the european union and the united nations. partners in ......chaillot paper the european union and...

Chaillot Paper

The European Union andthe United Nations

Partners in effective multilateralism

n°78June 2005

Sven Biscop, Francesco Francioni, Kennedy Graham withTânia Felício, Jeffrey Laurenti and Thierry Tardy

Foreword by Jean-Marie GuéhennoEdited by Martin Ortega

In January 2002 the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) beca-me an autonomous Paris-based agency of the EuropeanUnion. Following an EU Council Joint Action of 20 July2001, it is now an integral part of the new structuresthat will support the further development of theCFSP/ESDP. The Institute’s core mission is to provideanalyses and recommendations that can be of use andrelevance to the formulation of the European securityand defence policy. In carrying out that mission, it alsoacts as an interface between European experts and decision-makers at all levels.

Chaillot Papers are monographs on topical questionswritten either by a member of the ISS research team orby outside authors chosen and commissioned by theInstitute. Early drafts are normally discussed at a semi-nar or study group of experts convened by the Instituteand publication indicates that the paper is consideredby the ISS as a useful and authoritative contribution tothe debate on CFSP/ESDP. Responsibility for the viewsexpressed in them lies exclusively with authors. ChaillotPapers are also accessible via the Institute’s Website:www.iss-eu.org

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Chaillot Paper

The European Union andthe United Nations

Partners in effective multilateralism

Sven Biscop, Francesco Francioni, Kennedy Graham with Tânia

Felício, Jeffrey Laurenti and Thierry Tardy

Foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno

Edited by Martin Ortega

Institute for Security StudiesEuropean Union Paris

n°78June 2005

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Institute for Security StudiesEuropean Union43 avenue du Président Wilson75775 Paris cedex 16tel.: +33 (0)1 56 89 19 30fax: +33 (0)1 56 89 19 31e-mail: [email protected]

Director: Nicole Gnesotto

© EU Institute for Security Studies 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the EUInstitute for Security Studies.ISSN 1017-7566ISBN 92-9198-062-5Published by the EU Institute for Security Studies and printed in Condé-sur-Noireau (France) byCorlet Imprimeur. Graphic design by Claire Mabille (Paris).

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Contents

Préface Nicole Gnesotto 5

Foreword Jean-Marie Guéhenno 7

Introduction Martin Ortega 13

Security and development: a positive agenda for a global EU-UN partnership 17

Sven Biscop• Understanding the challenge: Global Public Goods 18

• Meeting the challenge: a positive and integrative agenda 19

• Forging integration at the country-specific level: the Peacebuilding Commission 22

• Forging integration at the global level: ECOSOC 24

• Human rights and democracy: a missing link? 25

• The EU contribution 26

• Conclusion 29

The role of the EU in promoting reform of the UN in the field of human rights and environmental protection 31

Francesco Francioni• Human rights 32

• Protection of the environment 42

• Conclusion 48

EU-UN cooperation in peacekeeping : a promising relationship in a constrained environment 49

Thierry Tardy• A highly constrained environment 50

• Some tangible achievements 53

• The modalities of EU-UN cooperation 60

• Conclusion 67

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What ‘reinforcement’ for the Security Council? 69

Jeffrey Laurenti• The UN Security Council and national sovereignty 70

• Decision-making and implementation 71

• The long path to reform 73

• Membership expansion 75

• The European Union and the future of UNSC reform 77

Regional organisations and collective security: the role of the European Union 83

Kennedy Graham with Tânia Felício• Regionalism under construction: developing

a ‘regional-global security mechanism’ 84

• Complexities of regionalism 87

• The potential role of the EU in a future collective security system 89

Conclusion – UN reform: as necessary as it is difficult 93

Martin Ortega• Points of agreement and disagreement 95

• Disappointment 97

• Three conclusions 99

Annexes 103

• About the authors 103

• Abbreviations 104

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Nicole Gnesotto

Soixante ans après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la nécessitéd’adapter le système des Nations unies aux réalités du XXIe siècle aété proclamée avec constance et ambition par le Secrétaire général

Kofi Annan. Plusieurs groupes de personnalités de haut niveau, man-datés par lui, ont désormais rendu leurs conclusions.

Pour l’Union européenne, engagée collectivement dans la promotiond’un « multilatéralisme efficace », l’enjeu est décisif, alors même qued’autres piliers du système international – le Traité de non-prolifération,le Protocole de Kyoto, le Tribunal pénal international et bien d’autrestraités et accords de désarmement – souffrent de lacunes majeures ou sontdésormais en crise ouverte.

A la veille de la réunion de New York en septembre 2005, l’Institut avoulu dresser un bilan le plus complet et le plus critique possible des dif-férentes options sur la table. Sous la responsabilité de Martin Ortega,responsable à l’Institut des études sur le Moyen-Orient et le droit interna-tional, cinq des meilleurs experts des Nations unies examinent, dans ceCahier de Chaillot, les possibilités de réformes susceptibles d’êtreportées par l’Union européenne. S’agissant de l’organisation la plus vastedu monde, l’hypothèse de consensus décisifs entre les Etats membres del’ONU n’est pas, a priori, le scénario le plus probable, sur des sujets aussisensibles et conflictuels que la réforme du Conseil de sécurité, la protectionde la planète ou le dilemme du droit des peuples face au droit des Etats.

Mais le débat fondamental est avant tout politique. Les Nations uniessont-elles un instrument au service d’un groupe de pays, fussent-ils les plusdémocratiques de la planète, avec pour mission première celle d’ex-clure/contourner/punir les Etats qui ne respecteraient pas les mêmesrègles ? Ou doivent-elles au contraire maintenir coûte que coûte une voca-tion universelle, fondée sur l’inclusion systématique de tous les Etats, ycompris les perturbateurs, afin de contraindre chacun au respect minimaldes règles collectives du système de sécurité international ? Leur objectifmajeur est-il de prévenir la prolifération des armes de destruction massiveet le terrorisme, ou doivent-elles développer une conception plus large etplus complexe de la paix internationale ? Doivent-elles obéir à une

Préface

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Préface

logique de discrimination ou d’intégration, se fonder davantage sur lesvaleurs (démocratiques) ou sur le droit (négocié), adopter une approcheplutôt occidentale ou résolument multilatérale pour le renforcement de lasécurité internationale ?

Ces questions animent, ouvertement ou en sourdine, l’ensemble desdébats sur la réforme des Nations unies à la veille de leur soixantièmeanniversaire. Parce qu’elles ne sont pas exemptes de considérationsidéologiques, elles compliquent encore davantage l’agenda de réformesambitieuses souhaitées par le Secrétaire général des Nations unies, maissur lesquelles s’affrontent les intérêts particuliers des Etats. La réformedu Conseil de sécurité fait ainsi l’objet de désaccords majeurs selon quel’on avance plutôt l’argument de la représentativité ou celui de l’effica-cité de cette instance. Même du côté de l’Union européenne, qui incarnepourtant plus que tout autre acteur l’esprit et les valeurs collectives dumultilatéralisme, les divisions sont profondes sur cette question. Certes,la date du soixantième anniversaire n’est pas une contrainte absolue :mais à trop perdre le momentum et laisser les choses en l’état, le dangerexiste d’une marginalisation progressive des Nations unies face àd’autres instances moins représentatives, qu’il s’agisse du G8, d’unéventuel club des démocraties, de l’OTAN, de l’Union ou de coalitions adhoc. Au risque de parcelliser encore davantage la communauté interna-tionale, d’antagoniser les différences au lieu de les réduire, de désunir aulieu de rassembler.

Paris, juin 2005

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Foreword Jean-Marie GuéhennoUnited Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations

In December 2003, the European Union took a significant steptowards articulating a vision of its role and responsibility in build-ing a better world. The European Security Strategy, ‘A secureEurope in a better world’, presents a compelling argument for aninternational order based on effective multilateralism. It sets outthe components of this as a stronger international society, wellfunctioning international institutions and a rule-based interna-tional order. And it powerfully reaffirms the EU’s commitment tostrengthening the United Nations, and to equipping it to fulfil itsresponsibilities and to act effectively.

The EU as an international institution possesses a uniquecapacity to realise this commitment across a broad range ofdimensions – political, economic, military and social. Mostrecently, it has developed capacities to support the UN in itsefforts to help countries emerge from conflict and make the longand difficult journey to a secure peace. This support is needed.Global peacekeeping demands continue to increase and regionalpartners can make a vital contribution to international efforts toaddress the rise in conflict. According to the Stockholm Interna-tional Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the total number of UNand UN-sanctioned regional organisations’ peace operationsunder way by the end of 2004 was the highest in the last decade,with the brief exception of 1999. These operations range in scaleand complexity to an unprecedented degree, from observer torobust peacekeeping, to complex peacebuilding and long-terminstitution building.

The current surge has stretched the UN’s existing peacekeep-ing capacities to their limits. Since the beginning of 2004, fivecomplex operations have been either newly mandated anddeployed or significantly expanded. UN peacekeeping has grownfrom some 30,000 uniformed and civilian personnel deployed in2000 to nearly 80,000 personnel currently deployed in 18 peace-keeping and related field operations led by my department, the

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Department for Peacekeeping Operations. To grasp the scale ofthis activity consider some of the numbers involved: 120,000troops were rotated in 2004, 580,000 passengers flown and half amillion tonnes of freight delivered – all this managed by a head-quarters with a ratio of 1 staff member to every 115 in the field.

Regional and international organisations such as the EU,NATO and the AU are also confronting similar challenges in meet-ing the operational demands of their engagement in peace opera-tions, either UN or UN-sanctioned. The personnel, materiel andlogistics requirements to launch and sustain this increased activ-ity weighs at least as heavily on regional organisations, none ofwhich has the long experience and global reach of the UN in peace-keeping. It is not a question of either UN or regional peacekeeping:the issue is how we can best work together in effective multilater-alism to advance the cause of peace and global security.

The EU’s eight crisis management operations to date havedemonstrated the potential and the range of multilateral cooper-ation in peacekeeping. The EU’s first crisis management opera-tion, the 2003 EU Police Mission (EUPM) in Bosnia and Herze-govina represented a transition from the seven-year UN mission inBosnia and Herzegovina (UNMIBH). In similar fashion, the EU’smilitary Operation Althea succeeded the NATO SFOR operationin Bosnia and Herzegovina in December 2004. The EU’s commit-ment to peace and stability in its neighbourhood is furtherdemonstrated in the ongoing police and rule of law operations inthe Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Georgia respec-tively. The EU’s first foray outside Europe, Operation Artemis inthe Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the summer of 2003,was a rapid military deployment in support of the UN mission inthat country, MONUC. Another dimension of EU-UN coopera-tion within MONUC is the current EU police mission in DRC,EUPOL Kinshasa, which is directed at a specific functional task inthe DRC capital. In Iraq, meanwhile, civilian EU and UN missionswork alongside each other in support of UN resolutions to assistthe Iraqi people rebuild their country.

The 24 September 2003 Joint Declaration on EU-UN coopera-tion in crisis management provided the framework for regularjoint consultation between the two organisations. These have inturn facilitated the EU’s drafting of documents that elaboratemodalities for provision of military and civilian capabilities to UNpeacekeeping. No less important is continued cooperation

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between the UN and the European Commission, not just inKosovo, where the EC leads UNMIK’s activities in economicreconstruction, but in providing resources for peacebuildingtasks outside Europe such as in Haiti, DRC and West Africa.

We have, therefore, set out on the journey towards effectivemultilateralism in international peacekeeping. The question nowis how do we chart a steady course to get there? I believe that thestarting point – our guiding star, so to speak – is recognition thateffective multilateralism builds on legitimacy. What this means, asthe report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges andChange indicated, is that UN Security Council authorisationshould ideally be sought for any operation carried out by regionalorganisations. This recommendation in fact goes beyond theCharter, which only requires authorisation for forceful action.The international legitimacy that UN Security Council authorisa-tion confers on a peace operation is indivisible, but it is not static.Effective multilateralism requires meaningful and consistentcommunication between the UN and the regional organisationengaged in a peace operation, a principle reflected in Article 54 ofthe UN Charter, throughout the course of an operation.

A second, related, principle for effective multilateralism inpeacekeeping is a shared commitment to qualitative standards ofpeacekeeping. The quality of the human resources we deploy to mis-sions is essential because the environments in which peacekeepingtakes place are difficult and often dangerous, and because thepeacekeeping tasks that we are requested to carry out are increas-ingly complex. With well-trained and interoperable military andcivilian personnel we can rise to these challenges. The EU can playa valuable role in helping to raise the quality of internationalpeacekeeping personnel. EU-UN cooperation has already pro-duced results in terms of the elaboration of EU training standardsand modules, and participation of UN personnel in EU trainingcourses. Here I believe there is a particular capacity for the EU andits member states to contribute to the spread of internationalpeacekeeping standards by extending military and civilian train-ing courses and initiatives to interested non-EU member states.

Quality extends to personal conduct. The legitimacy of inter-national peacekeeping is directly related to the conduct andactions of the men and women who carry it out. Where individualconduct and actions fail to meet the standards set by the UN, we allfail. UN member states must assert and enforce UN standards of

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conduct among their contributing troops and civilian personnel,and the EU can play a useful role in facilitating this effort.

The third step toward effective multilateralism in interna-tional peacekeeping is to develop the capabilities to respondstrongly and swiftly. In terms of military capabilities, the biggestweakness of international peacekeeping today is our lack of depth.The UN’s lack of a reserve to react robustly and respond to threatsto fragile peace processes in complex environments threatens theprogress already accomplished on the ground in our missions. Forthis reason, the Secretary-General has proposed a ‘StrategicReserve’ concept. Under this, the UN would establish a small num-ber of task forces/battalions of forces trained, equipped and avail-able for deployment to a UN operation at short notice. Thesewould be made up of troops from member states, earmarked forthat purpose and taken out of their regular duties for rotationperiods of up to 12 months to form an element of the StrategicReserve. Once deployed to a mission, these forces would operateunder UN command and control.

There is significant potential for linkage, I believe, between theUN Strategic Reserve and the EU’s ‘battle group’ concept. The 13battle groups which the EU intends to develop have the potentialto contribute substantially to the UN Strategic Reserve capacity,particularly in niche capabilities such as strategic airlift, commu-nications and evacuations. However, the envisaged length ofdeployment of EU battle groups is very short: the potential, there-fore, of EU battle groups to make the transition to Blue Helmets atthe end of an EU deployment may merit consideration.

It is important to reiterate that EU military capacity for crisismanagement is a complement, not a replacement, to memberstates’ national commitments to UN peacekeeping. We wouldstrongly encourage renewed commitment in terms of contribu-tion of uniformed personnel. Today, European representation –once a major element of our global deployment – represents only6.7 per cent of police, military and observer personnel in UN oper-ations worldwide, and only 2.3 per cent of deployment in Africa.The provision of uniformed personnel to UN peacekeeping by EUmember states represents a crucial practical asset, since they areamongst the best trained and prepared in the world. It also sends apowerful message as to the depth of EU member states’ commit-ment to effective multilateralism and their willingness to sharethe responsibilities, as well as the rewards, of collective security.

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We have raised this with the Permanent Missions of EU memberstates in New York and will continue to do so. At the same time, wewelcome the supplementary efforts of the EU institutions toencourage such participation, including through the EU’s ‘clear-ing house’ function.

One capacity area in which the EU has a unique role to play is inthe non-military dimensions of complex peacekeeping. Thesehave expanded exponentially in the last decade and include civil-ian specialist activity in fields such as police, rule of law and tran-sitional justice, security sector reform, human rights, disarma-ment, demobilisation and reintegration, civil administration,economic reconstruction and institution building. The EU hasgone further than many organisations in targeting capacity build-ing in this broad range of activities. The civilian dimension ofpeacekeeping represents an important area for cooperationbetween the UN and the EU in terms of recruiting and swiftlydeploying required personnel expertise to international peaceoperations. One particular aspect of this is potential cooperationin the establishment of a UN Standing Civilian Police Capacityproposed by the Secretary-General in follow-up to a recommenda-tion of the High-Level Panel. A pilot capacity of 25 full-time, field-based police specialists would be set up in the UN to provide assis-tance with rapid deployment and early mission start-up, with thegoal of expanding to 100 based on experience and needs. Activeengagement between this capacity and the EU’s police capacity,which includes a small Police Unit in the Council of the EuropeanUnion, would be desirable. Beyond the specific area of police, thereis significant opportunity for the UN and EU to work together indeveloping doctrines and concepts of operation for civilian ele-ments of peacekeeping, particularly in the rule of law, and in work-ing to ensure the integration of development perspectives intopost-conflict peacebuilding.

The integration of Europe has been a work in progress for over50 years. This process has brought peace, stability and wealth tothe Continent and offers a symbol for other parts of the world ofthe potential benefits of regional cooperation. Strong and effec-tive regional bodies could reinforce the pillars of the internationalsystem, which is built, as the European Security Strategy asserts,on the fundamental framework of the United Nations and itsCharter. Such regional bodies could give real meaning to its Chap-ter VIII. What the consolidation of regions must not do is put fur-

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ther pressures on global fragmenting tendencies along lines ofwealth, religion or resources. Effective multilateralism is aboutuniting diverse countries and peoples, and the organisations thatrepresent them, in common, concrete projects. It is in the pursuitof this that EU-UN cooperation finds its legitimacy and its effec-tiveness.

In its document outlining the modalities for EU-UN coopera-tion in military crisis management operations (of June 2004) theEU emphasised that, in order for our two organisations to workbetter together, we needed in-depth knowledge of each other. Tothis end, it suggested the potential of the EU Institute for SecurityStudies to carry out possible supporting work. I would like tocommend the Institute for responding with alacrity and initiativeto this idea and look forward to its continued work on EU-UNcooperation.

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IntroductionMartin ortega

In a famous speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 23September 2003, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched areflection process on the future of the organisation. He pointed out:

. . . we have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment noless decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations wasfounded. At that time, a group of far-sighted leaders, led andinspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were determined tomake the second half of the twentieth century different from thefirst half. They saw that the human race had only one world to livein, and that unless it managed its affairs prudently, all humanbeings may perish. So they drew up rules to govern internationalbehaviour, and founded a network of institutions, with theUnited Nations at its centre, in which the peoples of the worldcould work together for the common good. Now we must decidewhether it is possible to continue on the basis agreed then, orwhether radical changes are needed.

In order to analyse the challenges that the UN was confronting,as well as the changes needed, the Secretary-General convened threegroups of eminent personalities to give their views on (a) the role ofcivil society in global governance, (b) security threats and UN insti-tutional reform, and (c) development and poverty. The three panelsdelivered their reports, respectively entitled ‘We the peoples: civilsociety, the United Nations and global governance’ (June 2004), ‘Amore secure world: our shared responsibility’ (December 2004) and‘Investing in development: a practical plan to achieve the Millen-nium development goals’ (January 2005). On the basis of thosereports, Kofi Annan presented his own recommendations regard-ing changes in the UN, in the document ‘In larger freedom –towards development, security and human rights for all’, dated 21March 2005. In June this year, the incumbent president of the Gen-eral Assembly, following consultations with UN member states,

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prepared a draft list of issues drawing from the Secretary-General’sdocument. The member states of the United Nations will examinethese and other proposals for UN action and reform during the nextGeneral Assembly, which will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary ofthe organisation, starting in New York in September 2005.

Through a parallel development, the European Union has beendefining its role on the global scene in the last couple of years. In2003 the European Council decided to undertake OperationArtemis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the first EU-led mili-tary operation outside the European continent, and tasked JavierSolana to draft a final version of the European Security Strategy inJune 2003. On 24 September 2003, the EU and the UN signed a jointdeclaration on cooperation in civilian and military crisis manage-ment, and in December 2003 the European Council adopted theEuropean Security Strategy. In this document, the EU memberstates declare:

In a world of global threats, global markets and global media, oursecurity and prosperity increasingly depend on an effective mul-tilateral system. The development of a stronger internationalsociety, well functioning international institutions and a rule-based international order is our objective . . . The fundamentalframework for international relations is the United NationsCharter . . . Strengthening the United Nations, equipping it to ful-fil its responsibilities and to act effectively, is a European priority.

In May 2004, the EU – now enlarged to 25 member states – sub-mitted a contribution to the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Chal-lenges and Change. Finally, the draft Constitutional Treaty,approved in June 2004 and signed on 29 October 2004, describedthe guiding principles of the EU’s foreign and security policy, andaffirmed explicitly (Art. III-292) that:

The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided bythe principles which have inspired its own creation, developmentand enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the widerworld: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibil-ity of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect forhuman dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity, andrespect for the principles of the United Nations Charter andinternational law.

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The Union shall seek to develop relations and build partnershipswith third countries, and international, regional or global organ-isations which share the principles referred to in the first sub-paragraph. It shall promote multilateral solutions to commonproblems, in particular in the framework of the United Nations.

The EU is therefore committed to working hand in hand withthe United Nations. However, although practical EU-UN coopera-tion on peacekeeping, development assistance and other issues iswell on track, the appropriate synergy between the EU and the UNregarding UN reform has not been arrived at during the last twoyears. It can be argued that the EU and its member states have hadno impact on the preparatory work for UN reform because thisreform is both too much and too soon for them. Despite fact that therewere British and French members of the High-Level Panel, or thatthe EU presented a fourteen-page contribution to the High-LevelPanel, it appears that the Europeans (who pay around 40 per cent ofthe UN budget) have ‘punched below their weight’ during thepreparation of the forthcoming negotiation.

UN reform has been too much for the EU and its member statesbecause such reform is an intricate undertaking that encompasses awhole range of complex, intertwined global issues. Despite its his-torical significance, UN reform has not received sufficient public orpolitical attention in Europe. And it has been too soon because theEU is still searching its own international role vis-à-vis its memberstates, on the one hand, and vis-à-vis other states and actors, on theother. The draft Constitutional Treaty was a valid means for resolv-ing this kind of soul-searching impasse, but the debacle of theFrench and Dutch referendums casts many doubts on its ratifica-tion.

As a matter of fact, UN reform equally is too much for other gov-ernments across the world – not just Europeans. The ‘far-sighted’spirit of the UN founding fathers, as Kofi Annan put it, stands instark contrast to the short-sighted preoccupations of most of thecurrent political leaders. And yet, improving global governance is anurgent need. Extreme poverty, global warming, protection of theenvironment, respect for human rights and dignity, scarcity ofresources, pandemics, conflict resolution, collective security andpeacekeeping, as much as non-proliferation of weapons of massdestruction and international terrorism, are global challenges thataffect us all and call for immediate, concerted action. Neither a sin-

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gle state nor a group of states, however powerful they are, can tacklethose challenges alone. As pointed out in the European SecurityStrategy, multilateral responses are ineluctable and the UnitedNations must naturally be at the centre of international efforts todeal with global challenges. Reinforcing the United Nations andmaking it more effective is the only way to advance towards a moresecure and peaceful world.

This Chaillot Paper offers some ideas on how the EU and its mem-ber states can contribute to UN reform. The Institute organised aseminar in Paris under the title ‘The EU and the United Nations:implementing effective multilateralism’ on 21 March 2005. Afterthe seminar, the Institute asked five participants to write on the fol-lowing subjects: security and development (Sven Biscop), humanrights and protection of the environment (Francesco Francioni),peacekeeping (Thierry Tardy), UN Security Council reform (JeffreyLaurenti), and regional organisations and collective security(Kennedy Graham, who writes with Tânia Felício). A conclusiondraws some lessons from the various chapters and suggests that theEU should be more involved in the UN reform process.

