policy from being reduced to an arm of security policy in the context of international strategies against transnational terrorism.
The long-term objective was summed up by Jeffrey Sachs in the Financial Times (October 14, 2003). According to the Columbia University economist, by far the hardest challenge facing the world community today is to bear in mind long-term goals in the face of urgent and bitter divisions over Iraq and the war on terrorism. The problems of Aids, poverty and environmental degradation will not wait for a new consensus on Iraq or the Middle East, Sachs warns.
Mutual dependence
It is obvious that development cannot succeed without peace. Afghanistan, southern Sudan, Congo and Palestine clearly show that expensive development programmes can have only little useful impact as long as societies are plagued by civil war, organised crime, international drug trafficking or warlords. Around half of the world’s 60 poorest countries are embroiled in acute or latent armed conflicts. In such contexts, development policy can only produce results when flanked by efforts to help stabilise the security situation. If the EU strategy is to be taken seriously, the trend of the 1990s needs to be reversed. In this period, international development policy adopted a hands-off approach to the difficult group of crisis countries.
On the other hand, (national or international) security is scarcely possible without development. Fragile societies potentially threaten international security in a time when borders are increasingly becoming porous. Impoverishment, environmental degradation, ailing education and health systems, weak state institutions, corruption and political exclusion breed an explosive mix of organised crime, religious and/or ethnic extremism, hopelessness, despair and even political violence in wide sections of society. In extreme cases, the result is state disintegration and civil war. Zones of political disorder, in turn, can become havens for international terrorists, transnational crime and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This was a subject discussed in development policy circles long before September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, many German politicians concerned with security and foreign affairs saw conflict prevention as something Social Democrats and Greens merely dabbled in prior to the terrorist attacks.
Weighing risks for development actors
But how should development be positioned in the light of a European security policy that is now gradually taking shape? The first point to note is that a strong sense of uncertainty is haunting the European DC community. On the one hand, DC actors cannot close their eyes to the increasingly manifest overlaps between development and security policy. On the other, they share three latent, inter-related fears:
– There could be a substantial shift in DC resources towards security-relevant activities, away from developing countries which have few security problems (as, for instance, Tanzania and Honduras) to “at-risk countries” such (like Afghanistan and Sudan), or away from “classical” areas of development programmes (like basic education or resource protection) to security-relevant projects (as the creation of a police force or army).
– With the external relations of the EU subject to a security imperative, the system of development objectives could gradually be transformed to the detriment of DC areas without immediate security relevance (like sustainable development or poverty reduction).
– Development programmes could be turned into tools of European foreign and security policy without the affected agencies getting a say in policy making. The independence as a field of policy would thus be lost.
These risks cannot be denied. Critics rightly point to the days of the Cold War, when development concerns all too often had to submit to security interests. Obviously, it will hardly be a successful strategy to retreat defensively to traditional terrain without taking note of the debate on the interdependence of foreign, security and development policy. On the contrary, the greatest danger to development policy would stem from any refusal to engage in the discussions on appropriate reactions to new global risks.
Development policy’s strengths
European development actors have an obligation to become proactive. With their wealth of operative experience in precisely the areas where “classical” foreign and security policy is, by comparison, conceptually weak, they must get involved as strategic partners. Development agencies may be a long way from being able to offer patent remedies for state failure, civil war and societal disintegration. But they can pool their conceptual and operative expertise, translate it into manageable country-specific strategies and show other actors the power and efficiency of their tools.
What is needed most of all is a strategy along the lines of the Solana model for the 25–30 fragile states in the world. Which of them are of priority for European development policy? What systematic lessons can be learnt from the experience in the Balkans, East Timor or even Central America? Are established monitoring processes adequate for the surveillance of crisis countries? How should the EU member states’ approaches to crisis prevention be coordinated? What will an effective strategy for stabilising weak states cost?
In addressing these questions, development actors can draw on three comparative strengths:
– Since the 1990s, they have worked intensively on the diverse ways of promoting good governance, which, in the final analysis, is a prime requirement for eliminating security threats. The goal of reducing long-term dangers posed by weak states, as stated in the Solana strategy, can only be attained by strengthening statehood in those countries – and preferably liberal statehood. After all, stability established by despotism and tyranny rarely endures and tends to provoke social and political polarisation within a fairly short time. As seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and a host of African states, the consequences are development deadlocks and a new set of threats.
– Development actors have a great deal of operative experience as well as background knowledge of socio-economic, ethnic, religious and politico-economic conditions in the states in question. This is a fundamental requirement for providing the support required in disintegrating states. Development agencies possess country expertise, which is needed to combine humanitarian aid, survival aid, state building, poverty reduction and economic development strategies in order to make effective contributions to long-term security.
– Finally, development policy actors are the natural brokers and mediators, capable of balancing the interests of the European Union with those of developing countries. The relevant organisations can represent European security interests, but also know their partners’ interests well enough to take them into account.
If development promoters succeed in channelling their expertise into a convincing set of best practices for dealing with security issues, they will position themselves as strategically relevant actors in the context of the Solana strategy. That kind of proactive stance is also needed to prevent development policy from becoming a mere branch of foreign and security policy. The approach is also essential for winning attention for the legitimate demand that DC should not only help shape certain security-relevant areas of policy but should also “take care” of other resource-intensive issues such as poverty reduction and sustainable development. German development organisations could well use the Federal Government’s “Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Peace-Building” action plan as a basis for driving forward the European debate on the concretisation of the Solana strategy.
At the heart of that debate should be a proposal drafted in September 2004 by the Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities. It recommends that a “Human Security Response Force” (comprising around 5,000 civilians) should be created in addition to the planned EU military force. This would need to be a force of highly trained, rapidly deployable specialists (development and humanitarian aid experts, administrators, human rights monitors, police). It should not have to struggle with internal language barriers. Its members should undergo regular training together so that a sense of “corporate identity” is formed and operational routines become standard. Such a civilian EU intervention force needs to learn to cooperate with other foreign and security policy actors including the military to prepare for the challenge of coordinating foreign, security and development action in the case of crisis. By creating such a force, the EU would acquire the human resource capacity needed to translate the concept of “extended security” into action.
Literature
Common Foreign and Security Policy
http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/cfsp/intro/#1
EU-ISS: „European Defence Paper”:
http://www.iss-eu.org/chaillot/wp2004.html
Study Group on Europe´s Security Capabilities:
A Human Security Doctrine for Europe, Barcelona, September 2004
EU Institute for International Security Studies:
“European Defence Paper”
Dr. Dirk Messner
is director of the German Development Institute (GDI) and teaches international relations at Duisburg-Essen University.
Dirk.Messner@die-gdi.de
Dr. Jörg Faust
is one of the Institute’s research fellows.
Joerg.Faust@die-gdi.de
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