This publication is inspired by two main assumptions. First, theUnited Nations should be utilised not only for fighting againstglobal threats but also for realising global opportunities. As a con-sequence, UN reform is not solely a ‘defensive’ enterprise (i.e. betterprotecting ourselves through joint action) but also a ‘creative’undertaking (i.e. working to attain common goals, such as develop-ment, protection of the environment and human rights). Second,the EU and its member states share a balanced vision on globalissues, as clearly stated in both the European Security Strategy andthe draft Constitutional Treaty. They should be consistent with theprinciples and values they proclaim and participate more actively inthis unique opportunity to reinforce the United Nations.

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Security and development:a positive agenda for a global EU-UN partnershipSven Biscop

As the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Changerightly indicated in its substantive report on UN reform, the legit-imacy of the collective security system of the UN depends on itsability to address everybody’s primary concerns.1 The system can-not function if major concerns of specific countries or of a specificnature are felt to be systematically ignored. The Panel thereforecalled for a new security consensus and identified six clusters ofsecurity threats to be dealt with by the system – later underwrittenby Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his March 2005 report:2

economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious dis-eases and environmental degradation; interstate conflict; internal conflict, including civil war, genocide and other large-scale atrocities; nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; transnational organised crime.

The Panel and the Secretary-General thus clearly advocate acomprehensive approach, seemingly recognising the linksbetween social and economic, politico-military and other factors;the Panel’s report states that the primary objective must be pre-vention, which begins with development.

Yet, is it really helpful to label all of these challenges as securitythreats? Although it might raise their importance in the eyes ofstates, it also blurs the distinctions between policy areas. Povertyor HIV/AIDS are problems of a different nature than terrorism,proliferation or conflict: they do not imply a threat of violenceand cannot be tackled by politico-military means. Rather, social,economic and other factors constitute the background to, andthe root causes of, specific politico-military threats. The neces-sarily comprehensive nature of the collective agenda can be

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1. The author wishes to thank hiscolleague Valérie Arnould, re-search fellow at IRRI-KIIB, for herindispensable contribution, inparticular with regard toECOSOC; Ms. Arnould’s researchon the topic will be published inIRRI-KIIB’s Egmont Papers.

2. ‘A More Secure World: OurShared Responsibility’. Report ofthe High-Level Panel on Threats,Challenges and Change, 2 De-cember 2004. ‘In larger freedom –towards development, securityand human rights for all’. Reportof the Secretary-General for deci-sion by Heads of State and Gov-ernment in September 2005,21 March 2005.

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expressed in clearer and more positive terms, by way of anotherconcept: Global Public Goods (GPG).

Understanding the challenge: Global Public Goods

The concept of Global Public Goods (GPG) emerged in the contextof the UN at the end of the 1990s. GPG are usually seen in the con-text of development, but currently the concept is also being used inmore general political terms, as a way of conceptualising the com-prehensive approach to global policy issues (e.g. by Joseph Nye).3General speaking, public goods are characterised by non-rivalry inconsumption and non-excludability.4 Global Public Goods pro-vide benefits that are ‘quasi-universal in terms of countries (cover-ing more than one group of countries), people (accruing to several,preferably all, population groups), and generations (extending toboth current and future generations, or at least meeting the needsof current generations without foreclosing development optionsfor future generations)’.5

Global Public Goods can be grouped under four broad head-ings, which can be associated to the UN Secretary-General’s defi-nition of ‘larger freedom’:

physical security and stability – ‘freedom from fear’; political participation and an enforceable legal order that guar-antees the human rights and equality of all; an open and inclusive economic order that provides for thewealth of everyone – ‘freedom from want’; social wellbeing in all of its aspects – access to health services, toeducation, to a clean environment.

These are the core GPG to which every individual is entitled; inthat sense, they are universal public goods.6 As in the ‘human secu-rity’ approach, the individual is the point of reference. GPG arestrongly interrelated: ultimately, one cannot be ensured orenjoyed without access to the other; the four categories are there-fore equally important. In the words of the Secretary-General:‘Accordingly, we will not enjoy development without security, wewill not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoyeither without respect for human rights.’ Effective global gover-nance means ensuring access to GPG; a system that fails to providethe core GPG lacks legitimacy. Global stability, and therefore the

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Security and development: a positive agenda for a global EU-UN partnership

3. Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox ofAmerican Power: Why the World’sOnly Superpower Can’t Go it Alone(Oxford: Oxford University Press,2002).

4. Marco Ferroni and AshokaMody, ‘Global Incentives for Inter-national Public Goods: Introduc-tion and Overview’, in Marco Fer-roni and Ashoka Mody (eds),International Public Goods: Incentives,Measurement and Financing (Wash-ington, DC: Kluwer Law – WorldBank, 2002), p. 6.

5. Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunbergand Marc A. Stern, Global PublicGoods. International Cooperation inthe 21st Century (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press – UNDP, 1999),pp. 2-3.

6. GPG are sometimes also de-fined more strictly as comprisingonly those public goods whichcannot be provided but throughinternational cooperation, thusexcluding public goods of whichthe state is or should be the mainprovider, such as education or po-litical participation. See e.g. theInternational Task Force onGlobal Public Goods, www.gpg-taskforce.org.

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security of all states, depends on the availability of sufficientaccess to the core GPG.

Rather than terrorism, WMD or other military threats, themost important ‘threat’ is the ever growing gap between haves andhave-nots, a gap which can be best expressed in terms of access tothe essential GPG. While this gap and the feelings of exclusion,marginalisation and frustration resulting from it certainly do notjustify conflict, they do help to explain it, which is a prerequisitefor prevention and resolution of conflicts. The gap between havesand have-nots is foremost among the challenges of the globalisedworld, because it is a threat of a systemic nature, i.e. it results from,and impacts on, the functioning of the global order itself. Unlessmechanisms of governance are created or rendered more effectivethat can alleviate this situation, at a certain level of inequality, theresulting political upheaval, extremisms of all kinds, economicuncertainty and massive migration flows will become uncontrol-lable. Since it denies access to core GPG to a large share of theworld’s population, the status quo is not an option.

Against this background, specific politico-military threats doindeed stand out. They include regions of chronic tension andlong-standing disputes and conflicts, failed states and civil wars,proliferation of WMD and excessive militarisation, and terrorism.These challenges directly threaten people, states and regions. Theyhave to be tackled head-on, but as they are symptoms of the ‘darkside of globalisation’, effective global governance and improvingaccess to GPG, must be pursued at the same time as the key to pre-venting such threats. ‘Security is the precondition of development’,the European Security Strategy states, but this works the otherway around as well, as indicated by the Secretary-General. Ofcourse, the strength of the causal relationship between, on the onehand, the gap between haves and have-nots in the broadest senseand, on the other, specific politico-military issues, differs fromcase to case. None the less, in the long term no durable settlementof such issues can be achieved unless the stability of the world sys-tem itself is assured.

Meeting the challenge: a positive and integrative agenda

The keyword in a policy based on the notion of GPG is integration.Because the core GPG are inextricably linked together, action must

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be undertaken simultaneously and in a coordinated fashion by allrelevant actors in all fields of external policy, putting to use the vari-ous instruments at their disposal, including trade, development, theenvironment, police, intelligence and legal cooperation, diplomacyand security and defence. As is highlighted in the Secretary-Gen-eral’s report, both the recommendations of the High-Level Paneland the Sachs Report on development7 thus constitute a singleagenda. However, although policies in all of these fields must be inte-grated under the same overall objective of increasing access to GPG,each should continue to operate according to its own rationale anddynamic. ‘Securitisation’ (i.e. the instrumentalisation of non-mili-tary dimensions of external policy as a function only of ‘hard’ secu-rity concerns) must be avoided, for it ignores the intrinsic impor-tance of the other GPG. Accordingly, rather than all challenges beingincluded under the label of security, issues must not be dealt with assecurity threats unless they pose an effective threat of violence.

By thus addressing the root causes of conflict, a policy orientedon the core GPG emphasises structural conflict prevention. This pres-ents a formidable challenge: it implies dealing with more issues,related to all the core GPG, at an earlier stage, before they becomesecurity threats. Effective prevention is much more than mereappeasement: it demands a proactive stance, aiming to change cir-cumstances that induce instability and conflict. Mark Duffieldanalyses how structural prevention in effect amounts to the ‘merg-ing of development and security’: ‘[Development] is no longerconcerned with promoting economic growth in the hope thatdevelopment will follow. Today it is better described as an attempt,preferably through cooperative partnership arrangements, tochange whole societies and the behaviour and attitudes of peoplewithin them.’8 In this broad sense, development ‘not only leads tothe reduction of poverty, more political freedom, and greater affir-mation of human rights, but also lays the foundation for moredurable peace and security.’9 In the terms of the European Com-mission, ‘the EU will treat security and development as comple-mentary agendas, with the common aim of creating a secure envi-ronment and of breaking the vicious circle of poverty, war,environmental degradation and failing economic, social andpolitical structures.’10 A policy oriented on GPG should in fact bequite intrusive, which might make it rather contentious with thetarget countries.11 But bearing in mind that pursuing GPG is inthe mutual interest of all concerned, it is at the same time a very

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7. UN Millennium Project 2005,‘Investing in Development. A Prac-tical Plan to Achieve the Millen-nium Development Goals stet’, 17January 2005.

8. Mark Duffield, Global Gover-nance and the New Wars (Lon-don: Zed Books, 2002), p. 42.

9. Roy Culpeper, ‘Human Secu-rity, Equitable and SustainableDevelopment: Foundations forCanada’s International Policy’,NSI Paper on the InternationalPolicy Review, Ottawa, TheNorth-South Institute, 2005.

10. ‘Policy Coherence for Devel-opment. Accelerating Progress to-wards Attaining the MillenniumDevelopment Goals’, Commis-sion Communication COM(2005), 134 final, 12 April 2005,p. 10.

11. Agnès Hurwitz and GordonPeake, ‘Strengthening the Secu-rity-Development Nexus: Assess-ing International Policy and Prac-tice Since the 1990s’, ConferenceReport, New York: InternationalPeace Academy, 2004.

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positive approach, contrary to other, threat-based strategies. ‘Forwhom’ rather than ‘against whom’ is the question that woulddetermine policy based on Global Public Goods. The sincere pur-suit of GPG will bring greatly enhanced legitimacy. As Nye advisesthe United States: ‘We gain doubly from such a strategy: from thepublic goods themselves, and from the way they legitimize ourpower in the eyes of others.’12

As effective action in all policy fields concerned requires thecooperation of a wide range of actors at many different levels, aGPG-oriented policy implies multilateralism: an intricate web ofstates, regimes, treaties and organisations, i.e. multilevel gover-nance, implicating all levels of authority in a coordinated effort toimprove people’s access to GPG. States are crucial actors in thisrespect. Although in the notion of ‘human security’ the individualis taken as point of reference, the state indeed remains a primarypartner, for no effective arrangements can be made with weak andfailed states. In the words of the Secretary-General: ‘Sovereignstates are the basic and indispensable building-blocks of the inter-national system . . . Therefore, one of the great challenges of the newmillennium is to ensure that all states are strong enough to meetthe many challenges they face.’ For the EU, this means that thirdstates must therefore be seen as partners for cooperation ratherthan as mere subjects of EU policies; the aim is to influence ratherthan to coerce, to use the carrot rather than the stick. There will becases where the use of force is inevitable, for not all actors areamenable to preventive initiatives. But in the framework of multi-lateralism, the use of force can only be a measure of last resort man-dated by the Security Council. In those cases, the legitimacyacquired through the pursuit of GPG can be capitalised upon.

Both the approaches recommended by the Secretary-Generaland advocated in the European Security Strategy contain manyelements of a strategy based on GPG.13 Although the notion is notmentioned in the European Security Strategy, its implicit presenceis evident: ‘Spreading good governance, supporting social andpolitical reform, dealing with corruption and abuse of power,establishing the rule of law and protecting human rights are thebest means of strengthening the international order.’ Likewise, inthe objectives of EU external action as formulated in the draftConstitutional Treaty (Art. III-292) additional emphasis is placedon aspects of global governance such as sustainable economic,social and environmental development, the eradication of

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12. Op. cit. in note 3, p. 143.

13. Sven Biscop, The European Secu-rity Strategy – A Global Agenda forPositive Power (Aldershot: Ashgate,2005).

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poverty, the integration of all countries into the world economyand the abolition of trade restrictions. And in one of its recentcommunications on development, the Commission explicitlymentions the provision of ‘universal public goods’ as a basic fac-tor.14 Furthermore, since the Iraq crisis and throughout thedebate on the reform of the UN, the EU as such has emerged as oneof the leading proponents of the revitalisation of the UN. The EUand the UN are thus evident partners for a comprehensiveapproach to global challenges.

Forging integration at the country-specific level: the Peace-building Commission

An important new body to increase coordination between actorsand policy fields is the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC), a recom-mendation of the High-Level Panel included in the Secretary-Gen-eral’s report. In the post-conflict phase, on a country-by-countrybasis the PBC would provide a forum for all the actors involved ‘toshare information . . . in the interest of greater coherence’: the dif-ferent UN bodies, the international financial institutions (IFIs),the major bilateral donors and troop contributors, relevantregional actors and the national or transitional government. ThePBC should remedy the absence of a body in the UN system to helpcountries in transition from conflict to lasting peace, and shouldavoid weak local authorities becoming ‘overwhelmed by a multi-plicity of conflicting external demands from well-wishers, as eachaid agency and NGO seeks to fit the recipient government into itsown programmes and procedures’.15 The emphasis would be onbuilding strong local institutions.

Contrary to the original recommendations by the High-LevelPanel, which also saw a preventive role for the PBC, according tothe Secretary-General it should not have an early warning or mon-itoring function – the post-conflict phase would be its exclusiveremit. Yet, structural conflict prevention entails exactly the sameproblem of coordination between the multitude of multilateraland bilateral actors. The UN has set up mechanisms to addressthis problem, such as the UN Framework Team for Coordinationon Conflict Prevention, which was created in 1995 and on amonthly basis brings together 23 UN actors, including inter aliaDPA, DPKO, UNDP, UNHCR, FAO, ILO, the World Bank and the

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14. ‘Speeding up Progress to-wards the Millennium Develop-ment Goals. The EuropeanUnion’s Contribution’, COM(2005), 132 final, 12 April 2005.

15. Malcolm Chalmers, Rescuingthe State – Europe’s Next Challenge(London: The Foreign Policy Cen-tre, 2005), p. 1.

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IMF. Building on existing structures, such as the UN CommonCountry Analyses, and maintaining close contacts with the UNCountry Teams in the countries which it addresses, the Frame-work Team’s function is on a country-by-country basis to link upheadquarters and agencies in the field, and to channel early warn-ing information and suggestions for preventive action to theappropriate body; it is not itself an implementing body.

This working method seems very similar to that imagined forthe PBC. Although the Framework Team would retain its useful-ness as a body for intra-UN coordination, the PBC by addressingalso structural prevention would enhance the potential for coor-dination in this field too by bringing the bilateral donors and theregional and local authorities to the table as well. A further argu-ment in favour of extending the PBC’s mandate to structural pre-vention is that in fact the types of actions undertaken in the pre-vention and post-conflict phases are often the same, notablybuilding strong local institutions able to provide for citizens’access to the core GPG. In the immediate aftermath of war, thefocus is indeed on preventing the re-eruption of conflict.16

The Secretary-General recommends that the PBC, whichwould be assisted by a Peacebuilding Support Office in the UNSecretariat, should permanently comprise a subset of members ofthe UNSC and ECOSOC, the leading troop contributors and themain donors to a standing fund for peacebuilding, and the IFIs,while the major bilateral donors/troop contributors and theregional and local authorities would be involved on a country-spe-cific basis. Through its participation, the UNSC would be able tocomplete the data on which to found its decisions with the socialand economic dimension which is now often under-represented.Apparently, in the Secretary-General’s view, the PBC on a country-by-country basis would report to the UNSC, i.e. in the immediatepost-conflict phase, and, when the UNSC decides no longer toremain seized of the matter, to ECOSOC, i.e. with regard to thelonger-term peacebuilding efforts. The Secretary-General stressesthat ECOSOC should both ‘institutionalize its work in post-con-flict management by working with the proposed PeacebuildingCommission’ and ‘reinforce its links with the Security Council inorder to promote structural prevention’. If it were to be added tothe tasks of the PBC, structural prevention too would be a matterfor reporting to ECOSOC, while the UNSC would be able to seizethe matter in the event of a crisis requiring politico-military inter-

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16. Javier Niño Pérez, ‘EU Instru-ments for Conflict Prevention’,Working Paper 8 (Madrid: FRIDE,2005).

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vention. In order to make optimal use of the aggregate informa-tion it will be able to acquire, the PBC itself should also be able tobring to the attention of the UNSC any situation it judges torequire intervention.

In view of its collective political and economic weight, and ofthe establishment of a CFSP, it is advisable that the EU as suchwould be among the ‘standing members’ of the PBC, in additionto a range of individual EU member states, in order to contributein a coherent way its expertise and assets in many different rele-vant fields. This concerns inter alia development and the militaryand civilian ESDP missions, including in the field of the rule oflaw, an area specifically mentioned by the Secretary-General forinclusion in the PBC, as well as in the field of security sectorreform, a new area for the EU. An issue meriting particular atten-tion is the exchange of information on specific countries. Like theUN, the EU collects a wide range of country-specific data. TheCommission’s Conflict Prevention and Crisis Management Unitassesses the conflict indicators in the Country Strategy Papers, forwhich the Commission Delegations in the field are a vital sourceof information, and in close cooperation with the Council Secre-tariat and the Joint Situation Centre provides a watch list ofpotential crisis states.17 The watch list is confidential, but in theframework of EU participation in the PBC an arrangement shouldbe found that allows for the complete sharing of all informationavailable, in order to ensure its optimal use. Ideally, joint actionplans integrating different actors’ programmes for specific coun-tries should eventually be drawn up.

Forging integration at the global level: ECOSOC

ECOSOC would have an important role with regard to the newPBC, but that role risks remaining empty if ECOSOC itself is notrendered more effective. As it is, ECOSOC ‘has been too often rele-gated to the margins of global economic and social governance’, asthe Secretary-General diplomatically words its current lack ofinfluence.18

Similarly to the country-specific level, at the global level as wellthere is a need for coordination between the wide range of actorsand policy fields related to development in the broadest sense, inorder to address a number of structural issues. While the UNSC is

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17. International Crisis Group,‘EU Crisis Response CapabilityRevisited’, Europe Report 160,2005.

18. For an overview of ECOSOCreform initiatives, see Gert Rosen-thal, ‘The Economic and SocialCouncil of the United Nations. AnIssues Paper’, Occasional Paper 15(New York: Friedrich Ebert Foun-dation, 2005).

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responsible for maintaining peace and security – ‘freedom fromfear’ – ECOSOC could be the forum that provides coordination ofsocial and economic development. More specifically, as the Secre-tary-General recommends, and building on the existing annualhigh-level meetings with the trade and financial institutions,ECOSOC should hold an annual ministerial-level assessment ofprogress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).The individual states’ current reporting obligations should thenbe included in this ECOSOC framework, as well as an assessmentof the impact of the policies of the IFIs and other actors on theMDGs, in order to avoid contradictory policy objectives and nega-tive side effects.

ECOSOC has positive experiences with the establishment ofcountry-specific working groups, but as far as structural preven-tion and post-conflict activities are concerned, this level should becompletely transferred to the PBC if this body materialises.ECOSOC should, however, be able to have timely meetings asrequired, as the Secretary-General advocates, in order to providecoordination in crisis management at a regional or country-spe-cific level in case of crises that are not dealt with by the UNSC, suchas famine, epidemics, natural disasters and financial crises. Analo-gous to the relation between the UNSC and the PBC, once the sit-uation is stabilised ECOSOC could if necessary delegate the issueto the PBC for the country-specific coordination of the requiredlong-term activities.

Both the MDG review mechanism and the crisis managementrole require an enhanced profile for ECOSOC and its resolutions.Although, unlike the UNSC, ECOSOC cannot have binding powers,its resolutions should be given due attention by all the actors con-cerned. The ministerial level of the review mechanism should pro-vide for enhanced projection of ECOSOC resolutions, as would amore systematic reporting mechanism on the follow-up given tothose resolutions. Finally, ‘an Executive Committee with a regionallybalanced composition’, as proposed by the Secretary-General, wouldenable ECOSOC to interact in a flexible manner with other actors.

Human rights and democracy: a missing link?

The Secretary-General recommends the creation of a HumanRights Council to replace the Commission on Human Rights on a

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par with the UNSC and a reinforced ECOSOC. Three councilswould thus deal with the core GPG: the UNSC with ‘freedom fromfear’, ECOSOC with ‘freedom from want’ and social wellbeing, andthe Human Rights Council with respect to human rights.

Perhaps the question should be asked whether this does notleave the issue of political participation and democratisationunaddressed. The Secretary-General does recommend the cre-ation of a democracy fund to help countries seeking to establish orstrengthen their democracy, as well as the forging of a closer linkbetween the good governance work of UNDP and DPA’s ElectoralAssistance Programme. And of course building or strengtheningdemocratic structures will be part of the programme in thosecountries where the PBC is active. There are, however, a large num-ber of states with different degrees of authoritarian government;often repression of legitimate political opposition combined withthe unwillingness and/or inability to provide citizens with thecore public goods provokes radicalisation and extremism – inmany cases, this eventually results in conflict. Such states aremostly very suspicious of external involvement, although a varietyof actors attempt to implement programmes for the promotion ofhuman rights and democracy and ‘positive conditionality’, withlimited success. Here, too, there is a problem of coordinationbetween actors. The Mediterranean region can serve as an exampleof both the lack of coordination – the EU and the United Statesrun parallel programmes, for instance – and the lack of success –after 10 years, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership has notresulted in major progress towards human rights and democracy.One can easily imagine that greater coordination between the dif-ferent actors involved would at least increase the chances ofprogress being achieved. This is a very sensitive area for the UN,because Art. 2.7 of the Charter firmly excludes intervention ‘inmatters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction ofany State’. Yet perhaps in this area a UN forum for the sharing ofinformation and the comparative evaluation of strategies for pro-moting democracy could be envisaged.

The EU contribution

The EU has a lot to contribute to ‘the three councils’ in terms ofexpertise and capabilities. Building on the existing desk-to-desk

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dialogue that was established in the framework of the EU-UN JointDeclaration on Cooperation in Crisis Management, membershipof the PBC for the EU as such would permit direct contact with therelevant bodies in the EU institutions. The EU has also started tocreate partnerships with specific programmes and agencies, suchas with UNDP (28 June 2004), focusing on governance, conflictprevention and post-conflict reconstruction, with particular atten-tion to countries that emerge from conflict, and with the ILO (19July 2004), in the field of poverty reduction and improvement oflabour conditions in developing countries. These partnerships andcontacts can be intensified in the future, through EU-UN coopera-tion on the priorities identified by the PBC – which will require thenecessary manpower to be made available in the EU institutions.

The EU would also have to increase its internal coordinationwithin the different UN bodies where it is represented directly orthrough its member states. This is particularly true of the UNSC:since the Iraq crisis there has been a greater willingness on the partof the member states holding a seat to have substantial briefings at25, including on forthcoming debates and draft resolutions, butcoherence could be enhanced by aligning the work of the Politicaland Security Committee more with the agenda of the UNSC, so asto allow for ‘real-time’ interaction between Brussels and delega-tions in New York. It is often forgotten, however, that EU coordi-nation with regard to the executive boards of the UN specialisedagencies is much more limited: only recently have ‘informationrounds’ prior to sessions been introduced and then only for theNew York-based agencies. In the IFIs as well, as the Commissionrecommends, the visibility and influence of the EU could beincreased if it spoke more often with a single voice.19 Finally, theEU (and the member states) should also enhance coordinationbetween its representations in the different UN and internationalbodies, agencies and programmes, including the World Bank, theIMF and the WTO – all too often, European delegations to differ-ent organisations spread contradictory messages.

Within the EU itself as well, the many different dimensions ofexternal action can still be better aligned. If within the CFSP theintegration of the civil and military dimensions is progressing,coordination with trade and development is much less developed.The Commission has recommended ways of increasing coher-ence,20 but obviously different EU actors, even within the same pil-lar, often still follow different approaches. For instance, the Com-

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19. ‘Accelerating Progress to-wards Attaining the MillenniumDevelopment Goals – Financingfor Development and Aid Effec-tiveness’, COM(2005), 134 final,12 April 2005.

20. COM(2005), 134 final, pa-per 3-6.

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mission, in the framework of development, recommends that theEU must seek to avoid increasing political conditionality, while atthe same time ‘positive conditionality’ is the cornerstone of theNeighbourhood Policy. The projected European External ActionService and other provisions of the draft Constitutional Treatywould have been vital for the effective coordination and integra-tion of all dimensions of EU external action. Similarly, coordina-tion between action undertaken by the EU and that by individualmember states should be reinforced.

In order to implement an integrated, GPG-oriented approach,the EU would also have to adapt part of its policies. It is all too eas-ily forgotten that although the EU is widely seen as a proponent ofmultilateralism, 21in the South the EU’s image is often that of anaggressive economic actor, quite the opposite of the ‘benign’ per-ception that the EU has of itself. Correcting that image requires anearnest effort on the part of the EU to take into account theSouth’s access to GPG. Through its development policy the EU isalready heavily committed to the MDGs, but more fundamentalchanges in EU policy, notably with regard to trade, will be neededin order to create an economic order that is truly inclusive and toeffectively combat poverty. For, as the UN Secretary-Generalnotes: ‘At present, developing countries are often denied a levelplaying field to compete in international trade because rich coun-tries use a variety of tariffs, quotas and subsidies to restrict accessto their own markets and shelter their own producers.’ The Com-mission itself states this quite frankly: ‘In the long term, what weare talking about is controlling globalization through public pol-icy in the interests of a more just world order.’22 This will requiresubstantial efforts on the part of the EU, such as opening up itsagricultural market and halting the dumping of subsidised agri-cultural products on the world market. Another aspect is debtrelief, also called for by the Secretary-General: debt relief is a way ofempowering governments, e.g. in the countries addressed by thePBC; empowerment must of course be linked to accountability. Insum, the EU should consider more seriously the recommenda-tions made in the report ‘Investing in development’ presented byJeffrey Sachs in January 2005.

Achieving the long-standing target of 0.7 per cent of grossnational income for official development assistance is an impor-tant part of this effort, and the EU and its member states shouldcontinue along that path. The Commission has indicated that sev-

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21. Francisco E. González,‘Mexico’s Future InternationalOrientation: The EU as aModel’, in Martin Ortega (ed),‘Global views on the EuropeanUnion’, Chaillot Paper 72 (Paris:EU Institute for Security Studies,November 2004), pp. 55-70. 22. COM(2005), 132 final, p. 9.

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eral alternative sources of financing are under consideration.23 Avery promising option would be the introduction at the Europeanlevel of the so-called Spahn Tax. This is a variant of the Tobin Tax,the original proposal to impose a tax of 0.1 to 0.5 per cent on allspeculative currency transactions. Since it is almost impossible todistinguish speculation from regular transactions, however, theTobin Tax would have to apply to all transactions and would thushave a paralysing effect on the financial markets. The Spahn vari-ant proposes a more practicable, two-step approach: a general taxof 0.02 per cent, sufficiently low not to disturb the markets, wouldbe imposed on all currency transactions; but if a currency were tomove outside certain predetermined borders, a heavy tax of 80 percent would apply in order to stop speculation and avoid financialcrises and the disastrous socio-economic consequences that theyentail. The tax would thus bring a double benefit: the general taxwould generate an estimated €50 billion, a structural source offunds for reconstruction and development in less developed coun-tries, while the prohibitive 80 per cent tax would have a stabilisingeffect on the financial markets.24

The advantages to be gained through all of these efforts workboth ways, for promoting citizens’ access to GPG in the Southimplies firstly raising their standard of living and setting minimalnorms for wages and social security, and secondly, closing thewealth gap reduces instability and threats.

Conclusion

The EU and the UN share the same basic comprehensive approachthat integrates security and development, or in other words, thatstarts from the assumption that the inextricable link between thecore GPG should determine policy. In order to truly implementsuch an integrated approach, however, both organisations willhave to continue reforming their institutions and policies – theirefforts to that end can and should be mutually reinforcing.

The opportunity offered by the September 2005 summit mustbe grasped to introduce a number of reforms in the UN system.Even if decisions are not taken on all aspects of the comprehensiveset of recommendations by the Secretary-General, progressshould still be possible on specific issues, such as notably the PBC,a body which if all participants earnestly commit to it would be

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23. COM(2005), 133 final.

24. In 2004 Belgium adopted alaw introducing the Spahn Taxconditional upon its adoption byall members of the Euro-zone.

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able to make a difference on the ground in the short term. A trulyintegrated approach requires a revitalised ECOSOC – again,reform should certainly be feasible, but the UN member statesshould finally decide whether they want ECOSOC to play a role inglobal governance or not.

The EU, at the same time as supporting the all too necessaryreforms of the UN, should make sure that its own house is in order,proceeding with the coordination and integration of the differentdimensions of external action and increasing its role within theUN – proving that, in the words of the Commission,25 it can act asa ‘front-runner’.

More specifically, the EU should promote policies that ensurebetter access to Global Public Goods (physical security, politicalparticipation, development, health services, education and cleanenvironment) for everyone, including trade policies and assis-tance, in line with the declared principles and values that under-pin the EU’s relations with rest of the world.

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25. ‘The European Union and theUnited Nations: The Choice ofMultilateralism’, COM(2003),526 final, 10 September 2003.

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The role of the EU in promotingreform of the UN in the field ofhuman rights and environmentalprotectionFrancesco Francioni1

In 2005 the UN is facing the challenge of its most far-reachingreform since its birth in 1945. Diplomatic efforts and attention bythe media have focused especially upon the controversial issue ofSecurity Council reform and its enlargement to better reflect thepower and responsibilities of UN membership in the twenty-firstcentury. This theme was high on the UN agenda in the 1990s butconsensus eluded the General Assembly as to whether to proceedto the simple addition of a certain number of new permanentmembers or to adopt a more flexible formula involving rotationamongst semi-permanent members on the basis of geographicrepresentation. Less momentous institutional reform is alsocalled for with regard to the ineffective functioning of the Eco-nomic and Social Council, the Secretariat structure, peacekeepingand the possible elimination or transformation of obsolete bodiessuch as the Trusteeship Council and the Military Staff Committeecontemplated by Art. 47.2 The need for UN reform has been dra-matically brought to light by a chain of events that have con-tributed to the marginalisation of the organisation and dealt ablow to multilateralism. Since the decision taken by NATO coun-tries in 1999 to use military force against the Federal Republic ofYugoslavia without Security Council authorisation, more radicalforms of ‘unilateralism’, most notably the US-led war against Iraqand the subsequent and continuing occupation of the country,have signalled a marked drifting away from multilateral institu-tions.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the role that the EU canplay in responding to the present crisis and in promoting reform ofUN law and institutions with respect to two distinct subjectsfalling within the organisation’s competence: respect of humanrights and environmental protection. Paradoxically, these two sub-jects reveal an inverted order of precedence in the relations betweenthe EU and the UN. Human rights were the early product of the UNand its original commitment to rebuild the basis of civilisation dev-

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1. The author wishes to thank ElisaMorgera, EUI Ph.D. candidate,and Federico Lenzerini, ResearchFellow, University of Siena, fortheir valuable comments and sug-gestions on an earlier draft of thisarticle.

2. See the Report of the High-LevelPanel on Threats, Challenges andChange, ‘A More Secure World:Our Shared Responsibility’, 2 De-cember 2004, www.un.org/se-cureworld/.

2

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astated by the barbarity of the Second World War and the plungingof Europe into the moral abyss of the Holocaust. In the EU, instead,human rights were the late product of a complex process of eco-nomic integration, and their formalisation in ad hoc legal instru-ments – although prepared with intense jurisprudential contribu-tion by the European Court of Justice – did not take place until the2000 Nice Charter of Rights and the 2004 Constitutional Treaty.3On the contrary, environmental protection did not figure in theoriginal UN Charter scheme and it is still mainly entrusted to aninstitutionally weak ‘programme’ – the UN Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP) – while in the EU environmental protection hasbecome entrenched in the principles and purposes of the Unionand has become a necessary dimension of all the other policies.

Human rights

Protection of human rights represents one of the fundamentalprinciples and purposes of the UN. After reaffirming in the Pre-amble the ‘faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity andworth of the human person, in the equal rights of men andwomen’, the Charter proclaim at its Art. 1 that one of the purposesof the United Nations, besides the maintenance of peace and offriendly relations among nations, is the promotion and encour-agement of ‘ . . . respect for human rights and for fundamentalfreedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, orreligion’.4 The record of the UN in carrying out this commitment,although inspired by a cautious and gradual approach, is impres-sive. The establishment of the Commission of Human Rights andthe adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration placed humanrights and the safeguarding of the human person at the centre ofthe UN agenda. Subsequent adoption of binding human rightstreaties progressively introduced the revolutionary concept thatstates have international obligations towards one another withregard to the treatment accorded to their own citizens, thusremoving the subject from the traditional ‘shelter’ of domesticjurisdiction/domaine réservé. Human rights supervisory bodiescomposed of independent experts have been established to moni-tor the implementation of major UN treaties.5 The InternationalCourt of Justice and the UN International Law Commission haveboth recognised that human rights form an integral part of the

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Human rights and environmental protection

3. Human rights were rather thecompetence of the Council of Eu-rope with the adoption in 1950 ofthe European Convention on Hu-man Rights and FundamentalFreedoms (CETS no. 005), whichlater became the parameter of ref-erence of the European Court ofJustice to review the legality ofCommunity acts or of membersstates’ implementing legislationdeemed to violate fundamentalrights.

4. See also Art. 55, which, as partof international economic and so-cial cooperation , engages the UNto promote: ‘(c) universal respectfor, and observance of, humanrights and fundamental freedomsfor all without distinction as torace, sex, language, or religion.’

5. Supervisory bodies in the formof human rights committees havebeen established in connectionwith: (1) the 1966 Covenant on Civiland Political Rights (999 UNTS171); (2) the 1966 Covenant on Eco-nomic, Social and Cultural Rights (993UNTS 3); (3) the 1966 Conventionon the Elimination of all Forms of RacialDiscrimination (660 UNTS 195);(4) the 1979 Convention on the Elim-ination of All Forms of DiscriminationAgainst Women (1249 UNTS 13);(5) the 1984 Convention Against Tor-ture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or De-grading Treatment or Punishment(1465 UNTS 85); and (6) the1989 Convention on the Rights of theChild (1577 UNTS 3). For a reviewof the UN human rights monitor-ing system see P. Alston and J.Crawford (eds.), The Future of Hu-man Rights Treaty Monitoring ( Cam-bridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000).

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general interest of humanity and create obligations that statesowe to the international community as a whole.6 These are remarkableresults, if one considers the difficulties of the Cold War, the trans-formation of the international community as a result of decoloni-sation, and the ongoing controversy as to whether human rightsare the ideological imposition of the Western world (in the sense ofEuropean and/or American) rather than a sincere concern for thedefence of our shared humanity.

So, can we say that the picture looks bright for the future of theUN human rights system? Not quite.

The report issued by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Chal-lenges and Change has already identified one major institutionalflaw in the functioning and increasing bureaucratisation of theCommission on Human Rights. The report is correct on thispoint. It is hardly contestable that, despite the commendablerecord achieved in the early period of its life, when it pioneered thedrafting and adoption of the ‘International Bill of Rights’,7 andwhen it later responded to gross violations of human rights bydeveloping new procedures to deal with individual countries8 orspecial ‘themes’,9 the main UN body has declined in influence andcredibility. The reasons are manifold, but two can be singled out ashaving special relevance.

The first relates to the loss of the original human rights ‘ethos’,inspired by leading founding figures such as Franklin D. Roo-sevelt and René Cassin, and the drift towards a body more con-cerned with the defence of member states’ sovereignty than withthe cause of human rights. In recent years, membership of theCommission has included states with very poor human rightsrecord. In 2003, among widespread criticism, Libya was elected tothe chair of the Commission, thus showing that geographic repre-sentation in the UN was more important than genuine commit-ment to freedom and human rights. Today, among the 53 mem-bers of the Commission we can find countries which are far fromhaving a good human rights record, such as Saudi Arabia andChina. But the extreme case is Sudan, a member of the Commis-sion which has been the focus of international attention for possi-ble commission of acts of genocide and which, at any rate, wasfound to be implicated in atrocities and mass killings by the ad hocCommission nominated by the UN Secretary-General in 2004.10

It is no wonder that, given these precedents, the High-Level PanelReport arrived at the following dispirited conclusions:

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6. See in particular the judgmentsof the ICJ in the Barcelona Traction,Light and Power Company Limited(ICJReports, 1970, pp. 226 ff.) andthe recent Advisory Opinion on theLegal Consequences of the Construc-tion of a Wall in the Occupied Palestin-ian Territories (available at<http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/imwp0/imwpframe.htm>) built by Israel in the occu-pied territories.

7. With this expression we com-monly refer to the 1948 UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights (G. A.Res. 217 A (III) of 10 December1948) and the two 1966 UNCovenants on Civil and PoliticalRights, and on Economic, Socialand Cultural Rights (see note 5above).

8. See especially Resolution 1503-XL VIII of 27 May 1970 ofECOSOC which authorised theSub-Commission on Prevention ofDiscrimination and protection ofMinorities (a subsidiary organ ofthe Commission which has nowchanged its name to Sub-Commis-sion for the Promotion and Protec-tion of Human Rights) to examinecommunications received by theSecretary-General alleging viola-tions of human rights of a gravityand scale to reveal the existence of‘gross violations’. Once estab-lished the reliable character of thecommunication, the Sub-Com-mission would make a report thusopening the way to in-depth inves-tigation by the Commission andpossible recommendation and ac-tion by ECOSOC and even by theGeneral assembly. The procedurelaid down by Resolution 1503 hasbeen used to denounce gross vio-lations of human rights and to callupon states to put a stop to theminter alia in relation to apartheid inSouth Africa, human rights viola-tions in the Arab territories occu-pied by Israel, Cambodia, Equato-rial Guinea, Chile, Bolivia, ElSalvador, Guatemala, Iran andCuba.

9. The ‘thematic approach’ in-volved addressing specific humanrights violations which had ac-quired a systematic character incertain countries, such as, for ex-ample, enforced or involuntarydisappearances in Latin Americaduring the 1970s and 1980s (seeCommission on Human RightsRes. 20(XXXVI) of 1980, extended

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the Commission’s capacity to perform [its] tasks has beenundermined by eroding credibility and professionalism. Stan-dard-setting to reinforce human rights cannot be performed byStates that lack a demonstrated commitment to their promo-tion and protection. We are concerned that in recent yearsStates have sought membership of the Commission not tostrengthen human rights but to protect themselves againstcriticism or to criticize others. The Commission cannot becredible if it is seen to be maintaining double standards inaddressing human rights concerns.11

The second reason for the declining role of the Commission onHuman Rights is the increasing responsibility assumed directly bythe Security Council or the General Assembly in relation to spe-cific situations presenting a pattern of serious breaches of humanrights and the concomitant rise of prominence of the Office of theHigh Commissioner for Human Rights. Examples of this trendcan be found, as far as the Security Council is concerned, in itsdirect involvement in Kosovo, by way of Resolution 1244, and laterin the Darfur crisis, by way of Resolutions 1564 and 1593, and, asfar as the General Assembly is concerned, in its active involvementin the issue of the Israeli construction of the wall in the occupiedArab territories, which led to the 2004 Advisory Opinion by theInternational Court of Justice.

Against this complex background of shifting patterns ofhuman rights competences, the High-Level Panel Report focusedits attention on the reform of the Commission on Human Rights.Section XVII of the Report contains several recommendations inthis respect:

membership of the Commission should be expanded to univer-sal membership;all members of the Commission should designate prominentand experienced human rights figures as heads of their delega-tions;an advisory Council or Panel, possibly of 15 independentexperts, appointed for their skill and according to geographicrepresentation, should be set up to assist the Commission inaddressing country-specific issues, general themes and stan-dard setting and research;the role of the High Commissioner should be enhanced to pro-vide the Commission with a yearly world report on human

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with Res. 2001/46) or on extraju-dicial, summary or arbitrary exe-cutions (see Res. 1982/35, ex-tended with Res. 2001/45).

10. The Commission was chairedby Antonio Cassese, professor ofinternational law at the Universityof Florence and first President ofthe International Criminal Tri-bunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Itrendered its report on 25 January2005. See ‘Report of the Indepen-dent Commission of Inquiry onDarfur to the UN SG, pursuant toSC Resolution 1564 of 18 Sep-tember 2004’ (available at<http://www.reliefweb.int/li-brary/documents/2005/ici-sud-25feb.pdf>). The Commission’sconclusions and recommenda-tions were endorsed by UNSCR1593 of 31 March 2005. It is inter-esting to note that with this Reso-lution the Security Council has re-ferred the question of atrocitiescommitted in Darfur by Sudaneseofficials or individuals to the Inter-national Criminal Court, al-though Sudan is not a party to theICC Statute.

11. Op. cit. in note 2, para. 283.

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rights and liaise with the Security Council and other UN bodiesto help them effectively monitor human rights compliance inthe performance of their functions;finally, ‘in the longer term’, the Commission should beupgraded from the present status of auxiliary organ ofECOSOC to a full Charter body.12

The proposals made by the High-Level Panel are quite sensible.They reflect real needs of improvement of a system that hasbecome dangerously detached from both the reality of interna-tional society and the original purpose of the Charter. But they donot go far enough. That is why there is room for the EU to consideradditional proposals and recommendations as a collective contri-bution to the UN reform process.

Although the UN Secretary-General, in his March 2005 report,did not endorse all the Panel’s recommendations, they constitutean appropriate basis on which the EU and its member states couldelaborate. They could support the following initiatives on UNinvolvement in human right issues: streamlining, mainstreaming,and entrenching.

Streamlining

By this term I mean simplification and search for coherence in thepresent UN system of human rights implementation. Contrary tothe principle of ‘indivisibility’ stated in the 1993 Vienna Declara-tion on human rights, the UN system has become more and morecharacterised by fragmentation and compartmentalisation.While in Europe the model of the European Convention onHuman Rights was at the beginning, and remains today, that of aunitary legal instrument, of a single court and of the gradualinclusion of new rights and freedoms by way of additional proto-cols,13 the UN system has followed the path of a multitude ofhuman rights regimes, each with its own implementing mecha-nism. This has led to a proliferation of supervisory bodies, func-tioning in isolation one from another. There are today six majorsupervisory human rights bodies (‘Committees’) serving theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), theInternational Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights(ICESCR), the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimi-nation (CERD), the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimi-

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12. Ibid., paras. 285-9.

13. There are now 14 additionalprotocols, some of them con-cerned with structural reform ofthe system – such as the well-known Protocol XI abolishing theCommission and reforming theStrasbourg Court (see Protocol no.11 to the Convention for the Protectionof Human Rights and FundamentalFreedoms, restructuring the controlmachinery established thereby, CETSNo. 155) and Protocol XIVamending the control system ofthe Convention (see Protocol no. 14to the Convention for the Protection ofHuman Rights and Fundamental Free-doms, amending the control system ofthe Convention, CETS no. 194) – butmost of them concerned with theenlargement of the catalogue ofrights originally recognized in theConvention.

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nation Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention Against Tor-ture (CAT), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).The tasks of these bodies are to examine periodic reports by stateparties, to examine communications and to make general com-ments concerning relevant points of interpretation of the relevantinstruments. The institutional proliferation consequent to thistreaty-based approach has not led to more effective implementa-tion and better quality of human rights protection. On the con-trary: heavy reliance on periodic reports as a means for humanrights monitoring has produced an unmanageable backlog instate reporting and an increasing mass of overdue reports,14 sys-tematic delay in the committees’ consideration of communica-tions and hasty consideration of state reports, with consequentforeclosure of the opportunity for constructive dialogue. Statedefault in the presentation of periodic reports cannot be sanc-tioned. Indeed, as has been pointed out, the system paradoxicallyrelies to a large extent on state default because, were all states to bepunctual in the presentation of their reports, the congestionwould be so severe as to bring the system to a halt.15 This situationis bad enough in terms of detrimental effects of delayed consider-ation of reports and of communications. But the fragmentationof the monitoring system also produces an artificial segregationof the implementing practice of one supervisory body with respectto the others. This is hard to accept, since in human rights law,rather than the abstract proclamation of a right in the text of atreaty, what is important is the way in which the right is effectivelysecured in concrete situations, how it is safeguarded against possi-ble abuses of discretionary powers of national authorities, andwhat actual remedies are available to counteract possible viola-tions.

In this situation, a ‘streamlining’ proposal by the EU could bebased on the following elements:

The six treaty committees that today monitor and evaluatestate practice in the field of human rights, although remainingdistinct treaty institutions, could be brought under the sameumbrella of a single Human Rights Monitoring Body, whosemembers would be elected to perform multifunctional dutiesin relation to different human rights treaties and in close con-nection with the Commission on Human Rights reformedalong the lines suggested by the High-Level Panel Report.Reporting procedures should be consolidated in a single

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14. For a detailed analysis of thisphenomenon, I refer to the com-prehensive study The future of UNHuman Rights Treaty Monitoring, op.cit. in note 5 above.

15. J. Crawford, ‘The HumanRights Treaty System: a System inCrisis?’, ibid., p. 6.

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Human Rights Report, the content and breadth of whichwould depend upon the number of treaties that the reportingstate has adhered to but would take into account the linkagesbetween different types of rights.Communications concerning human rights violations shouldbe addressed to and dealt with by the single Human RightsMonitoring Body on the basis of new and stringent admissibil-ity criteria, following the valuable experience accumulated inEurope with the Human Rights Commission and the Court.The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rightsshould be reinforced so as to become the institutional supportstructure and professional secretariat of the consolidatedHuman Rights Monitoring Body.Members of the Human Rights Monitoring Body should beindividuals with proven experience and professional skills inthe field of human rights, chosen from a pool of names formedby lists of three names proposed by each state, in analogy withthe procedure followed in the parliamentary assembly of theCouncil of Europe for the nomination of judges to the Euro-pean Court of Human Rights, and reflecting equitable geo-graphic distribution.The Human Rights Monitoring Body would be assisted in theperformance of its functions by an advisory panel consisting ofrepresentatives of NGOs, professional associations active inthe field of human rights and civil society.

The above proposals, if properly implemented, (a) wouldrequire minimal amendment of human rights treaties and, withsome possible adaptation, no amendment whatsoever; (b) wouldhelp to overcome the present fragmentation of the UN humanrights implementation by creating a single monitoring mecha-nism where the existing treaty monitoring systems would con-verge; and (c) would maintain the Advisory Council proposed bythe High-Level Panel Report (para. 287) but with a different func-tion and, more important, a different composition. Such compo-sition, rather than being determined by bureaucratic manoeu-vring between the SG and the High Commissioner for HumanRights, as suggested in the High-Level Panel Report,16 ought toreflect the representative NGOs, and professional associations oflawyers, jurists and scholars concerned with human rights. Recog-nition of the role played by NGOs and civil society in the field of

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16. HLP Report, para. 287.

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human rights is essential. It is time for the EU to take active stepsin this direction, so that the impending reform of the UN Charterbecomes an opportunity for their institutional upgrading to therank of official advisory bodies of the UN Commission on HumanRights. The EU Network of independent experts on fundamentalrights/Reseau UE d’experts indépendents en matière de droits fondamen-taux, set up by the European Commission in 2002 following arequest by the European Parliament,17 is a precedent or even amodel that the EU could utilise in view of concrete proposalstoward Charter reform.

Mainstreaming

By this term I mean the reconsideration, evaluation and reorgani-sation of UN policy-making so that human rights perspectives aresystematically incorporated in all policies at different levels ofdecision, at different stages of development, by all relevant actorsand responsible agents. An important advantage of this approachis that human rights concerns are anticipated before adverseimpacts occur, rather than being dealt with ex post facto, after dam-age has been done.18 One of the limits of the UN approach (besidesthe fragmentation resulting from the plurality of human rightsregimes as indicated in the previous section) is the self-containedcharacter of UN human rights policy. The Commission onHuman Rights, the supervisory bodies and the Office of the HighCommissioner for Human Rights are all involved in the businessof interpreting existing human rights instruments, elucidatingtheir scope and implementing their standards to concrete situa-tions. The risk, however, is that in doing so, these organs may findthemselves in the position of a fairly isolated industry in the handsof a specialised group of experts with little impact on the policiespursued by the organisation and its agencies. This has led somecommentators to speak in somewhat pejorative terms of ‘human-rightism/droit de l’hommisme.19

Human rights mainstreaming entails the overcoming of thisinsular view of human rights and a consequent striving for con-stant integration of human rights standards in the social, eco-nomic, scientific, and developmental policies of the organisationin order to forecast problems and anticipate human rights abuses.The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights hasalready started to practice this ‘anticipatory’ approach at the cog-

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17. The Network was set up by theEuropean Commission DG Jus-tice and Home affairs in Septem-ber 2002. It is composed of 25members, one for each memberstate, and its function is to moni-tor the state of respect and com-pliance with human rights in theUnion and in member states onthe basis of the EU Charter ofFundamental Rights. It holdsthree sessions per year and pre-pares annual reports as well asthematic studies and opinions onspecific issues. The last availablereport was published in 2004,vol.1 – Fundamental Rights Se-ries, Luxembourg, Office for Of-ficial Publications of the Euro-pean Communities.

18. For a discussion of the con-cept of mainstreaming and of itsapplication in the EU, see O. DeSchutter, ‘Mainstreaming Hu-man Rights in the EuropeanUnion’, in P. Alston and O. DeSchutter (eds.), Monitoring Funda-mental Rights in the EU – The Contri-bution of the Fundamental RightsAgency (Oxford: Hart Publishing,2005).

19. A. Pellet, ‘ “Human Right-ism” and International Law’, TheItalian Ybk of International Law,2000, vol. X, pp. 3 ff.

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nitive level, through a series of studies assessing the impact onhuman rights of, inter alia, the increasing use of intellectual prop-erty rights, transnational corporations and biotechnology.20 Thisapproach should be encouraged and reinforced. The EU can con-tribute to the process of human rights mainstreaming in the UN,and its contribution can be all the more effective since it hasalready moved in this direction in its own legal system. Some ini-tial proposals and recommendations may be summarised as fol-lows:(1)Taking as a starting point Art. III 118 of the EU Constitutional

Treaty, which mandates the systematic assessment of EU lawsand policies in light of the need to avoid racial, sexual and reli-gious discrimination, the Office of the High Commissioner forHuman Rights should be entrusted with the task of assessingthe impact of major UN initiatives, from transitional adminis-tration to peacekeeping, development plans, environmentalpolicies etc, on internationally recognised human rights. In thisconnection, it is to be noted that the High-Level Panel Report,in advocating an enhanced role of the High Commissioner forHuman Rights, does not make any meaningful advance towardanticipatory assessment and human rights mainstreaming asindicated above. It remains faithful to the traditional, yet inef-fective model of ex post facto reporting and monitoring,21 whoseshortcomings were examined in the preceding section.

(2)Building upon the Vienna Declaration and programme ofaction (1993),22 the EU could recommend that the UN, its spe-cialised agencies and UN bodies, should consider drawing upaction plans, within the sphere of their respective competence,identifying steps to be taken in order to the protection ofhuman rights.

It is clear that this strategy is more ambitious than humanrights impact assessment, since, unlike the latter, which is aimedat simply ‘avoiding’ an adverse effect on human rights, ‘actionplans’ offer an opportunity for positive promotion of humanrights. They entail anticipatory reflection on what are the bestoptions to improve human rights and societal values, and theyrequire consultation with civil society and coordination with dif-ferent stake-holders, thus improving democracy and participa-tion. If these virtues are easily recognisable within national soci-eties, we see no reason why they should not apply to the organs and

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20. See ‘The impact of the Agree-ment on Trade-Related Aspects ofIntellectual Property Rights on hu-man rights. Report of the HighCommissioner’, UN doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2001/13 of 27 June 2001;High Commissioner’s ExpertGroup on Human Rights andBiotechnology, 2002, ‘Conclu-sions’, available at <http://www.unhchr.ch/biotech/conclu-sions.htm>; ‘The responsibilitiesof transnational corporationsand related business enterpriseswith regard to human rights: Re-port of the High Commissioner tothe Commission on HumanRights OHCHR’, due to be sub-mitted to the Commission on Hu-man Rights in March 2005 (see<http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/globalization/business/re-portbusiness.htm>).

21. HLP Report, paras. 288 and289.

22. Adopted by the World Confer-ence on Human Rights, 25 June,1993, UN doc.A/CONF.157/23,12 July 1993.

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activities of the UN, to improve their channels of communicationone with another and with civil society.23 This is the best way toreinforce their democratic legitimation and deprive the enemies ofmultilateralism of their recurrent argument that internationalinstitutions – and indeed international law – lack a genuine demo-cratic basis.24

Entrenching

Although the protection of human rights is one of the fundamen-tal purposes of the UN, as indicated in the Preamble to the Char-ter, in Arts. 1(3), 55 and 56, it is clear that, 60 years after its foun-dation, the Charter system cannot be said to have fulfilled thepromise of ensuring respect for human rights worldwide. Outsidethe 30 or so democracies (say, the OECD members), severe poverty,widespread discrimination and human rights violations continueto prevail. Of course, these problems should be addressed prima-rily by the concerned states. But it is a limit, and indeed a severe onein an epoch of globalisation, to continue to look at human rightspurely in terms of ‘obligations’ undertaken by states in their recip-rocal relations. This narrow conception of human rights has ledthe UN to the present situation where its legal system and theaction taken at an administrative and political level by the organi-sation and its specialised agencies is not informed by a ‘constitu-tional’ mandate to respect and fulfil human rights. Contrary towhat happens in most modern democratic constitutions, wherehuman rights represent one of the fundamental parameters forevaluating ex ante the admissibility of a given action and for judg-ing ex post facto the legality of legislative and executive action, in theUN no legal mechanism exists for ensuring that the fundamental‘purposes and principles’ of human rights may translate in preciseconditionality or bases for review and possible invalidation of actsof the organisation on human rights grounds. The Security Coun-cil and the Secretary-General do not adequately take human rightsconsiderations and human rights records of participating coun-tries in planning and implementing peacekeeping or peace build-ing operations; financial institutions are not subject to statutorymandate to respect and protect human rights, and they resort topurely voluntary mechanisms to avoid disastrous human rightsimpacts of their operations and consequent international scan-dal;25 development policies are not planned and conducted within

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23. For a discussion of this issuewithin the EU, see CommissionCommunication ‘Toward a rein-forced culture of consultation anddialogue – General principles andminimum standards for consulta-tion of interested parties by theCommission’, COM(2002), 704final, 11 December 2002.

24. The myth of popular sover-eignty is being ‘rediscovered’ to at-tack the multilateral institutions,especially the UN. While this is nota novel idea, since also at theepoch of decolonisation newly in-dependent countries challengedinternational law in the name ofself-determination and non-par-ticipation in the ‘writing’ of exist-ing rules, today this intellectualoperation finds active epigones inthe US. See the work of E. Posnerand J. Goldsmith, The Limits of In-ternational Law (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005).

25. See e.g. the World Bank In-spection Panel, a three-memberbody instituted in 1993 with thepurpose of offering an independ-ent forum to private individualswho believe that their interestshave been or could be directlyjeopardised by a project financedby the World Bank; see<http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/ipn/ipnweb.nsf/WOverview/overview?opendocument>

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a precise framework of human rights and citizens’ rights; not tomention the International Court of Justice, which remains a juris-diction of purely interstate disputes26 where the opportunities forhuman rights adjudication are extremely rare and contingentupon the consent of the interested states.27

This situation contrasts sharply with the EU system, wherefundamental rights, even in the absence of original treaty provi-sions, have been recognised as forming part of the general princi-ples of the system applicable to states and to citizens and privatepersons alike, and forming part of what has been called a ‘Euro-pean public order’. This has led the EU legal system to graduallyopen up to the necessity of accommodating human rights andfundamental freedoms to the process of market integration in away that makes it possible for the European Court to review thelegality of member states’ and the Community’s action in light ofgeneral human rights parameters.28 Taking this into account:

The EU should seize the opportunity of the impending UNCharter reform to advance a more modern conception ofhuman rights, that is, of a set of objective principles derivingfrom the international human rights treaties that are to berespected, not only by states but also by the organisation, itsorgans, its specialised agencies and its programmes, as well asby public and private actors in their respective fields of compe-tence and action.The EU should contribute to greater infusion of human rightsconsideration in the present system of economic globalisation,especially by supporting the efforts of the UN Sub-Commis-sion on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rightstowards the development of norms on the conduct of transna-tional corporations, which should be translated into nationallegal standards and applied as part of a modern code of corpo-rate social responsibility.The EU should continue to support the multilateral system ofcriminal justice established by the International Criminal Court(ICC) in order to combat impunity for grave breaches of humanrights and international crimes. To this end, the EU could buildupon Council decisions establishing points of contact in mem-ber states for the exchange of information concerning the inves-tigation of international crimes as defined in the Statute of theICC29 and enhancing cooperation between national authoritiesin the effective prosecution of international crimes.30

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26. See Art. 34 of the Statute of theInternational Court of Justice.

27. It is not by chance, therefore,that some of the most significantcontributions given by the Inter-national Court of Justice to hu-man rights and humanitarian lawhave been provided by AdvisoryOpinions requested by the Gen-eral Assembly on general points oflaw. See in particular the AdvisoryOpinion on ‘Legality of the Threator Use of Nuclear Weapons’, 1996(available at <http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/icases/iunan/iu-nanframe.htm>), and on LegalConsequences of the Construction of aWall in the Occupied Palestinian Terri-tories (see note 5 above).

28. One of the most interesting ex-amples in the ECJ human rights ju-risprudence is the recent case ofEugen Schmidberger, InternationaleTransporte und Planzüge v RepublikÖsterreich, Case C-112/00, judge-ment of 12 June 2003, EC Reports,2003, p. I-05659, where the Courtupheld the fundamental right tofreedom of expression and ofpeaceful assembly of a group ofenvironmentalist who hadblocked a transalpine road toprotest the impact of excessiveroad traffic on the environment.The fundamental rights laid downin Arts. 10 and 11 of the EuropeanConvention on Human Rightswere carefully balanced with thecompeting rights of shippingcompanies to free movement ofgoods and ultimately up-held as alegitimate aim to be pursued bythe relevant member state.

29. See Decision of 13 June 2002setting up such European networkof contact points, OJ no. L 167, 26June 2002.

30. See Decision of 8 May 2003, inOJ no. L 118, 14 May 2003.

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Protection of the environment

By comparison with other threats, such as terrorism, armed con-flict and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, theHigh-Level Panel Report devotes scant attention to the deteriora-tion of the natural environment and the reform of global environ-mental governance. The problem of environmental degradation istreated together with poverty and infectious diseases in less than 6pages out of a total of 95 of the Report. Among the new initiatives,the Report mentions only global climate change and the entryinto force of the Kyoto Protocol, which the Report considers insuf-ficient to meet the challenge of greenhouse gas accumulation,because of both lack of universal support and the limited timespan (up to 2012) of pertinent obligations.

As far as institutional reform is concerned, the Report does notput forward any new ideas, as it had done with regard to humanrights, and concludes with the rather plain recommendation that‘[t]the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), theUnited Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the WorldBank should work in a more integrated fashion – and in partner-ship with Governments and outside research institutions – toimprove vulnerability assessment and work with the most affectedGovernments to strengthen their adaptive capacity.’31

One could have expected more focused attention on, and widerand more in in-depth analysis of, the functional necessities of theUN system of environmental protection and its present short-comings, as well as a bolder and more creative set of recommenda-tions to improve the overall performance of the system. This is allthe more surprising since academic studies and political initia-tives to improve the international institutional arrangements forenvironment and sustainable development have been under wayfor quite a while.32

Given the complexity of the international system of environ-mental protection, with the multiplicity of treaty regimes andoverlapping competences of international institutions within andbeyond the UN, it is impossible, within the limits of this paper, toaddress all the possible aspects of the real or perceived environ-mental governance deficit of the present system. I will thus con-centrate my attention on one particularly important issue thatcontributes to the ineffectiveness of the overall performance of themultilateral environmental system, i.e. the normative and institu-

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31. HLP Report, para. 73.

32. See, among the many contri-butions, F. Biermann, ‘TheEmerging Debate on the Need fora World Environmental Organi-zation: A Commentary’, GlobalEnvironmental Politics, 2001,1(1), pp. 45 ff.; S. Charnowitz, ‘AWorld Environmental Organiza-tion’, 27 Columbia J. Env. Law,2002, p. 321. In 2004 FrancescoFrancioni and P. M. Dupuy, at theEUI, Florence, prepared a prelim-inary feasibility study, commis-sioned by the French Ministry ofForeign Affairs, for the establish-ment of a UN environmental or-ganisation or agency. A similarstudy has been carried our withthe support of the French Min-istry of Ecology and SustainableDevelopment and recently pub-lished by the Institute du devel-opment et des relations durablesinternationales, (Implications of aUNEO for the global architecture ofthe international environmental gov-ernance system, R. G. Tarasofskyand A. L. Hoare, ChathamHouse, December 2004).

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tional fragmentation of international environmental governance,due to the formation of a multiplicity of environmental regimes,each supported by its own ‘institutions’ ( Meeting of the Parties,Conference of the Parties, Consultative Meetings, etc.), separatesecretariats, separate scientific and technical advisory bodies andcompliance mechanisms. If this ‘specialisation’ is justifiable, oreven unavoidable in some cases (one such case is the Antarcticenvironmental regime, whose specificity needs to be safeguardedin light of the unique political arrangement on which it isrooted)33 it is clear that from a general point of view more coordi-nation and institutional cohesion of the system as a whole wouldbe desirable. Some crucial problems must be pointed out:

Effective multilateralism in the environmental field wouldrequire a global forum for discussing and elaborating a globalenvironmental agenda, similar to the global trade agenda thathas developed through the WTO. The United Nations Environ-mental Programme could perform this role. However, politicaldistrust, shortage of funding and competition with other UNprogrammes and agencies have led to a situation where it iseven difficult to list all the environmental actors competing forauthority and funds. Effective multilateralism is not compatible with ineffectualenforcement of environmental standards and rules; some envi-ronmental protection regimes, such as the Montreal Protocol onthe ozone layer and the Kyoto Protocol, are supported by specificnon-compliance mechanisms; but these provisions are scatteredin different treaties and can hardly provide the basis for well-coordinated enforcement strategy. Effective multilateralismimplies participation in international decision-making andcompliance procedures of the largest and most representativecountries. Due to the proliferation of international environmen-tal regimes, developing countries and small states face severe dif-ficulties in participating in the plethora of, often overlapping,Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) meetings.The UN should have a pivotal role in building capacity of devel-oping countries to deal with environmental problems. In part,UNEP plays this role in a wide range of environmental initia-tives,34 but it has limited resources and its mandate can also belimited by the competing environmental responsibilities ofother UN programmes, such as UNDP, or agencies such asUNESCO, FAO, IMO, the World Bank, and WHO.

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33. The Antarctic Treaty,adopted at Washington in 1959(see 402 UNTS 71), serves thepurpose of preserving peace inthe region through the establish-ment of a system of multilateralcooperation that has laid to restthe issue of sovereignty claims,including conflicting claims overAntarctica. One of the remark-able results of the AntarcticTreaty System was the adoptionin 1991 of the Madrid Protocol,with Annexes (see Protocol onEnvironmental Protection to the1959 Antarctic Treaty, 30 ILM1455), which declared Antarc-tica a ‘natural reserve’ devoted topeace and science.

34. For a list of such initiatives,see UNEP/GCSS.VIII/5/Add.1(13 February 2004), Annex.

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Another adverse consequence of the fragmentation of the pres-ent system of environmental governance is the difficultyencountered in developing a constructive interaction betweenMEAs and the WTO. At present, MEA bodies do not haveobserver status in relevant WTO committees, and even UNEP isexperiencing difficulties in obtaining observer status with theWTO Committee on Trade and Environment.35 This situationdoes not help to reconcile free trade commitments under WTOwith the requirement of securing compliance with an array ofMEAs, many of which are binding upon WTO members astreaties, without, however, acquiring in their aggregate massthe authority of a legitimate public policy capable of counter-balancing specific WTO free trade obligations.Finally, systematic monitoring and warning on the state of theenvironment needs coordination and integration of data toavoid gaps in knowledge and information collection,36 but atpresent such data and information are gathered and processedby individual states, independent international secretariats orNGOs.

How can the EU contribute to the resolution of these problemsand to better cohesion of the UN system of environmental gover-nance? There are basically two ways to deal with this problem.

Consolidation of the UN environmental scheme

The first way is the one suggested in the report issued by the UNSecretary-General in March 200537 in which, after recognising theneed for a more coherent institutional framework of internationalenvironmental governance, the following recommendation ismade:

It is now high time to consider a more integrated structure forenvironmental standard setting, scientific discussion andmonitoring treaty compliance. This should be built on existinginstitutions, such as the United Nations Environmental Pro-gramme, as well as the treaty bodies and specialized agencies.Meanwhile, environmental activities at the country levelshould benefit from improved synergies, on both normativeand operational aspects, between the United Nations agencies,making optimal use of their comparative advantages, so that

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35. While UNEP has cooperatedwith WTO in regular sessions ofthe CTE, status in the CTE SpecialSession (see ‘Existing Forms of Co-operation and Information Ex-change between UNEP/MEASand the WTO’, Note of the Secre-tariat, Doc. TN/TE/S/2, 10 June2002), it does not appear to haveobtained observer in the CTE Spe-cial Session which is supposed tocarry forward the Doha Declara-tion mandate on trade and envi-ronment.

36. See R.G. Tarasofski and A.L.Hoare, note 35.

37. Kofi Annan, ‘In larger freedom– towards development, securityand human rights for all’, issued20 March 2005.

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we have an integrated approach to sustainable development, inwhich both halves of that term are given due weight.38

As the above citation indicates, the preference of the Secretary-General is for a streamlining and consolidation of the UN envi-ronmental efforts by way of building ‘on existing institutions’.This route is certainly the easiest one from a technical and politi-cal point of view: no new institution would be required and nopolitically controversial overhauling of the whole system would beundertaken. However, in order to yield a reasonable expectation ofimprovement of the system, a certain number of functional neces-sities should be kept in mind.

First, even if UNEP were to remain simply a UN programme asit is today, its funding should become adequate, predictable andstable. It is no mystery to anyone that UNEP has been constantlyplagued by scarce resources, a problem that became more acute inthe late 1990s with increasing dissatisfaction of major donorcountries, such as the United States, and consequent decline inavailable resources. A response to UNEP’s financial structurecould be to re-design the funding system by foreseeing assessedcontributions by member states in addition to voluntary contri-butions. This is an option, but, given the scale and level of criticismthat UNEP has attracted in the past ten years, it is difficult toimagine that such an option would find political support, espe-cially among the industrialised UN member states.

Second, a revamped UNEP will be possible only to the extentthat it is given real authority within the UN system and clear oper-ational capacity with regard to the mounting complexity of thethreats to the global environment. However, since its creation, fol-lowing the 1972 Stockholm conference, the UNEP mandate hasbeen quite limited. It was meant to provide monitoring of envi-ronmental developments, serve as a ‘clearing house’ for environ-mental information and provide impetus and coordination in thedevelopment and implementation of international environmen-tal agreements. UNEP has performed these functions quite well;in some it has actually excelled, as in the Regional Seas pro-gramme, and in others it has out-performed its original mandate,as in the sponsoring of a great variety of multilateral conferences,programmes and agreements, ranging from hazardous waste todangerous chemicals, air pollution, land degradation and waterresources management. Today, it seems that it has stretched to its

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38. Ibid. para. 212 of the Reportunder the heading ‘Governance ofthe global environment’.

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limit. It is quite doubtful that with the present institutional struc-ture, and with the further inconvenient of a headquarters locatedin Nairobi, far removed from the main centres of UN agencies andorganisations, more authority and operational capacity could beachieved without institutional reform.

Third, an essential condition for improving the effectiveness ofUNEP would be a better integration of environmental protectioninto the socio-economic policies pursued by other UN agenciesand programmes. This is what the 2005 Report by the Secretary-General calls ‘improved synergies . . . between United Nationsagencies, making optimal use of their comparative advantages, sothat we have an integrated approach to sustainable development.’To obtain such result, however, it would be necessary to align thetwo separate UNEP and UNDP ‘programmes’, through a system-atic, institutional division of tasks between the two programmesso as to avoid duplication, competition over financial resources,and ensure joint management of projects, particularly thosefunded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). This could beachieved through the negotiation of a Memorandum of Under-standing between UNEP and UNDP. Similarly, in its relationswith the World Bank, UNEP could have an enhanced role in themanagement of the GEF funds to support developing countries’efforts in securing compliance with their international environ-mental obligations, including climate change and biodiversity.However, this move also seems to be problematic, in view of theforeseeable opposition from the World Bank. As has been pointedout, a more realistic option would be that of a ‘joint operation ofthe GEF by the World Bank and UNEP . . . in order for the twoorganizations to share the responsibility of project selection,appraisal and supervision, in accordance with the respectivespheres of expertise.’39

As we can see, in spite of its apparent simplicity, the option ofimproving international environmental governance through thestrengthening of UNEP presents important challenges of a finan-cial, legal and political nature. It is our view that the very weakinstitutional status and the legacy of, not always deserved, distruston the part of some leading members of the UN, would render itextremely difficult for the EU to gamble on a reinforced UNEP asthe new environmental authority in the reformed UN Charter sys-tem.

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39. See the Study prepared at theEUI under the direction of Profes-sors P. M. Dupuy and F. Francionientitled ‘Options and Modalitiesfor the Improvement of Interna-tional Environmental Governancethrough the Establishment of aU.N. Environmental Organiza-tion’, Florence, December 2004.The section of the study cited inthe text was prepared by F. Lenz-erini (Ph.D. Siena) and E. Morgera(Ph.D. candidate, EUI).

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A new global environmental organisation

Another option to be considered by the EU in view of strengthen-ing international environmental governance is the creation of anew organisation having general competence in the environmen-tal field. This option, which has been promoted by France in par-ticular40 and is currently supported by a number of EU memberstates, can be pursued in two distinct versions. One version wouldbe the creation of a UN Environmental Agency, i.e. an organisa-tion endowed with its own legal personality but placed within theUN; the other version would be the creation of a totally independ-ent world environmental organisation, along the lines of theWTO. These two models have several advantages in common: (1)they would place the current system of international environmen-tal governance on a more stable institutional basis; (2) they wouldbring under the same institutional umbrella the vast array of mul-tilateral environmental agreements; (3) they would presumably beable to facilitate the acceptance of international environmentalstandards by developing dialogue among governmental and non-governmental actors; (4) because of the new institutional struc-ture, one may expect that they would be the catalyst for a strongerenvironmental solidarity and fiduciary spirit among participants,which would foster more coherent action for environmental pro-tection; (5) they could provide a forum for global environmentalmonitoring and for dispute settlement, a function that is acutelylacking in the present fragmented and decentralised system ofenvironmental protection.41

Naturally, in order to create any of these environmental organ-isations it would be necessary to negotiate a new multilateraltreaty. To this end, it would be desirable to involve in the negotia-tions, besides all the UN members, the most important stakehold-ers in environmental governance, including the relevant UN agen-cies and programmes, the main MEA secretariats, the World Bank,the GEF, and representatives from leading environmental NGOsand the private sector. This would certainly not be an easy task.However, since the present UN system clearly presents a deficit ofenvironmental governance and since the United States seemsreluctant to engage in a fresh effort to strengthen multilateralcooperation in this field – as it appears from its recalcitrant posi-tion with respect to the Kyoto Protocol and the Convention onBiological Diversity – it would seem appropriate for the EU to seizethis opportunity for UN reform to take the lead in promoting the

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40. See the preliminary studiescited above, notes 35 and 43.

41. This results in having the WTOdispute settlement mechanismbeing asked to resolve disputes in-volving the legality of environmen-tal measures having the effect ofimpacting on free movement ofgoods and services. See F. Fran-cioni, ‘Environment, HumanRights and the Limits of FreeTrade’, in F. Francioni, Environ-ment, Human Rights and InternationalTrade (Oxford: Hart Publishing,2001), pp. 7 ff.

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creation of a new international environmental organisation fol-lowing one of the two models described above. In addition, the EUcould be instrumental in gathering the consensus of developingcountries on such reform, building upon its long-standing rela-tionship with the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries,through the once Lomé, now Cotonou cooperation agreements,and with other associated states, with which it has increasinglystrengthened environmental cooperation.42

Conclusion

As this paper has tried to demonstrate, the High-Level PanelReport and the subsequent March 2005 Report prepared by theUN Secretary-General do not exhaustively address the presentthreats and challenges to the international system of humanrights protection and environmental governance. The above-men-tioned documents focus rather on military security, peacekeeping,use of force and the enhanced role of the Security Council in main-taining world order. But world order and effective multilateralismcannot be divorced from a strong sense of legitimacy and collectiverecognition that the UN and other international institutions servethe common good of the people. At a time when the excesses ofunilateralism and superpower politics are accompanied byincreasing annoyance with the encroachment of international lawon national sovereignty, and by open attacks on the legitimacy anddemocratic foundation of international institutions,43 it is all themore important to strengthen the UN commitment to humanrights and environmental protection. These are indeed two essen-tial components of global governance, security, democracy andhuman welfare, values to which the EU has anchored its constitu-tional development. The EU should consequently play a leadingrole in the enhancement of the protection of human rights and theenvironment during the current efforts to reform the UN Charter.

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42. G. Marin Duran and E. Morg-era, ‘Towards Environmental Inte-gration in EC External Relations?A Comparative Analysis of Se-lected Association Agreements’,Yearbook of European EnvironmentalLaw, 2005 (forthcoming).

43. I refer particularly to the new‘negationist’ wave in the UnitedStates that tends to deny the legalvalue of customary internationallaw within the domestic legal sys-tem, thus depriving independentcourts of the opportunity of ad-vancing the international rule oflaw and reducing internationallaw to an infinitely flexible toolmeant to accommodate policydecision. See C. A. Bradley and J.L. Goldsmith, ‘Customary Inter-national Law an as Federal Com-mon Law: A Critique of the Mod-ern Position’, 110 Harvard LawReview, 1997, pp. 815 ff.; P. R.Trimble, ‘A revisionist View OfCustomary International Law’, 33UCLA Law Review, 1986, pp. 665ff.; A. M. Slaughter, ‘Good Rea-sons for Going Around the UN’,New York Times, 18 March 2003,A33.

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EU-UN cooperation inpeacekeeping: a promisingrelationship in a constrainedenvironmentThierry Tardy1

The relationship between the European Union (EU) and theUnited Nations (UN) in the field of crisis management has gonethrough major changes over the last five years. On the UN side, theconstraints imposed by the changing and ever-demanding natureof peacekeeping have led the organisation to seek increased sup-port from regional actors, the EU among others. On the Europeanside, the development of the European Security and Defence Policy(ESDP) logically led the EU to revisit its relationship with the UN,both as a legitimising body and as the main peacekeeping imple-menter. The convergence of these two trends has led to a genuineinter-institutional rapprochement.

Yet this process has taken place in a highly constrained envi-ronment. Structurally, even though both the UN and the EU havedisplayed a will to move forward in their relations, the differencesin the organisations’ respective agendas, vocations, constituenciesand means limit the scope of their cooperation in the field of peaceoperations. Peacekeeping imposes itself on the UN more than itdoes on the EU. The UN approach is inspired by an open agenda,while the European policy combines self-interest and the necessityto respond to conscience-shocking situations.

In general, it is the EU rather than the UN that sets the agendaand defines the terms of the UN-EU relationship, which is charac-terised by a divide between what the UN wants and what the EU iswilling to offer. Africa, as a great security-consumer where boththe UN and the EU must play a role, illustrates the EU-UN divideas much as it tests cooperation between them. In the shorter term,the EU-UN rapprochement is being confronted with the simulta-neous reform processes of the two institutions, which includes ahigh degree of uncertainty surrounding both the overhaul of theUN and the ratification of the European Constitution.

In this context, the two institutions have achieved a significantamount, in terms of increasing knowledge of respective function-ing and activities, institutionalised framework of cooperation and

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1. The author would like to thankEric Berman, Fred Tanner, ErikWindmar and Miriam Fugfugoshfor their comments on earlier ver-sions of this paper.

3

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practical cooperation. In relative terms, although the EU is notformally a ‘regional arrangement’ in the sense of Chapter VIII ofthe UN Charter, it is the regional organisation that has gone thefurthest in its relationship with the UN, and it is also the one thatoffers the most promising perspectives of cooperation at both themilitary and civilian levels. The UN welcomes EU efforts and iswilling to take advantage of the EU crisis management policy. Yetthe UN also aspires to include such a policy as much as possibleinto its broader framework, and calls for a more direct EU partici-pation in UN-led peace operations.

This paper will look at three facets of the EU-UN relationshipin peace operations. It will first look at the nature of the environ-ment and the constraints attached to it. In a second part, it willdeal with the achievements of the EU-UN relationship. It willfinally address the modalities of their relations, exploring the dif-ferent scenarios of EU-UN cooperation in the broader field of cri-sis management.

A highly constrained environment

The question of EU-UN relations in peacekeeping is a multifacetedone, as it comes at the junction of different state actors’ policies vis-à-vis an activity – peace operations – which is complex and multidi-mensional by nature, and approached differently depending onwhere it is to take place (Europe, Africa, elsewhere), through whichframework (UN, regional organisations, coalitions) and for whatpurpose (mandate, level of force required, etc.).

UN overstretch . . .

In this context, the UN and the EU are no doubt in a different situ-ation. Through its Security Council, the UN is the legalising andlegitimising body for peace operations, and the only organisationthat can authorise the use of force in international relations. At theoperational level, the UN is by far the international organisationthe most involved in peace operations. With 16 missions as atMarch 2005 and around 67,000 military personnel and civilianpolice deployed, the UN counts more people in peacekeeping oper-ations than all regional and subregional organisations puttogether. Such a level of deployment, combined with the increas-

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EU-UN cooperation in peacekeeping

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ingly complex nature of its missions, pushes the limits of the UN’soperational capacity. Facing overstretch, the UN Secretariat is con-stantly looking for ways to fill gaps, by reforming itself, as theBrahimi Report on Peace Operations suggested in 2000, and byasking states and regional organisations – as the Secretary-Gen-eral’s report ‘In larger freedom’ does2 – to provide the assets that areneeded for complex and robust peacekeeping.

It is here that the EU can play an important role. ThroughESDP, the EU is developing crisis management capacities that pre-cisely the UN is lacking. The UN faces shortages in troops, butabove all in rapid reaction capacity and in what it calls ‘enablingassets’, such as movement control, intelligence, medical units orlogistics, which are less available than infantry battalions. The UNSecretariat recurrently calls on the EU and its member states toprovide such resources, and welcomes any EU initiative thatstrengthens the UN capacity directly or indirectly.3 In the mean-time, there has been concern within the UN that the whole ESDPprocess would develop to the detriment of the UN inclusiveapproach as well as of UN peacekeeping needs.

. . . versus EU ambivalence

Faced with this situation, EU member states’ policies areambivalent. On the one hand, the EU and EU member states arestrong supporters of the UN, in accordance with the EuropeanSecurity Strategy and the concept of ‘effective multilateralism’.4EU states are attached to the centrality and legitimising power ofthe UN Security Council, and the EU as such has gained somepolitical clout within UN bodies5 beyond the role played by theCommission in economic and development affairs. At the finan-cial level, the EU states’ shares of the UN regular and peacekeep-ing budgets are very high, with respectively 37.75 per cent and 39per cent.6

On the other hand, the strong emphasis that the EU places onits political autonomy leads it to somehow distance itself from theUN. For example, obtaining a UN mandate for ESDP operationsdoes not appear to be a requirement as long as these operations aredeployed in Europe, with the consent of the host state, and are of anon coercive or civilian nature. In Europe, the examples are the EUPolice Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Operations Concor-dia and Proxima in FYROM that were not created by a UNSC reso-

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2. See ‘In larger freedom – towardsdevelopment, security and humanrights for all’, Report of the Secre-tary-General, United Nations,A/59/2005, 21 March 2005,paras. 111-13, and the section on‘Regional Organizations’, paras.213-15.

3. See Speech by the UN DeputySecretary-General before the Eu-ropean Parliament, Strasbourg,29 March 2004, and the Report ofthe Secretary-General on the Im-plementation of the recommen-dations of the Special Committeeon Peacekeeping Operations,A/59/608, 15 December 2004,para. 72.

4. See Espen Barth Eide (ed.), ‘Ef-fective Multilateralism’: Europe, Re-gional Security and a Revitalised UN(London: The Foreign Policy Cen-tre/Global Europe Publications,2004).

5. See Alexandra Novosseloff, EU-UN Partnership in Crisis Management:Developments and Prospects (NewYork: International Peace Acad-emy, June 2004), pp. 4-6.

6. To be compared with 22 percent (regular budget) and about27 per cent (peacekeepingbudget) for the United States, and19.5 per cent for the two budgetsfor Japan.

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lution; outside of Europe, the three civilian operations in Georgia(EUJUST THEMIS), Kinshasa (EUPOL KINSHASA), and Iraq(EUJUST LEX) provide other examples.

Most importantly, while EU member states are major contrib-utors to UN-mandated peace operations, they contribute very littleto UN-led operations. As of March 2005, EU member statesaccounted for 6.52 per cent of UN troops,7 a percentage thatdecreases to 2.24 per cent for UN operations in Africa,8 the conti-nent where peacekeeping needs are by far the greatest. For well-known political and military reasons with origins in the UN peace-keeping records of the early 1990s, Western states in general havebecome reluctant to participate in UN-led operations, and haveover the last ten years favoured regional organisations (EU andNATO) or coalitions of states for their crisis management activi-ties. Consequently, even if EU representatives are right in sayingthat EU member states’ military capabilities are not ‘frozen forESDP purposes’,9 in practice, the probability that such assetswould be deployed in UN operations is likely to remain low and inany case subject to very specific conditions.

This situation concerns the relationship between EU memberstates and the UN more so than that of the EU, as most EU assetsbelong to the individual states. However, the general reticence ofthe European states to place troops under UN command, in addi-tion to their scepticism about the reliability of the UN structure ingeneral, are concerns that are echoed within the EU itself and itspolitico-military structure, and that both negatively impact theEU-UN relationship. EU rigidity also finds some grounds in thespecificity of ESDP operations. The key principle of the EU deci-sion-making autonomy in this field makes subordination to theUN difficult. Any ESDP operation is, in principle, placed underpolitical control and strategic direction of the Political and Secu-rity Committee (PSC). It is the involvement of the EU politico-mil-itary structure, much more than the commitment of EU memberstates’ troops, which defines a given operation as a EuropeanUnion operation. It follows that the mere idea that EU memberstates’ assets could simultaneously be part of an EU operation andplaced under UN command clashes with ESDP philosophy. Herea distinction has to be made between military and civilian assets,since the readiness of EU member states to include civilian assetsas a component of a UN operation is higher than in the militarysphere (see the third part of this essay).

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7. 4,378 military observers, civil-ian police and troops from EUmember states out of 67,150 as of31 March 2005; Monthly Sum-mary of Contributions, UN web-site.

8. 1,148 military observers, civil-ian police and troops from EUmember states out of 51,208 de-ployed in Africa as of 31 March2005; Monthly Summary of Con-tributions, UN website.

9. ‘EU-UN Cooperation in Mili-tary Crisis Management Opera-tions – Elements of Implementa-tion of the EU-UN JointDeclaration’ESDP Presidency Re-port, Annex II, European Council,15 June 2004, para. 4.

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This being said, the general absence of European states fromUN-led operations has to be checked against their presence in UN-mandated operations. Such a contribution is quite high, from theBalkans to Afghanistan, but with NATO playing the most promi-nent role. This raises the question of what the most effective chan-nels are to serve the UN Charter’s ultimate goal of maintaininginternational peace and security. For EU member states, there isno doubt that their strong involvement in peace operations iscomplementary to overall UN efforts. If those operations are EU-led, they should consequently be seen as part of the broader EU-UN picture. For the UN, national or regional contributions topeacekeeping activities are encouraged as long as they are notexclusive of direct contributions to UN-led operations. One con-cern here is the development of two-speed peace operations, someUN-led, relatively poor, ill-equipped and with weak political back-ing, and others led by states or regional organisations such as theEU or NATO, which would be politically and militarily better sup-ported. The other concern lies in the rift between Africa on the onehand, where the needs are but would be neglected by the ‘rich’organisations, and other places on the other hand, which wouldbetter benefit from Western/Northern attention. Given these twosets of concerns, no doubt a test case of EU-UN cooperation inpeacekeeping will arise in Africa.

These different elements come as constraints imposed on theEU-UN relationship in the field of peace operations. To sum-marise, while the UN is in a position to demand that the EU com-mit itself to supporting UN activities, the EU is constrained by anumber of factors which limit its favourable response to UNrequests and restrict the scope of its cooperation.

Some tangible achievements

It is in this constrained environment that the achievements as wellas opportunities of EU-UN cooperation in peacekeeping have to beconsidered. This cooperation was illustrated during the 1990s, inthe Balkans in particular, where both the UN and the EU were inone way or another involved in the management of the Yugoslavconflicts. Yet the idea that cooperation on crisis managementshould be closely looked at and possibly institutionalised came upin earnest in 2000, at a time when the UN was examining the reform

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of its peace operations through the Brahimi Report process and theEU was laying the foundations of ESDP.

Initially, though, the idea that the EU and the UN should coop-erate in the peacekeeping field was not obvious within the twoinstitutions and their member states. On the UN side, some scep-ticism was expressed regarding the establishment of channels ofcommunication with regional organisations, which was perceivedas placing the UN and these organisations on the same level. More-over, any move that was seen as giving the EU preferential treat-ment was not perceived favourably. On the EU side, there was astrong sentiment that the ESDP should be developed withoutexcessive linking to the UN.

The first steps of the EU-UN dialogue

It is in this context that, after initial talks between the two institu-tions in the second part of the year 2000,10 the ESDP Report to theNice European Council underlined the ‘value of cooperationbetween the Union and the United Nations . . . as the Union developsits crisis-management and conflict-prevention capabilities’, andfurther stated that ‘[t]he efforts made will enable Europeans in par-ticular to respond more effectively and more coherently to requestsfrom leading organisations such as the UN or the OSCE.’11

A document was then elaborated in 2001 under the EU Swedishpresidency on ‘EU-UN cooperation in conflict prevention and crisismanagement’.12 Three issues, ‘conflict prevention’, ‘civilian andmilitary aspects of crisis management’ and ‘particular regionalissues’, were identified as themes and areas for EU-UN cooperation.The document also established modalities for meetings at differentlevels between the two institutions. In the meantime, the GöteborgEuropean Council adopted a document on ‘EU cooperation withinternational organisations in civilian aspects of crisis manage-ment’13 which defined four guiding principles of the Union’s coop-eration with international organisations,14 as well as putting for-ward different options of EU civilian participation in crisismanagement operations led by international organisations.15

The first EU operations: successful tests of EU-UN cooperation

The next important step came in 2003 with the creation of the firstESDP operations: two of them – the EU Police Mission in Bosnia

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10. Javier Solana addressed theUN Security Council for the firsttime on 23 June 2000 (on theBalkans). Some meetings be-tween the UN Secretary-Generaland the EU troika followed in Sep-tember and October 2000.

11. Presidency Report on ESDP,Nice European Council, 7-9 De-cember 2000.

12. See ‘EU-UN cooperation inconflict prevention and crisismanagement’, Annex to the Presi-dency Conclusions, Göteborg Eu-ropean Council, June 2001.

13. See ‘EU cooperation with in-ternational organizations in civil-ian aspects of crisis management’,Presidency Report on ESDP, An-nex V, Göteborg European Coun-cil, June 2001.

14. The four principles are ‘addedvalue’, ‘interoperability’, ‘visibil-ity’ and ‘decision-making auton-omy’.

15. Communication around theemerging EU-UN relationship wasassured through a brochure pro-duced by the office of the Com-mission in New York (updated in2004 under the title ‘The Enlarg-ing European Union at the UnitedNations: Making MultilateralismMatter’) as well as through a ded-icated website (http://europa-eu-un.org).

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and Herzegovina (EUPM) and Operation Artemis in the Democra-tic Republic of Congo (DRC) – constituted real tests for the EU-UNrelationship. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the EU tookover the UN International Police Task Force (IPTF), with the objec-tive of ensuring a ‘seamless transition’ from UN to EU responsibil-ity. That was achieved through inter-institutional cooperation inthe planning phase, collocation of EU and UN teams in Sarajevo,information-sharing, and double-hatting of Sven Christian Fred-eriksen, simultaneously IPTF Commissioner and Head of theEUPM Planning Team, and then EUPM Commissioner. Once theEUPM was launched, cooperation between the two organisationswas maintained through liaison officers, and the EU establishedcontact on the ground with the International Criminal Tribunalfor the Former Yugoslavia and UNHCR. In the meantime, some les-sons-learnt exercises were conducted on the transition. While over-all EU-UN cooperation was assessed positively, one issue that arosewas that double-hatting of the head of mission created an addi-tional workload that was difficult to digest. Moreover, the take-over by the EU of an existing mission meant that the EU was notable to shape it as it would have had it created it.

Since the launch of the EU mission, and following the UNSCinvitation to the EU to ‘keep it regularly informed, as appropriate,on the activities of EUPM’,16 reports have been issued by the HighRepresentative for CFSP and sent to the UN Security Councilevery six months. The first report commends EU-UN cooperationand says that ‘[while] the EUPM is the first experience of coopera-tion in the field between the UN and EU’, it ‘illustrates that asmooth and efficient transition of responsibility from the UN toEU in a crisis management operation is no longer an aspirationbut a concrete component of our cooperation.’17

The EU involvement in the DRC was of a fundamentally differ-ent nature. In the summer of 2003, the EU conducted its firstautonomous military operation in the north-eastern part of theDRC (Ituri, city of Bunia). This occurred at the request of the UN,under a UN mandate, and as a temporary endeavour eventuallytaken over by a reinforced component of the UN operation(MONUC, Ituri Task Force). EU and UN activities were thereforeintimately linked throughout the planning and the deploymentof the operation. Operation Artemis – officially called InterimEmergency Multinational Force (IEMF) – was formally created byUNSC Resolution 1484 of 30 May 2003 and by the Council Joint

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16. Statement by the President ofthe Security Council, 12 Decem-ber 2002, S/PRST/2002/33.

17. Letter dated 14 July 2003 fromthe Secretary-General and HighRepresentative for the CFSP of theEU to the Secretary-General of theUN; annex to the letter dated 17July 2003 from the Secretary-Gen-eral of the UN to the President ofthe Security Council, S/2003/732, 21 July 2003.

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Action of 5 June 2003.18 The Security Council resolution wasadopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and authorised themember states participating in the force to ‘take all necessarymeasures to fulfill its mandate’. The Security Council formallycreated the force, but subcontracted its implementation to theEU, with no subordination of any sort between the two institu-tions. The Security Council only requested the leadership of theforce ‘to report regularly to the Council through the Secretary-General, on the implementation of its mandate’,19 which JavierSolana did once, in July 2003, by addressing the Security Coun-cil.20 Artemis was placed under political control and strategicdirection of the PSC, with France, as the framework nation, play-ing the key role in the planning process as well as in the conduct ofthe operation.

EU-UN cooperation on Artemis was assessed positively by bothorganisations. Initially, the fact that the operation came as aresponse by the EU to a request formulated by the UN Secretary-General, which was then endorsed by the Security Council, facili-tated the formal creation of the operation. In the pre-deploymentphase, the UN deplored the lack of information coming from theEU – in particular on the deployment of the IEMF – which couldhave caused incidents when the EU force and UN peacekeeperswere simultaneously deployed.21 But overall, communication wasestablished at different levels (New York/Brussels and on theground) and once Artemis had been deployed, cooperation withMONUC proved to be satisfactory. The deployment of the firstelements of the Ituri Task Force in mid-August 2003 also led tovaluable cooperation between the two forces.

Most importantly, EU cooperation with the UN Secretariat(and with Bangladesh as the main contributor to the Ituri TaskForce) to make sure that MONUC could take over in September2003 as agreed, proved to be successful. This point was of crucialimportance, since the UN’s ability to take over Artemis constitutedthe exit strategy for the EU.

Yet EU-UN cooperation was put to the test when EU memberstates were asked by the UN Secretariat to ‘re-hat’ some of theirassets and to make them available to the UN after the departure ofArtemis. The re-hatting of forces was implemented in East Timorin 1999, where Australia, which acted as the lead nation in the UN-mandated operation INTERFET, agreed to keep some of its troopsin the UN-led operation (UNTAET), thus guaranteeing its credi-

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18. ‘Council Joint Action2003/423/CFSP of 5 June 2003on the EU military operation in theDRC’, Official Journal of the EuropeanCommunities, L 143/50, 11 June2003.

19. UNSC Resolution 1484(2003).

20. Intervention by Javier Solana,EU High Representative for theCFSP, public meeting of the UNSecurity Council, New York, 18July 2003.

21. See ‘Operation Artemis: TheLessons of the Interim EmergencyMultinational Force’, Peacekeep-ing Best Practices Unit, UN DPKO,New York, October 2004, p. 11.

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bility. The ‘East Timor model’ has often been praised by UN repre-sentatives,22 who see in it the opportunity for the UN to benefitfrom Western states’ key military assets, but who are also anxiousto ‘narrow the commitment gap’23 between the developing andthe developed world.

In the case of the DRC, the request to re-hat was dismissed bythe Europeans; locally, this jeopardised the credibility ofMONUC.24 But in the context of EU-UN relations, the Europeanstance revealed the limits of cooperation; it showed what the EUand its member states were ready to do (support through a sepa-rate operation), but also what they would not do (support withinthe UN operation). In his address to the Security Council on 18July 2003, Javier Solana stressed that a reinforced MONUC‘should have a mandate and rules of engagement similar to thoseof the European Union force, i.e. a mandate under Chapter VII.’ Hecontinued by saying that this force should have the ‘equipmentand military resources necessary to accomplish its mission andimplement the mandate and rules of engagement.’ Yet none of theEU states participated in the strengthened UN force that took overArtemis.

The EU has remained present in the DRC through a series ofinitiatives related to civilian crisis management: a programme ofstrategic support totaling €205 million adopted in 2003, and thecreation of a Police Mission in Kinshasa (EUPOL KINSHASA) inDecember 2004. In so far as EU-UN cooperation is concerned, theEU also decided, in response to UN calls for reinforcing MONUC,to provide it access to the EU Satellite Centre’s capabilities.25

All together, these different measures taken by the EU to sup-port the UN in the DRC are to be commended, as they dostrengthen overall crisis management efforts. Yet they fall short ofa direct strengthening of MONUC via the deployment of EUmember states’ assets on the ground, which would be most wel-comed by the UN.

Drawing on field cooperation: battle groups, UN-EU Joint Dec-laration and ‘beauty contest’

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of EU-UN cooperationrevealed by Operation Artemis, this episode constituted a majorbreakthrough in relations between the two institutions. It forcedthem to work together on the ground, and therefore to become bet-

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22. See in particular ‘Implementa-tion of the United Nations Millen-nium Declaration’, Report of theSecretary-General, A/58/323, 2September 2003, paras. 35-7.

23. Ibid., para. 37.

24. Op. cit. in note 21, p. 14.

25. See Presidency Report onESDP, European Council, Brus-sels, December 2004.

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ter acquainted. At the conceptual level, it led to the elaboration bythe EU of the ‘battle groups’ concept, which should become one ofthe most visible expressions of EU-UN relations in the future (seebelow). Likewise, Operation Artemis brought institutionalisationof EU-UN cooperation one step further, with the signature on 24September 2003 of the ‘Joint Declaration on UN-EU Cooperationin Crisis Management’ by the UN Secretary-General and the EUpresidency. The declaration took note of the recent developmentsin EU-UN cooperation and identified four areas where furthercooperation should be explored: planning, training, communicationand best practices. A ‘joint consultative mechanism’, named SteeringCommittee, was established at working level to enhance coordina-tion in these four areas and to follow through with the implemen-tation of the Joint Declaration. In the meantime, the EuropeanCommission released an important Communication on EU-UNrelations,26 which offered an in-depth analysis of the EU generalposture vis-à-vis the UN, in addition to calling for a renewed EUcommitment to multilateralism. The Communication also putforward recommendations on how to maximise EU benefits in awider EU-UN partnership, going far beyond peacekeeping issues.

Since September 2003, the Steering Committee has met twice ayear, and points of contact have been established (or developed) atdifferent levels of the two secretariats. Work has been conductedon training standards and modules; UN personnel have partici-pated in EU training courses; and a continued dialogue on plan-ning and EU-UN operational cooperation has taken place, as inthe EU-UN exercise of April 2005.

With these different initiatives and achievements, the EU-UNrelationship in the field of peacekeeping has gone through majorevolutions. What used to be of a rhetorical nature a few years agohas become tangible at both institutional and field levels.Throughout these years, the UN has often tried to involve the EUfurther than the EU was able or willing to commit. The UN hasoscillated between a relative optimism, stemming from the poten-tial of the UN-EU relationship, and concerns, about the EU’srather self-interested peacekeeping policy.

However, despite the differences of approach, the EU-UN rela-tionship has developed further and faster than the relationshipbetween the UN and any other regional organisation. Moreover,this relationship may be seen as a model to be replicated, betweenthe UN and African organisations for example.

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26. ‘The EU and the UN: TheChoice of Multilateralism’, Com-munication from the EuropeanCommission, Brussels, 10 Sep-tember 2003.

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In a sense, the UN appeal to the EU is an acknowledgement ofits nascent crisis management capacity. This pleases the EU in gen-eral terms, but can also be reframed in the broader context of EU-NATO relations, where the EU needs to assert its political andoperational capacity, and therefore also in the context of UN-NATO relations. As if he wanted to place the EU and NATO incompetition, Kofi Annan acknowledged before the Sub-Commit-tee on Transatlantic Relations in March 2004 that the ‘unrivalled[NATO] capability to deploy rapidly and robustly can have a majorimpact on the UN’s work for peace and security,’ and furtherstated that ‘NATO might be employed in a ‘peace enforcement’role, much as the EU deployed Operation Artemis in the Democra-tic Republic of Congo as a bridging force before the deployment ofa UN operation.’27 This situates the three organisations in a trian-gular relationship that changes the nature of the EU-UN relation-ship alone. For the UN, the idea is clearly to develop partnershipswith as many organisations as possible, in a non-exclusive way. Forthe EU, this raises the issue of its ability to perform in the ‘beautycontest’. But for EU member states that are also NATO memberstates, at stake is also the extent to which NATO should play a rolein the crisis management field, and the division of labour betweenNATO and the EU in this respect.

EU support beyond peacekeeping: the need for increasedcoherence

Finally, besides the above-mentioned achievements, the EU mayalso invoke its role in supporting the UN crisis management policyat other equally important levels.28 This encompasses several com-ponents, ranging from the EU contribution in the broad field ofconflict prevention to its multifaceted involvement in the peace-building phase.

Taking the case of Africa, in line with the ESDP Action Plan forAfrica,29 the EU role in the strengthening of African peacekeepingcapacities, the financing of some components or programmes ofpeace operations (through the Peace Facility for Africa andthrough the support of DDR and SSR30 programmes), the politi-cal and technical support to the African Union (in Darfur forexample) and ECOWAS,31 the participation in joint fact-findingmissions (as was the case in Burundi in February 2004 with a EU-UN joint fact-finding mission conducted prior to the establish-

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27. NATO Parliamentary Assem-bly, Visit to New York, Montereyand Santa Monica by the Sub-Committee on Transatlantic Rela-tions, March 2004.

28. See on this T. Tardy, ‘L’Unioneuropéenne et l’ONU dans la ges-tion de crise. Opportunités et lim-ites d’une relation déséquilibrée’,Recherche et documents n. 32 (Paris:Fondation pour la Recherchestratégique, May 2004), pp. 47-57.

29. See ‘Action Plan for ESDP sup-port to Peace and Security inAfrica’, document 10538/4/04Rev 4, 22 November 2004.

30. ‘Demobilisation, Disarma-ment and Reintegration’ and ‘Se-curity Sector Reform’.

31. See for example ‘Technical ad-vice on “ECOWAS stand-by units:concept and structures” ’, Docu-ment of the European MilitaryStaff, Brussels, 29 June 2004.

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ment of the UN operation) are all activities that contribute to over-all UN crisis management efforts. In his report ‘In larger freedom’,the UN Secretary-General called for the ‘establishment of an inter-locking system of peacekeeping capacities that will enable the UNto work with relevant regional organisations in predictable andreliable partnerships.’32

In Africa, there is no doubt that such collaboration should gobeyond peacekeeping activities. In the broader field of crisis man-agement, the EU and the UN may think, in close cooperation withregional and subregional actors, of a strategic partnership thatwould take account of their respective capacities and comparativeadvantages. The potential for EU-UN cooperation is immense inthis context, and the EU holistic approach, combining a wide vari-ety of instruments, is a unique comparative advantage. The role ofthe European Commission is here particularly important. The EUcould draw on what the Commission has done in regards to theimplementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

The EU has displayed a will to move in that direction, reflectedby the ESDP Action Plan for Africa and the ‘battle group’ concept.However, it will also remain vigilant to ensure a certain degree offlexibility and autonomy of action vis-à-vis the UN and otherorganisations. Overly constraining commitments will thereforebe avoided. In any case, if such a comprehensive partnership is tobe sought, it will require a much more coherent and coordinatedapproach from the EU, both in terms of the nature of the policy(combining economic, political and security elements) and of thebodies that would implement it (States, Council Secretariat, Com-mission).

The modalities of EU-UN cooperation

The work conducted by the two organisations over the last fiveyears, combined with the experience acquired in the recent opera-tions, has led the two secretariats to elaborate a number of scenar-ios of EU-UN cooperation in peace operations. These scenarios arenot all agreed upon by the two institutions and some only reflecttheir respective aspirations. However, they all revolve around thedegree of involvement of the EU in a given crisis management activ-ity (be it UN-led or UN-mandated), and give particular importanceto the three following factors: the nature of the crisis management

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activity, i.e. military or civilian; the sequence of EU and UN deploy-ments, taking place simultaneously or subsequently; and thedegree of EU and EU member states assets’ deployment within aUN operation. Almost all scenarios of EU-UN cooperation aredetermined by the combination of these three elements, to whichone can add the presence or absence of a UN mandate.33

Based on these elements, a synthesis of the two organisations’aspirations leads to the identification of six main scenarios.

Scenario 1: National contributions and the ‘clearing houseprocess’

When allowing for a contribution to a UN operation, the EU firstconsiders the provision of national capabilities, both military andcivilian. As mentioned earlier, for the time being such contribu-tions are extremely limited, and while they could indeed make a dif-ference for the UN, they would fall short of a real ‘EU’ contribu-tion.34However, the EU also envisages a role in the coordination ofnational contributions to UN-led operations, through a mecha-nism called the ‘clearing house process’. Such a system would cre-ate a ‘framework by which member states could, on a voluntarybasis, exchange information on their contributions to a given UNoperation and, if they so decide, co-ordinate these national contri-butions’. The system was activated in autumn 2004 following a UNrequest to strengthen MONUC in the DRC, and led to the decisionto make the EU Satellite Centre available to the UN. Following thiscase, this system could be of particular interest for the coordina-tion of the deployment of ‘enabling assets’ in UN operations.

Scenario 2: The ‘stand-alone model’

At the other end of the spectrum, the EU could conduct an opera-tion under a UN mandate, at the request of the UN or as an EU ini-tiative, which, once created, would have no link with the UN struc-ture. Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina provides anexample. In this case, the EU may report regularly to the UN Secu-rity Council (via the UN Secretary-General),35 but no other form ofcommunication would be envisaged. The EU would act as a sub-contractor of the UN or, put differently, the UN would act (only) asthe mandating body of the EU.

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33. On the scenarios, see also T.Tardy, ‘Limits and Opportunitiesof UN-EU Relations in Peace Op-erations: Implications for DPKO’,External Study, Peacekeeping BestPractices Unit, DPKO, United Na-tions, New York, September 2003.

34. ‘EU-UN Cooperation in Mili-tary Crisis Management Opera-tions – Elements of Implementa-tion of the EU-UN JointDeclaration’, Annex II, ESDP Pres-idency Report, European Council,15 June 2004, para. 5.

35. As UNSC Resolution 1575(2004) on Operation Althea re-quests.

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Beyond these two options, which do not imply a high level ofinter-institutional cooperation, four possibilities of EU-UN coop-eration can be identified:

an EU operation preceding a UN operation;an EU operation taking over a UN operation;an EU operation deployed simultaneously with a UN operation;an EU component of a UN operation.

Scenario 3: An EU operation preceding a UN operation – the‘bridging model’

Two of the key challenges that current UN operations are facingare rapid deployment once an operation has been formally createdand rapid reaction when the mandate of an operation is jeopar-dised by incidents taking place on the ground (peacekeepers beingtaken hostage, activities of spoilers, populations under immediatethreat of physical violence, etc.). It is these two types of activities inparticular for which the UN has sought EU cooperation and assis-tance.

Cooperation between the two organisations to palliate theshortages of UN rapid deployment capacity was best illustrated byOperation Artemis, which then led to the elaboration of the ‘battlegroup’ concept. Through what is called the ‘bridging model’, theEU envisages the rapid deployment of an operation – a battlegroup – at the request of the UN and with the objective of provid-ing ‘the UN with time to mount a new operation or to reorganisean existing one’. For the EU, this option requires a ‘rapid deploy-ment of appropriate military capabilities and agreed duration andend-state’.36 Such a model implies a ‘subcontracted’ operation, asis the case with Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thedifference between the two lies in the sequence – since a UN opera-tion takes over in the bridging model – and therefore in the degreeof cooperation between the two institutions.

This model corresponds to a new trend in peace operations bywhich regional organisations (or states) go first to a crisis zone fora limited period of time before the UN takes over for a longer term.In addition to the Artemis-MONUC or INTERFET-UNTAETexamples, such was the case for the three West African operationsin Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast (where the UN took overECOWAS operations), and also in Haiti (UN takeover of a coali-tion of states) or in Burundi (UN takeover of an African Union

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36. ‘EU-UN Cooperation in Mili-tary Crisis Management Opera-tions – Elements of Implementa-tion of the EU-UN JointDeclaration’, Annex II, ESDP Pres-idency Report, European Council,15 June 2004, para. 9.

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operation). In all these cases, the idea is to draw on comparativeadvantages of different institutions, and to somehow organise thedivision of labour between the UN and regional organisations.

Indeed, the ‘bridging model’ offers a series of advantages andmeets the aspirations of both the UN and the EU. However, it alsoraises the issue of the compatibility between EU peacekeeping andUN peacekeeping. EU documents acknowledge that ‘the exit strat-egy from such an operation is the arrival, in time, of a UN force ableto take over the EU force deployed and tailored to the mission.’37

That ability of the UN to take over in good conditions was raisedin the DRC. The very fact that the UN becomes part of the exitstrategy of the EU is a challenge for the UN. It implies that the UNraises its standards and manages to somehow meet the EUrequirements. It also means that the two organisations worktogether at different levels, outside and during operations, toguarantee a certain degree of compatibility and therefore asmooth transition. Such dialogue falls within the implementa-tion of the Joint Declaration on UN-EU Cooperation and is cur-rently conducted between the Department of Peacekeeping Oper-ations (DPKO) and the EU Council Secretariat in the frameworkof the Steering Committee.

This model also leads us back to the issue of ‘re-hatting’ EUforces into the UN operation, which is favoured by the UN butcontemplated reluctantly within the EU. The decision to ‘re-hat’will remain a national one, which means that ‘EU assets’ thatwould be ‘re-hatted’ could be ‘re-nationalised’ in the UN opera-tion. Short of re-hatting, the EU will anyway have to be ready toinstall some information-sharing mechanisms with the UN,which is the sine qua non of a smooth transition. Furthermore, asthe ability of the UN to take over ‘in time’ or to deploy a well-tai-lored operation will never be guaranteed, the two institutionsmust develop the options by which the EU stays on the ground, inparallel with the UN, and theoretically for a limited period of time.The bridging model is contemplated in the civilian sphere in simi-lar terms, with a focus on police forces. Here, cooperation isaddressed by the EU more openly than in the military sphere. TheDecember 2004 ESDP Presidency Report states that ‘practicalissues such as information-sharing, advanced co-location of EUofficials in the UN mission, some possibly double-hatted, and pos-sible re-hatting between UN and EU operations should be takeninto due consideration.’38

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38. ‘EU-UN Cooperation in Civil-ian Crisis Management’, Annex IVto the Annex, ESDP Presidency Re-port, European Council, 13 De-cember 2004, paras. 16-17.

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The bridging model was further explored in the EU-UN exer-cise conducted in April 2005 (EST 05), which examined the issueof transition between the EU and the UN in three different cases: aUN military operation taking over an EU operation (Artemis type);an EU police operation taking over a UN operation (UNIPTF-EUPM type; see scenario 4); and health and medical support. Theexercise, which was not a joint EU-UN exercise but EU-led, withthe UN being invited to participate, looked at the practical modal-ities of EU-UN cooperation, drawing on previous operations. Acertain number of points were clarified, particularly in relation tothe use of battle groups at the request of the UN, as well as issuessuch as planning, chains of command, rules of engagement, liai-son officers or information-sharing.

In so far as the use of the battle groups is concerned, while theUN Secretariat welcomes the EU initiative, UN officials haveexpressed the wish that the battle groups be possibly placed underUN command, that they be deployed for more than 120 days (forexample by deploying two battle groups one after the other), andthat they be possibly re-hatted (‘blue-hatted’) at the end of thetransition.39 In response, the EU might contemplate a deploy-ment of the battle groups in a more flexible way, but the possibil-ity to have EU-labelled military assets put under UN commandcontinues to meet strong reluctance in EU capitals.

Scenario 4: An EU operation taking over a UN operation

The scenario in which the EU takes over a UN operation was illus-trated in the UN handover to the EU Police Mission in Bosniaand Herzegovina, and was also explored in the EU-UN exercise(EST 05) as one the possible scenarios of EU-UN cooperation.Such an option could be further implemented if the EU had totake over the UN Mission in Kosovo, which may be considered inthe short to medium term. Yet, leaving aside this case, thechances that such an option be replicated for a police operationare not very high.

Scenario 5: An EU operation deployed simultaneously with aUN operation – the ‘stand-by model’

While searching for ways to improve its capacity to react rapidlyand efficiently to incidents occurring within operations and jeop-

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39. Interviews with participants inthe exercise.

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ardising the security of peacekeepers or the implementation ofthe mandate, the UN elaborated the concept of a ‘strategicreserve’,40 that would be ‘on call’ and able to quickly ‘respond todangerously unfolding circumstances’41 within UN operations.With the same logic and in the context of the EU-UN relation, theUN Secretariat has put forward the concept of a ‘stand-by model’,that would ‘consist of an ‘over-the-horizon reserve’ or an ‘extrac-tion force’ provided by the EU in support of a UN operation.42

Through a rapid reaction force deployed in parallel with a givenUN operation, the EU would be in a position to support the oper-ation in the case of difficulties encountered on the ground. In adifferent context, the forces deployed by the United Kingdom inthe territorial waters of Sierra Leone following their militaryintervention in that country in 2000, or the French-led OperationLicorne in Ivory Coast, deployed simultaneously with the UNOCI,can be described as ‘over-the-horizon’ forces. They both are/weresupposed to, among other things, give the UN the rapid reactioncapacity that it is lacking.

EU member states are very sceptical about such an option. EUdocuments highlight the ‘complicated coordination’ that itwould involve, and put forward its limited ‘usability’ as well as the‘considerable associated risks’ that it would entail.43 This scenariowould indeed combine two levels of difficulty: one coming fromthe nature of the mandate that would require adequate militarycapabilities backed by a strong and lasting political commitment;the other stemming from the simultaneity of deployment with theUN that would need further-reaching coordination mechanismsthan the ones currently discussed.

Yet EU member states cannot totally rule out such a scenario.Once operational, although not part of their mandate, the battlegroups will be formatted for this kind of role. Furthermore, theway Operation Artemis was launched showed how rapidly scenar-ios of EU-UN cooperation can change. As an example, in the eventthat the UN cannot take over an EU battle group with adequatemilitary capacities (following the ‘bridging model’ scenario), themaintenance of an EU presence simultaneously with the UNmight come close to the concept of an ‘over-the-horizon’ force. Forthe time being, the EU has not yet thoroughly investigated norevaluated the implications of this option in terms of cooperationwith the UN.

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40. See Implementation of the rec-ommendations of the SpecialCommittee on Peacekeeping Op-erations, Report of the Secretary-General, A/59/608, 15 December2004, paras. 13-18.



43. Ibid.

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Scenario 6: An EU component of a UN operation – the ‘modu-lar approach’

The sixth scenario of a possible EU-UN cooperation is one in whichthe EU would contribute to an UN operation by providing onecomponent to the operation (called ‘modular approach’ in the EUterminology). This option is very much favoured by the UN, whichwould like to see the EU committed within UN operations and pos-sibly under UN command. Here again, a distinction is to be madebetween military aspects and civilian aspects of crisis management.In the military sphere, the option of having an EU componentwithin a UN operation is, as seen earlier, not favoured by the EU.However, theoretically, and on the condition that special arrange-ments would be made regarding the chain of command, EU mem-ber states might consider having an ‘EU-labelled’ component in aUN-led operation. This could give the EU some kind of visibility, oreven make national contributions more acceptable to recipientcountries, as in a way was the case for Artemis.44 Although this is notthe most likely scenario given EU concerns vis-à-vis the UN, such anoption is not to be excluded in the longer term.

Along with the issue of the re-hatting of EU member statesassets in a UN operation, the UN Secretariat also invokes theexample of the Multinational Stand-by Force High ReadinessBrigade for UN Operations (SHIRBRIG) that was deployed inEthiopia and Eritrea in 2000-01 before the UN took over. TheSHIRBRIG is in general available to the UN as part of the UNStandby Arrangement System (UNSAS) and could inspire the EUin its relation with the UN. In his report ‘In larger freedom’ the UNSecretary-General even talks about memoranda of understandingsigned with regional organisations, which would ideally place the‘conflict prevention or peacekeeping capacity’ of these institu-tions ‘within the framework of the United Nations StandbyArrangements System’,45 a proposal that has little chance of meet-ing EU approval.

In the civilian sphere, things are more open, and the option ofhaving an EU component – police force for example – in a largerUN operation is there better developed and accepted. Andalthough it is made clear that such civilian elements shouldremain under the EU ‘own chain of command’, they may alsoreport to the UN chain of command.46 The EU also talks about an‘integrated and inclusive framework’, as well as about the neces-sity to define ‘appropriate command arrangements and coordi-

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44. Where an EU operation wasbetter accepted by regional statesthan a French operation wouldhave been.


46. ‘EU-UN Cooperation in Civil-ian Crisis Management’, Annex IVto the Annex, ESDP Presidency Re-port, European Council, 13 De-cember 2004, para. 14.

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nation requirements including reporting mechanisms and com-patibility of concepts and procedures’,47 which pushes the poten-tial of EU-UN cooperation much further than in the militarysphere. EU assistance in the civilian sphere is very much favouredby the UN, in the context of the project of a UN Standing CivilianPolice Capacity, but also regarding the provision of civilianexperts by the EU.

Finally, along with these main scenarios, the EU could assistthe UN (DPKO in particular) at different stages of the launchingof an operation (planning and force generation, civilian experts,information, etc.). Looking ahead, together with the necessity tofurther explore the modalities underlying the above-described sce-narios, issues such as information-sharing and the elaboration ofa security agreement, the establishment of permanent liaison offi-cers, compatibility of standards and rules of engagement, as wellas financing of operations, will all need to be looked at by the twosecretariats and the Steering Committee. In these talks, a twofoldeffort to (a) look at crisis management as a continuum involvingconflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, and (b)combine military and civilian aspects of crisis management,would allow for a more comprehensive and coherent approach,within both the UN and the EU.

Conclusion

EU-UN relations in the field of military and civilian crisis manage-ment have come a long way since the first contacts of the year 2000.Both organisations have made significant efforts to make this rela-tionship constructive and achievements tangible. However, such arelationship remains characterised by a form of imbalance thatstems from the different agendas of the two organisations. The UNhas tried to involve the EU as much as possible in peacekeepingactivities – in Africa in particular – and is advocating a strong andinstitutionalised partnership that would not be confined to thesubcontracting model and some kind of assistance, but would alsoallow for direct EU contribution to UN-led operations. Whiledoing this, the UN has always insisted on the complementarity ofthe two approaches. The EU stance matches other concerns: itacknowledges the need to cooperate at different levels, but favoursa more flexible and case-by-case approach, where EU autonomy of

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47. Ibid.

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decision and action would prevail and with no guarantee that theUN needs will ever be met.

In this overall context, much remains to be explored. EU-UNcooperation in crisis management is recent; the evolving environ-ment in which it takes place constantly creates new opportunitiesor new incentives to move forward, but also new concerns thatmay slow down the process.

In this respect, two factors will determine the shape the EU-UNrelationship in the coming months and years. The first is the out-come of the two processes of the reform of the United Nations onthe one hand, the ratification process of the European Constitu-tion on the other. The second is the way the two institutions tacklethe security and development challenges with which Africa is con-fronted.

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What ‘reinforcement’ for theSecurity Council?Jeffrey Laurenti

After a decade of ever more sterile debate about ‘reforming’ theSecurity Council, the Institute has provocatively recast the issue asone of ‘reinforcing’ it. This casts the debate in a decidedly differentlight, since the explicit question is not simply how to revise themembership and decision-making of this international policybody, but whether tangibly better security may be achieved by put-ting more strength behind the Council.

Not all actors in the international community will champion astrengthening of this institution. Some fear enhancing the capac-ity of a distant conclave of the powerful to meddle in their localaffairs; others bridle at a supranational institution that may cir-cumscribe the room for manoeuvre of the powerful. Yet ‘reinforce-ment’ may itself be ambiguous, and its invocation may provide itsown invitation to mischief. For reinforcements can come fromoutside, and if those doing the reinforcing prefer to keepautonomous control of their ‘reinforcement’, the supposed bene-ficiary may actually become more marginalised and – dare one say– irrelevant.

Indeed, one of the issues about the Council’s future role iswhether decision-making and enforcement will migrate onceagain, as it did for most of the Cold War, to dedicated power cen-tres that find the global mechanisms, and perhaps the globalvision, embodied in the Security Council a source of frustration.Pressures in this direction have been building for a decade, mani-fested in ideologically rooted calls for ad hoc coalitions of thewilling, the off-loading of security cooperation to regionalgroups and unilateral initiatives to maintain international peaceand security.

Europeans may have thought that NATO’s decision to go to warover Kosovo was a one-shot circumvention of the UN SecurityCouncil, but many in Washington celebrated the September 1998decision in the North Atlantic Council as a momentous step for-ward in weaning Europeans away from their fixation on Charter

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legalisms. And the Bush administration’s war in Iraq was all along– allegedly, of course – a helpful reinforcement to the SecurityCouncil to ensure its resolutions would be respected.

The UN Security Council and national sovereignty

It is important, therefore, to begin our discussion by asking what itis that really ails the Council, and to consider remedies accordingly.

As the Bush administration’s newly nominated UN representa-tive once remarked, ‘the real issue is the legitimacy of the UnitedNations’. And he was not talking about the representativeness ofthe Security Council as the legitimacy problem, but rather theclaim (or ‘pretension’) of the international body to rein in thebehaviour of its most sovereign member. Even senior officials ofthe supposedly friendly Clinton administration took pains todescribe the UN as just another wrench in the toolkit for imple-menting its foreign policy goals. Of course, dedicated multilateral-ists might say that forum-shopping for whatever multilateral fig-leaf will cover what you want to do is better than nakedunilateralism, but this may be no more significant than Americancourts’ parsing the distinction between indecency and obscenity.

The United States is not the only country that questions theauthority that states (or, as the Charter would have us believe, ‘thepeoples of the United Nations’) have conferred on UN institutionsto regulate state behaviour in the domain of security; many othersare equally vigilant, and often more consistent, in defence of tradi-tional sovereignty – think of, say, China, Iran or Cuba. But the sov-ereignists in developing countries imagine there is a structural fixto restrain the Security Council’s evolution into meddlesomepoliceman: just tilt the balance of seats on the Security Counciltowards the African and Asian groups, and they can curb Westernproclivities to enforce ‘international’ standards on benightedregimes. For these, it is the outsized influence of largely Westernpower centres in setting the global security agenda that under-mines the ‘legitimacy’ of the Security Council.

To be sure, this complaint reflects a minority view. Unfortu-nately, the supposed remedy resonates in a UN political systemwhere inclusiveness is seen as the answer to almost any problem(although many voting delegates are able to draw the line at includ-ing non-governmental actors). But inclusiveness is a cure for a dif-

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ferent disease than what is actually debilitating the Security Council,and applying it in this case risks sending the patient into shock. Theincentives for major actors to bypass the system altogether if promis-cuous enlargement renders the Council unworkable will be great.

This is not just an American problem. To the extent that Europecontinues to emerge as a global leader and agenda-setter, Euro-peans, too, have an interest in a Security Council that can decideand then implement. They may well inherit a role that has largelybeen America’s for the past six decades, and if so they too willforum-shop or bypass altogether a body that has become unwieldyand immobilised. In that respect Europeans, too, might be cau-tious about calls for significant expansion of the Security Council.

Decision-making and implementation

For what is it that really ails the Security Council? My diagnosis isthat the fundamental disorder lies in the disconnect between deci-sion-making and implementation, and especially between thepower to decide and the power resources actually committed toimplementation. An ossified membership structure and a crudelyweighted voting system are aggravating manifestations of theunderlying disorder.

In contrast to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, whoseleading members were prepared as recently as 1999 to go to war touphold the ‘credibility’ of a threat they had collectively issued in itsname, the United Nations has not been able to count on its mem-bers’ concern for Council credibility to back up their votes withaction. It is striking that the permanent members of the Council,after a flurry of activity in UN peace operations in the 1990s, havedisappeared from them since the UN Protection Force in Bosniawas converted to a NATO operation in 1996.

Initially the allergy to serving under UN command was anAmerican phenomenon (even when Americans ran the UN mis-sion, as in Somalia), but the contagion has spread. Britain andFrance, which had pioneered major-power leadership of a large-scale UN peace operation in former Yugoslavia, now refuse to puttheir troops under UN command; even when they have stepped upto reinforce an embattled UN operation, as in Sierra Leone and inCongo and Ivory Coast respectively, they have done so under sepa-rate, national command. Today the Council’s guarantor powers

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have become the absentee landlords of international security, rely-ing on others to supply the troops for missions whose mandatesthe Five have written.

The reasons why military contingents of the Security Council’spermanent members no longer participate in UN peace operationsare several, ranging from chauvinist resistance to ‘foreign’ com-mand and fear of a creeping world government, to concern aboutunreliable partners and substandard military commanders fromdeveloping countries, to military leaders’ distaste for the presumed‘peacenik’ culture of the United Nations, where the politicalrestraints on robust use of armed force are believed to be exponen-tially tighter and more paralysing than those set by their civiliannational leaders. Many other NATO states have followed the lead ofthe Western permanent members in keeping a discreet distancefrom UN peace operations in recent years, leaving countries likePakistan and Bangladesh, India and Jordan, and Ethiopia andGhana as the UN’s leading troop contributors.

Not surprisingly, the countries still willing to provide troops toUN operations have increasingly clamoured for a share in decision-making on the mandates and goals of the missions their soldiersare implementing – a demand that arose after moralising Westerngovernments that refused to put their own troops on the ground inSierra Leone wrote aggressive mandates for peacekeepers there,even though the governments sending many of those peacekeeperswere intent on keeping them out of someone else’s civil war.

Yet for all the troop contributing countries’ insistence on hav-ing a role in deciding the mandates and objectives of peace opera-tions, they have notably failed to demand that their own regionalgroups endorse only major troop contributors for their region’sseats on the Security Council. In fact, the Western group is the onlyregional grouping where a candidate country’s troop contribu-tions ever emerge as a factor in the campaign for election to theSecurity Council – and it is noteworthy that, for 2005-2006, eventhis group is represented by a determined non-performer likeGreece and a decidedly virtuous but second-tier contributor likeDenmark.

The reality is that troop contributing countries have not soughtto challenge the entrenched system of regional group rotation onthe Security Council. This suggests the difficulty inherent in mak-ing even incremental changes to the procedures governing SecurityCouncil membership. Instead, most governments prefer to seek

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the Holy Grail of a far-reaching overhaul, hoping that expansionmay painlessly satisfy national ambitions and contributors’ griev-ances. To that end, member states have been consumed by a pro-tracted debate in the famously open-ended working group onreform of the Security Council, which has been as long-running ashow in New York as any musical on Broadway.

The long path to reform

Though it has not exactly drawn crowds to the galleries of the Gen-eral Assembly, within a six-block radius of United Nations head-quarters and in some interested foreign ministries the debate onSecurity Council reform is all-consuming. Nothing, it seems,brings out the repressed interior designer in the hearts of diplo-mats as much as discussion of rearranging the furniture in theSecurity Council chamber. But this is definitely a political insider’sgame. The issue inspires yawns among most of the informed pub-lic and even in a normally opinionated press.

Moreover, the working group on Security Council reform maybe open-ended, but it is not particularly open. It has never solicitedthe views of non-governmental organisations that regularly inter-act with the Council, such as the humanitarian relief agencies thatsometimes deploy more people to conflict-torn countries than theUN itself does, about the dysfunctions they observe in the Coun-cil’s structure and changes that could improve its performance.The wider public is totally disengaged, except for narrow networksin a handful of countries where foreign ministries have investedheavily in promoting their own membership – or blocking some-one else’s – as a matter of national pride.

Security Council reform has, of course, been a battle cry sincethe Council itself shook off its four decades of Cold War slumberand came to life as a nerve centre of international politics. And theclashes of national ambitions over the dozen years since the Clin-ton administration’s embrace of reform helped launch the open-ended debate in 1993 remain apparently irreconcilable. Indeed, theconventional wisdom among most jaundiced UN observers is thatthe chances of Security Council revision in the foreseeable futureare little better than zero.

That is too despairing a judgment, though bookmakers wouldprobably not lose money by putting odds on continued paralysis.

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The Secretary-General clearly wanted the High-Level Panel onglobal security to address this issue head-on in the hope of break-ing the log-jam, and the Panel exceeded the realists’ expectations infashioning an almost compelling case for Security Council reform.

With great delicacy, the Panel hinted at the deformity at theheart of the Council’s eroding credibility, along the lines of the cri-tique advanced in this chapter: ‘the ability of the five permanentmembers to keep critical issues of peace and security off the Secu-rity Council’s agenda’. Given its membership and its avowed inten-tion to come up with a package that could be adopted within a year,the Panel prudently declined to focus on problems that cannot befixed in 2005. Rather, it moved smartly to spell out the principlesthat its members agreed should guide Council reform in the nearterm: (1) ‘greater involvement . . . by those who contribute most’; (2) making it ‘more representative . . . of the developing world’; (3) ‘not impair the effectiveness of the Security Council’ (normally

understood as code for keeping the Council relatively small);and

(4) ‘increase the democratic and accountable nature of the body’.

The Panel then offered two models for revision, one that flowsfrom the logic of these four criteria (though falling short on crite-rion 3), and another – inserted after protests from relevant govern-ments – that arguably meets criterion 2 and, perhaps transiently, 1.

The debate, inevitably, has focused on whether more heavy-weight contributors from each region should be added throughpermanent seats or longer-term elected seats, and the implica-tions of that choice are profound. But with the Panel’s far-sighted recommendation for a mandatory revisiting of theCouncil’s composition in 2020, ways may be envisioned to squarethat circle.

Both alternatives reported by the Panel would expand the num-ber of major contributors to peace and security on the Council.This is not an objective shared by many representatives of smallstates in the UN, especially in the developing world, who are inadamant denial of the premise that size matters. The size of mem-bers’ contributions to peace and security (enshrined in Art. 23 butoften ignored, especially in African rotation) is not the only suchfundamental issue, however. Size also matters in terms of a politi-cal body’s efficiency, especially a body faced with an exploding

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security crisis – and the Panel’s call for enlargement of the SecurityCouncil to 24 will seem promiscuous to those governments thathave arduously had to build Council coalitions for robust action.They have a major stake in keeping the Council numbers down.

Membership expansion

A highly motivated group of countries has energetically sought tofashion a plan that wins the required 127 votes for adoption in theGeneral Assembly. This involves delicate compromises and, likemany dazzling feats of legislative engineering, bridges across policygaps that may be built on hazy rather than solid foundations. Fourcountries have, at the time of writing, submitted a draft ‘frameworkresolution’ endorsing, in principle, the addition of permanentseats – drawing on the High-Level Panel’s Model A – for a Councilof 25. This moves suggests the sponsors – Brazil, Germany, India,and Japan – believe they have at last found the formula that canobtain the necessary 127 votes, as required by Art. 108 of the UNCharter.

But, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, the supportersof this revision must leap a number of other obstacles in their wayafter the test vote in the Assembly on a framework resolution. Thesecond obstacle is the regional caucuses that would then select theactual names of states to engrave in the UN Charter; the four spon-soring states may not all be guaranteed selection in their region,and unwelcome surprises in the regional caucuses could weakensupport for the ultimate Charter amendment. Beyond that, 127governments – including all five of the 1945 permanent members –must then ratify the Charter amendment.

The Americans have already made clear that the United Stateswill not ratify an amendment that adds to the number of veto-wielding permanent members. This is a problem, not only becauseboth the lead sponsors of the proposal themselves bristle at second-rate permanency, but because a veto for newly permanent Africanmembers is specifically the condition for Africans’ support of theresolution. African representatives are innately suspicious ofpower and privilege, and would normally be quick to deflate anypretensions, whether among their own or outsiders, to claim per-manent privilege as the entitlement of overweening economic ormilitary power. They have been brought around to supporting per-

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manent seats by the lure of African vetoes to block American initia-tives, which they believe is the only leverage they will ever have toforce increased attention from an indifferent superpower toAfrican security problems. In this they may be wrong: Washington– and probably Europe as well – would almost certainly circumventUN frameworks if a veto by an objectively impotent African coun-try thwarts the will to act of a hard-won majority of the SecurityCouncil. Still, the complete marginalisation of the Security Coun-cil would not be ideal for Washington, and Americans will standfirm to save the Security Council from the paralysis of proliferatingvetoes. By stating unambiguously that it will accept no revisionthat provides additional vetoes, the United States has set out one ofits red lines.

Another red line is the size of the expansion itself – not onlybecause 25 is in principle too many for Washington, but becauseany expansion of that magnitude will inevitably make the vote of atleast one or two African and Asian members indispensable forapproval of any resolution. The regional distribution of seatswithin the existing 15-member Council allows for the required 9-vote working majority to be formed just from countries in Europeand the Americas. It was precisely such a majority that approved theUN sanctions against Libya in 1992 – a resolution on which everyAfrican and Asian member of the Council abstained. The UnitedStates has little reason to concede to countries congenitally suspi-cious of Western values and purposes a choke-hold on resoluteaction by the Security Council.

The fact is that the United States has no compelling self-interestin promoting any alternative to the existing composition of theCouncil. The current size of 15 is already on the high end for aneffective executive committee, and the existing inner directorate offive may include some occasionally difficult partners but is of arealistic size. Indeed, it can be convenient, on issues where Wash-ington cannot build a majority for its policies, to blame failure on aprospective French or Chinese veto to justify marginalising theCouncil. America’s reigning conservatives might wish to give Japanthe permanent seat that France now holds, which the currentlychimerical call for a single ‘EU’ seat might permit, but even theyrealise that their ideal reform – reducing the number of permanentmembers, preferably to one – is not achievable. For Washingtontoday, Security Council reform is someone else’s problem, and itsseeming passivity masks purpose.

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The United States is not the only country of weight that is pre-pared to stonewall a Council revision that is not carefully tailoredto meet its practical objections. Another permanent member hasalso finally tipped its hand on its red line: the apparently intenseChinese opposition to Japan’s bid for a permanent seat. It is notclear whether the Chinese government’s resistance is genuinelyrooted in the historical evasiveness of Japanese officialdom regard-ing wartime responsibility, their refusal to pay war reparations, andthe apparent continuing dominance of Japanese politics by theconservative political class that had launched the war (all of whichmay factor into the nationalist animosity towards Japan among theChinese public), or whether it aims simply to raise the price of adeal. But the intensity of public hostility, on view in the Aprildemonstrations in several Chinese cities, may abort any cunningstrategy to extort a high price from Tokyo in exchange for acquies-cence to a Japanese permanent seat. Of course, Japan is the onlycandidate country that Americans believe actually deserves a per-manent seat based on the merits, given its outsized share of theworld economy and UN assessments (both now on a downward tra-jectory), to say nothing of the ‘I owe you’(s) that the Koizumi gov-ernment has accumulated thanks to its loyal support of Bushadministration policies; Beijing’s unyielding stance against Japanwould drain what little interest Washington can muster in expan-sion of permanent membership.

The European Union and the future of UNSC reform

In terms of self-interest it does not really matter much to Euro-peans whether Japan becomes a permanent fixture at the Counciltable or not – they do not expect Tokyo to relieve them of their cur-rent troop or financing burdens. Europeans are famously frag-mented, however, on whether adding a permanent seat for theEuropean Union’s largest member is desirable. Britain and Francehave a strong incentive to bring Germany into the Council’s innercircle: if left outside, the Germans will surely press for a consoli-dated EU seat at the expense of separate British and French per-manent seats, but if they gain their own permanent seat, theBritish and French can feel secure in retaining theirs in perpetuity.The prospect of a ‘G-3’ motor driving EU foreign policy, enshrinedby permanency in the UN Security Council, pleases some and dis-

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mays others elsewhere in the Union. The normally fractious Ital-ians are uncharacteristically united and feisty in opposing perma-nency (including Germany). Their views are not shared by everymember of the EU, but they have invested notable energy in build-ing alliances with partners in every region to keep Model A fromleaving the station. Thus, while American passivity on the Councilreform project reflects Washington’s lack of passion, Europe’smutually cancelling passions on the subject have produced EUpassivity.

The United Nations is notoriously the place where, in defianceof the laws of physics, inertia can develop momentum. Alreadywarning signs of the UN membership’s traditional immobilism onthis issue are beginning to appear. If the coalition that Japan andGermany have so painstakingly assembled to put them across thetop ultimately falters, it will not be for lack of imagination on thepart of their diplomats, but because of the inherent contradictionsof permanent membership: it is very hard to satisfy all the nationalambitions for a permanent place in the inner circle and have a man-ageably sized Council – much less a Council that is, in the Panel’swords, ‘democratic and accountable’ from the perspective of eitherthe regional groupings or the full UN membership.

The biggest inherent contradiction, of course, is that perma-nence eliminates a member’s incentive to perform – even more inthe universe of states than in that of tenured university faculty. Wehave seen that the states most securely implanted on the SecurityCouncil have been the most visible non-contributors of troops toUN peace operations, and there is nothing in the various plans forexpansion of permanent membership that would tie their seats totheir contribution to security operations. (It is no coincidence thatthe two permanent members that spent much of the 1990s show-ily supporting UN peace operations with troops on the groundwere the two European members that felt their permanent status,after being shorn of their 1945 empires, was most under attack.)Conversely, a number of major states outside the Permanent Fivehave viewed contributions of personnel to international securityoperations as evidence of their global indispensability and of theneed to include them in decision-making circles (think of Brazil,Germany, India, Italy and Pakistan). It would be perverse if theunintended consequence of expanding the ranks of permanentmembers were to be a further shrinkage in the pool of major con-tributors.

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Given these difficulties, if ‘Plan A’ fails, can – or should – Coun-cil reform still be salvaged? Kofi Annan’s High-Level Panel offeredtwo recommendations in this arena that could be the key. The firstis its insistence that any revision now would be only an interimsolution, with a mandatory re-examination in 2020 (a ‘sunset’clause could make such a re-examination truly compulsory). Now,‘2020’ connotes clarity of vision, and we may well see some prob-lems that are today politically untouchable as realistic possibilitiesfor resolution two decades hence. The EU common security anddefence policy enshrined in the draft European constitution is atthe moment still more speculative than real, but two decades ofhabit may make separate privileged seats on the Security Councilfor Britain and France seem quaint and obsolete – even in Londonand Paris, where by the 2020s the experience of European andglobal politics of nearly all the diplomats and politicians who willthen be in office will have been forged post-Maastricht. If, ideally,the main international disputes are resolved in the next decade ortwo, the veto power could then be reconsidered, and that decisivecontribution of Josef Stalin to the Council’s structure might berationalised. It thus becomes eminently realistic to fix 2020 as theyear for making a long-term reform of what really ails the SecurityCouncil, and to treat the 2005 measure as a short-time patch.

The second relevant recommendation of the High-Level Panelthat could point the way to a ‘fallback’ reform is the interim struc-ture outlined in Model B – seats reserved for major contributors topeace and security in each region, elected to longer terms (say, fouror five years) and eligible for successive re-election. The Panel help-fully offered a list of quantifiable criteria for determining whichstates in each region might be eligible for these longer-term seats(criteria that would be equally relevant to identifying members thatmight claim seats without election, so long as they continued astheir region’s leader).

This model could be further modified to allow a region to fill itsnew seat for a single 15-year term – the full life-span of the interimarrangement – giving the most uncontestedly important contribu-tors the opportunity to rehearse de facto permanency without pre-judging the eventual reconfiguration of the Council two decadeshence.

The other modification to Model B that would seem desirable,to meet the Panel’s own criterion of effectiveness, is to limit the sizeof the interim Security Council to the 20 that the United States had

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signalled in 1997 was the most it could accept. ‘20 till 2020’ canmake eminent sense: we would have nearly two decades to seewhether a more limited expansion adversely affects the Council’sefficient decision-making in a crisis; and the results would helpguide agreement on the long-term reform in the 2020s.

What none of the plans floated in the current Security Councildebate addresses is the most crucial reinforcement that the inter-national security system needs: concrete commitments of forcescallable by the Council in a crisis. This too will clearly have to awaitthe major overhaul of the 2020s, since the current debate has pro-ceeded too far down the road of furniture rearrangement to getback to the basics. But it is not too soon to put out the marker forthe 2020 revision: every member state assuming a seat on the Secu-rity Council, whether by election or by entitlement based onextraordinary contributions, could (and should) be required dur-ing that state’s tenure as a member to commit appropriately deter-mined military units to a rapid deployment force capability underthe authority of the Council. Only its vote in Council against a pro-posed deployment would exempt a member’s pre-committed con-tingent from short-term call-up.

Such a linkage of decision-making to implementation, ofcourse, could be accomplished even with the existing Council com-position. It would make far more of a dent in what ails the Councilthan all the furniture renovations in the Council chamber onwhich various expansion plans are premised. This is the ‘reinforce-ment’ that the Security Council most desperately needs. Whateverthe short-term ‘fix’ may be regarding membership that 127 mem-ber states can agree on and the existing permanent members willratify, it is clear that they will not act now on the hard questions ofcapacity.

Reinforced capacity is an area where a uniting Europe can makea decisive contribution. It can begin immediately by launching theinternational debate on what military commitments should berequired (‘from each according to his ability’) for Council member-ship after 2020; after all, ambitious projects easily take 15 years ormore in international consensus-building. The EU could consider– and, even more boldly, initiate – creation of an internationalstanding force dedicated to UN peace operations, recruited fromwithin and beyond its borders and financed in part from the UNreimbursements on their deployment. This would provide theUnited Nations with the kind of visionary leadership that for much

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of the twentieth century was associated with the United States, butwhich the polarised and self-referential politics of America todayseem incapable of providing. It is through such concrete reinforce-ment that an emboldened European Union, in partnership withpeoples and states in all the world’s regions, can most productivelyestablish its twenty-first century global role.

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Regional organisations andcollective security: the role of the European UnionKennedy Graham with Tânia Felício

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1. The contents of this chapter aredrawn principally from two recentpublications: Kennedy Graham,‘Towards Effective Multilateral-ism: The EU and the UN – Partnersin Crisis Management’, WorkingPaper 13 (Brussels: The EuropeanPolicy Centre, November 2004);and K. Graham & T. Felício, ‘Re-gional Security and Global Gover-nance: A Proposal for a Regional-Global Security Mechanism’,Egmont Paper 4 (Brussels: Acade-mia Press for IRRI-KIIB, January2005). A longer version of the sec-ond paper is also available onlineat the website of the United Na-tions University Programme inComparative Regional Integra-tion Studies, www.unu.cris.

2. Kofi Annan declared: ‘I believewe can develop a new vision ofglobal security . . . A vision thatdraws upon the resources and le-gitimacy of a network of effectiveand mutually reinforcing multilat-eral mechanisms – regional andglobal – that are flexible and re-sponsive to our rapidly changingand integrating world.’ Secretary-General of the United Nations,Address to 5th UN-Regional Or-ganisations High-Level Meeting,July 2003.

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The metamorphosis in the nature of regionalism – from its almostexclusively economic and defence dimensions, from the 1940s tothe 1980s, towards a comprehensive multi-sectoral movement ofthe 1990s involving political, cultural, economic and securityissues in the broadest contemporary sense – is transforming inter-national organisations as regions develop an integrated skein ofmutual interests among member states. But much of this, mostparticularly in the area of security, has been ad hoc and haphazard.The challenge of the next decade is to replace this improvised, polit-ically selective, resource-skewed approach to regionalism with amore planned, consistent yet flexible, resource-balanced style ofregional and global governance which would find the adequatesynergy between regional organisations and the United Nations.1

For this to occur, a tension within the present security systemwill need to be resolved. In July 2003 the UN Secretary-Generaladvanced a ‘vision’ of global security based on a future partnershipbetween the UN and regional organisations – one that would beeffective, holistic and global in nature, emphasising the concept oflegitimacy that can come ‘only from the United Nations’.2 Progresstowards such a ‘regional-global security mechanism’, however, isimpeded by the endemic shortcomings of the current system.

In 2005 the debate is under way over how best to respond to thiscrisis of confidence in collective security. Issues such as reaffirm-ing and refining the rules of the use of force, the rights of self-defence in an age of terrorism and possible WMD proliferation,expansion and reform of the Security Council, and the institu-tional means of making peace-building and human rights protec-tion more effective – all are on the agenda. Where regional organi-sations fit into this future scenario remains uncertain. But thedebate on their role in partnership with the UN will be carried inthe 6th UN-Regional Organisations High-Level Meeting in July,the 60th anniversary summit debate of the General Assembly inSeptember and the third Security Council meeting with regional

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organisations in October. The next six months are thus critical tostrengthening the partnership between the UN and regional andother intergovernmental organisations in peace and security.

Regionalism under construction: developing a ‘regional-global security mechanism’

A structured relationship between the Security Council andregional organisations is fundamental to the success of a futureglobal-regional security mechanism. The development of a‘regional-global security mechanism’ in the multilateral era is bestunderstood as having comprised three distinct periods: shapingthe constitutional relationship (1919-45); building the institu-tional network (1946-92); and developing a framework for cooper-ation (1992-2004). The constitutional, institutional and coopera-tion phases in the development of the mechanism bring us to thepresent time – a fourth ‘moment of opportunity’.

The constitutional phase

The fundamental relationship between universalism and region-alism in security doctrine was shaped during the two formativemoments of institutional planning – 1919 and 1942-45. Thedeliberations over the League of Nations and the UN laid thefoundations for the present system. In one sense the securityarrangement embodied by the League was, to some extent, anessentially regional affair, being wrought in the aftermath of theGreat War in Europe and designed to prevent any repetitionthereof – with the same approach being applicable to Latin Amer-ica. Overall, however, regionalism played no significant role in theLeague’s attempts at conflict resolution and management, ill-fated as they were.

In the early planning for a new world organisation during theSecond World War, the issue of ‘security regionalism’ became amatter of dispute. The preliminary outline of an ‘interim UN’envisaged 26 member states, with an Executive Committee ofnine, comprising the Big Four which had ‘policing duties’ (UnitedStates, United Kingdom, USSR and China) and five ‘regional rep-resentatives’. The regional nature of the Committee, however, wasopposed by a majority in the US planning team, and the outline

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was dropped. The principle of regionalism was at various times ‘in’and ‘out’ of subsequent planning, and at the San Francisco Con-ference of May 1945 the choice between regionalism and univer-salism proved controversial. Most delegations, led by the LatinAmerican bloc and the Arab states, with support from Britain andits commonwealth and also the USSR, favoured regionalism, butthe United States remained steadfastly opposed. The resultingcompromise, contained in Chapters VII and VIII of the UN Char-ter, proved to be critical.

The final provisions agreed upon in the Charter reflect whathas been called a ‘mild discouragement’ of regionalism. The Char-ter allows for regional security arrangements for the maintenanceof peace and security as a support to the primary role exercised bythe Security Council. Nothing is to preclude the existence ofregional agencies for dealing with international peace and securityas are appropriate for regional action, provided they are compati-ble with its purposes and principles. But this was not provided forthrough any prefabricated mechanism. Instead, the Charter madeprovision for a vaguely apprehended regionalism, with regionalagencies or arrangements encouraged to take initiatives in pacificsettlement of disputes but with enforcement only to be under-taken on the authorisation of the Council.

The institutional phase

The forty-year period of the Cold War paralysed the functionaloperation of the Security Council and thus the development of anyregional-global security mechanism. It was during this period,however, that the decolonisation process occurred, accompaniedby the growth of regional agencies in virtually all regions of theworld. The 1940s saw their establishment in the two regions wherethe political consciousness of ‘regionalism’ was most developed atthat time – Latin America and the Arab world – the most vocal pro-ponents of regional security during the ‘constitutional phase’. Thiswas followed in the 1950s with a burst of unparalleled creativity inregional institution-building in Europe.

The process of regionalisation continued ineluctably throughthe ensuing three decades. Once the decolonisation process hadrun its course in Africa and Asia in the 1960s and the Caribbeanand the Pacific in the 1970s, supplemented by ‘latecomers’ in the1980s and the newly independent states of Eastern Europe and

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Central Asia in the 1990s, a global network of regional and subre-gional agencies was finally in place.

The cooperation phase

Concomitantly with the development of the global ‘fabric of peace’developed during the 1990s, the UN began to act on the recogni-tion of the potential for greater involvement of regional agencies ina cooperative relationship with the UN in the pursuit of interna-tional security. A series of meetings have been held since the mid-1990s designed to develop a strategic partnership between theglobal body and the regional agencies. It is clear that the UN is seri-ous in seeking to develop a ‘regional-global security mechanism’for the twenty-first century. Two phenomena in particular charac-terise to date the experience in strategic planning for that goal:increased interest from the ‘regionals’ themselves and the develop-ment of a normative framework between them and the UN.Accordingly, five high-level meetings between the UN and regionalorganisations were convened by the Secretary-General to discussissues of cooperation in peace and security between 1994 and 2003.These efforts have resulted in a ‘Framework of Co-operation’between the UN and regional organisations with guiding princi-ples for collaboration in conflict prevention and peace-building. Asixth meeting is scheduled for July 2005. Important initiatives areunder way in preparation for this meeting to strengthen the UN-RO partnership.3

Two special meetings with regional organisations have alsobeen held by the Security Council. At the first, in April 2003, onlysix organisations attended (AU, ECOWAS, EU, LAS, OSCE andOAS) under the theme ‘The Security Council and Regional Organi-zations: Facing New Challenges to International Peace and Secu-rity’. The objective of the meeting was to engender an ‘interactivedialogue’ between the Council and regional organisations, mark-ing perhaps a ‘new stage’ in international relations, since the cur-rent situation then prevailing obliged the Council to identifycourses of action that would strengthen international security. Thesecond meeting took place in July 2004 under Romanian presi-dency, this time with the aim of identifying new methods of coop-eration between the UN and regional organisations and develop-ing innovative approaches to conflict resolution and stabilisationprocesses. This meeting was attended by seven international organ-

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3. In preparation for the 6th UN-RO High-Level Meeting; sched-uled for July 2005 at the UnitedNations in New York, six workinggroups have prepared back-ground papers on six thematicsubjects with proposals for adop-tion by the UN Secretary-Generaland heads of regional and otherintergovernmental organisations.A secretariat has been createdwithin the UN’s Department ofPolitical Affairs to ensure soundpreparation and effective follow-up on decisions taken. The secre-tariat is supported by researchand advisory services of the UNUniversity’s Programme in Com-parative Integration Studies(UNU-CRIS).

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isations (AU, CIS, EU, LAS, NATO, OSCE and ECOWAS) and aPresidential Statement was produced. The Council concluded thatregular dialogue on specific issues between it and regional organi-sations would bring ‘significant added value’ to UN-regional coop-eration for peace and security, based on ‘complementarity andcomparative advantage’. A third meeting is planned for October2005, to build further upon these initiatives and emerge perhapswith a Council resolution that will commence a serious momen-tum for introducing a viable operational partnership. Thus, theSecurity Council has rather belatedly – a decade after the Secretary-General took the initiative – begun to develop a relationship withthe regional and subregional organisations that is focusing on therange of peace and security challenges – counter-terrorism, conflictprevention and management, and peace-building.

Complexities of regionalism

The development of the regional-global security mechanism ishampered by an array of complexities. These pertain to uncertain-ties over the meaning of the central concepts of ‘region’, ‘agency’and ‘arrangement’; the structural duplication of regional agenciesand other organisations (involving overlapping of membership);contention over the area of application of their functions; andambiguity over their objectives (involving, inter alia, improvisedand occasionally competing mandates).

The UN Charter does not define ‘region’, its framers havingdecided, after much fruitless effort, against any self-restrictingordinance of that kind. A definition advanced by Egypt during theSan Francisco Conference, however, gives as good a conceptualnotion as is perhaps necessary:

There shall be considered, as regional arrangements, organisa-tions of a permanent nature, grouping in a given geographicalarea several countries which, by reason of their proximity, com-munity of interests or cultural, linguistic, historical or spiritualaffinities make themselves jointly responsible for the peacefulsettlement of any disputes which may arise.

The membership of regional agencies and similar organisationsis bewilderingly complex, as an analysis of regional economic com-

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missions, regional integration bodies and electoral groupings at theUN reveals. This begs the question of what constitutes a ‘region’ andindeed, what is a truly meaningful concept of ‘region’. It is, in thisrespect, difficult to posit the most appropriate and authoritativedeparture-point for gaining clarity over geographical regionality.

The area of application of a regional agency or other interna-tional organisation has also become contentious. The phenome-non in recent years of some organisations operating ‘out-of-area’in a ‘hard security’ function has caused some political controversybut the United Nations appears to be willing for the present torecognise such operations as not only legitimate but welcome.This issue is linked to both membership and mandate. It raisesfirst the question of whether it is appropriate, in a constitutionalsense, for a ‘regional agency’ under Chapter VIII to operate outsidethe national territories of its own regional members.

An analysis of the same organisations also shows overlappingmandates of those that seek to ‘partner’ with the UN in peace andsecurity, inferred from their statutory objectives. The question ofmandate of regional arrangements and agencies is problematic –some pertain to economic issues, some to security and some tobroader political and cultural ‘identity’ purposes. The evolutionof regional and other organisations has thus given rise to someunusual developments regarding mandates. Some organisationshave experienced ‘mandate creep’ through force of circumstance,entering the field of peace and security from the vantage point ofan economic mandate. Others have taken on what might be called‘mandate crab’, ranging laterally across geographic space andextending their focal areas. A few have undertaken ‘mandate stray’– effectively exceeding their constitutional authority in certaincases beyond the confines of the UN Charter. There is a need forgreater clarity and order in the matter of mandates in the regional-global mechanism for peace and security.

There thus exists a rather confusing admixture of regional andsubregional agencies, with different membership, statutory man-dates in peace and security, and other organisations with qualita-tively different mandates, all assembling together for meetingswith the United Nations over the maintenance of internationalpeace and security. This invites institutional confusion; indeed italmost institutionalises that confusion in a divided world.

The international community faces a ‘strategic choice’ withregard to the relationship between universalism and regionalism.

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A partnership has been built up between the United Nations andother international organisations in the name of regionalism butthat relationship is complex, informal and constitutionally inver-tebrate. The choice is between two future courses. The UnitedNations can continue with ‘business-as-usual’ in which severalscore entities partner with it but with little clear sense of commondirection. Or it can commence the process of clarifying, and tosome extent formalising, the relationship with a view to making itmore effective.

The potential role of the EU in a future collective securitysystem

In the above analysis the question arises of where the EuropeanUnion fits in. In the post-Cold War period – the past decade and ahalf – the EU has come into existence, initiated moves towards aconstitution and a common foreign and security policy, andexpressed the intention to become a ‘global actor’ in internationalaffairs. Such an aspiration is redolent of the centuries-old Euro-pean dream, resting on the vision of a united continent assertingitself to enlightened effect on the world stage. The manner in whichthe EU perceives the Iraq and other crises, and the prescriptions itoffers for a collective international order, has become a closelywatched factor of international politics.

What might be called the first ‘strategic policy’ of the EU, inparticular vis-à-vis the UN and multilateralism, is spelt out in twodocuments of 2003: the EC Communication ‘The EuropeanUnion and the United Nations: the choice of multilateralism’ of10 September and the European Security Strategy adopted by theEuropean Council three months later. These two documents areproving seminal in the annals of EU foreign policy development.The EU’s overarching ‘strategic objective’ is the strengthening ofan international order based on ‘effective multilateralism’. The‘fundamental framework’ for international relations remains theUN Charter. The challenge accepted by the EU is to help the mul-tilateral system deliver on its key objectives. Two aspects of its con-tribution to effective multilateralism could, the EU believes, befurther developed: its ability to act as a ‘front-runner’ in develop-ing multilateralism; and its support for capacity-building in othercountries and regions.4

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4. ‘The EU should adopt a deter-mined “front-runner” approachto the negotiation and implemen-tation of important UN initiativesin the fields of sustainable devel-opment, poverty reduction, andinternational security, taking amore proactive approach to thedevelopment of international in-struments and specific EU imple-menting actions. Moreover, theEU should give renewed impetusto the UN reform’. ‘The EuropeanUnion and the United Nations:the choice of multilateralism’, ECCommunication COM(2003),526, 10 September 2003, p. 9.

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The EU has moved with speed and determination to imple-ment its policy of ‘effective multilateralism’. The relationshipbetween the EU and the United Nations as partners in crisis man-agement is characterised by far-reaching potential yet also by for-midable challenges. Four dimensions to the relationship can bediscerned: doctrinal, operational, institutional and political. Eachneeds to be addressed of itself yet all are interrelated, thereby pos-ing a major policy test for EU leaders and officials over the nextdecade.

Doctrinal dimension

The interrelated crises of Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and Iranhave placed strain on a number of cardinal principles of traditionalsecurity doctrine contained in the UN Charter. In various wayseach one of the contentious policy issues identified earlier hastested the unity of EU policy-making.5 The major policy split, how-ever, has emerged in the past two years in response to the UnitedStates’s unilateralist policy over Iraq. The pre-emptive use of forcein March 2003, without Security Council authorisation, dividedthe major member states, particularly France and Germany vis-à-vis the United Kingdom. Of perhaps greatest embarrassment to theEU, the ‘unreasonable veto’ theory was generated in response to athreatened French (and Russian) veto against Security Councilauthorisation of force. And the regime change of the Iraqi govern-ment (universally recognised at the UN for the previous twodecades despite its use of WMDs) was undertaken without any offi-cial querying of the legality of such a move.

Operational dimension

It is often contended that Europe has been slow to develop an oper-ational capability in crisis management. Yet it should be recalledthat, only a decade ago at the time of the Balkans crisis, the EU didnot even exist as an entity. The EC’s capacity to undertake an oper-ational deployment in the Balkans was, inevitably, seriously lim-ited. In the past five years the EU has begun to develop its opera-tional capability, and this is starting to show practical results in thefield. Recently the UN has recognised the far-reaching potential ofrelying on a more active, capable and coherent EU as an operationalpartner committed to ‘effective multilateralism’. The UN Secre-

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5. Such as the rules governing theuse of force in self-defence versuscounter-terrorist pre-emption;the recognition of governments v.regime-change; the principle of P-5 concurrence vs. ‘unreasonablevetoes’; the right to possessweaponry vs. ‘compulsory WMDdisarmament’; and the principleof domestic jurisdiction vs. the ‘re-sponsibility to protect’.

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tary-General visited EU headquarters in January 2004 and remainsconstant contact with the EU High Representative for CFSP. Plansfor EU-UN cooperation have been thoroughly implemented in thepast two years. Effective contact between the two secretariats com-menced with DPKO officials on peacekeeping in May 2001. SinceApril 2002 the UN-DSG has led an annual mission to Brussels. TheEU Military Staff has identified UN-DPKO as its UN partner, andthe EU Policy Unit has identified UN-DPA (Europe branch). Jointtask forces have been established to coordinate interaction overpolice and military missions, and foster training, with a ‘steeringcommittee’ now meeting biannually. Liaison offices have beenstrengthened in New York and Brussels. It is clear that, as far as theUN is concerned, the EU is in business as a ‘global actor’.

Institutional dimension: the EU as a regional agency?

The status of international organisations vis-à-vis Chapter VIIIremains imprecise and uncertain. This raises the question whetherthe EU is to be regarded as a regional agency under Chapter VIII ofthe UN Charter. A number of issues require consideration.

At the 5th UN-RO High-Level Meeting in 2003 some 21 organ-isations participated, yet only seven were true regional agencieswhile the rest were subregional, cross-regional or transnational.The manner in which an international organisation is to be desig-nated as a ‘Chapter VIII regional agency’ has yet to be determined.Two agencies (OAS, OSCE) have proclaimed themselves to be a‘regional agency for the purposes of Chapter VIII of the UN Char-ter’. For its part, NATO does not see itself as a ‘Chapter VIIIregional agency’ but that believes that it ‘acts in the same spirit’.6Nor in fact does the EU consider itself to be a Chapter VIII regionalarrangement or agency.7

The distinction between being a regional agency under Chap-ter VIII of the UN Charter or not carries little significance at pres-ent. Any international organisation, whether subregional(ECOWAS), regional (OAS), cross-regional (NATO) or transna-tional (Commonwealth), may be called upon by the SecurityCouncil for pacific settlement activities and, as appropriate, forenforcement of the Council’s decisions, acting under Chapters VIand VII respectively. But as the UN increasingly relies on partnerorganisations to share in the maintenance of peace and security,the distinction between a regional agency under Chapter VIII and

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6. Joop de Hoop Scheffer, NATOSecretary-General, Address to theNew Defence Agenda Conference,Brussels, 17 May 2004.

7. See Dr Thierry Tardy, GenevaCentre for Security Policy, ‘Limitsand Opportunities of UN-EU Re-lations in Peace Operations: Im-plications for DPKO’, ExternalStudy for UN DPKO Best PracticesUnit, September 2003, p. 9; also,statements by senior EC officialsin Brussels-based seminars.

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others acting under Chapters VI and VII may become more impor-tant. A future arrangement in which designated ‘Chapter VIIIregional agencies’ represent agreed ‘security regions’ could beenvisaged, whereby such agencies assume an institutional role (forinstance, representation and reporting) and an executive role forpacific settlement. Enforcement could be undertaken by either a‘Chapter VIII regional agency’ or any other international organisa-tion, as appropriate. The EU might thus act, in its sui generis capac-ity, in peacekeeping under Chapter VI, enforcement under Chap-ter VII and peace-building under Chapter IX.

Political dimension

All in all, it seems that the EU is not to be seen as a ‘Chapter VIIIregional agency’ but rather as a sui generis organisation – operatingon a plane above the nation-state but not yet, and perhaps never, asingle supranational entity.8 The EU lacks the single-minded polit-ical coherence of the United States and also the dedicated militarycapability of the superpower. But its loosely aggregated Europeancitizenry is larger than that of its North American partner, and itscombined diplomatic skills and ‘soft power’ are already formidableand generally welcomed around the world as a potential force forgood. To the extent that the UN is moving towards ‘soft power’ asthe principal default mode for crisis management, the EU is takingshape as the single most valuable operational partner of the UN.This development is attracting interest, and even excitement,within the UN itself, as witnessed by the frequency of visits to Brus-sels by the UN leadership, and also within the wider policy commu-nity beyond.

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8. ‘[The EU] is not a State in-tended to replace existing states,but it is more than any other inter-national organisation. The EU is,in fact, unique. Its Member Stateshave set up common institutionsto which they delegate some oftheir sovereignty so that decisionson specific matters of joint inter-est can be made democratically atEuropean level. This pooling ofsovereignty is also called “Euro-pean integration”.’ ‘The Euro-pean Union at a glance’, EU web-site at http://europa.eu.int/abc/index_en.htm.

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ConclusionUN reform: as necessary as it is difficultMartin Ortega

The preceding chapters show that there is a lot to be done toimprove global governance through the United Nations. The worldhas changed dramatically since 1945, when this organisation wascreated, and it is imperative to reach global consensus to modernisethe United Nations so that it can make a more decisive contribu-tion to tackling today’s challenges. However, looking at the situa-tion in June 2005, one has the impression that the debate on UNreform that will take place during the 60th General Assembly thisSeptember will not bear substantial fruit. Some progress is foresee-able in areas such as development and the creation of a Peace Build-ing Commission, but overall the agreed changes in the UnitedNations will most probably be low-key. The United States govern-ment is not willing to exercise any leadership on this front, the EUmember states are in disarray, taking care of their own problems,the developing countries are putting forward certain demands thatthe others deem unacceptable, UN member states are divided onthe key issue of Security Council reform, and, in his report ‘In largerfreedom’ (March 2005), the UN Secretary-General has opted for a‘minimalist’ approach, trying to attract agreement on a few issuesthat do not really imply the revamping that the organisation badlyneeds.

The reform of global order requires a ‘constitutional momen-tum’, which, unfortunately, is not present today owing to the pre-vailing political circumstances. Indeed, such ‘constitutionalmomentum’ appears only rarely in history, and is usually linked toserious crises or extraordinary developments. This momentumexisted, in particular, after the First and Second World Wars, andled to the creation of the League of Nations and the UnitedNations respectively. In a different environment, a significant con-stitutional change in the international order took place at thebeginning of the 1990s – although it did not entail formal modifi-cation of the UN Charter. The end of the Cold War and SaddamHussein’s aggression against Kuwait triggered an unprecedented

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consensus amongst the five UNSC permanent members that ledto effective action by the Security Council. For the first time sinceits creation, this body decided to authorise large (and later,smaller) uses of force, to make substantive pronouncements oncertain international conflicts and disputes, and to mandatepeacekeeping operations. Also, in a peaceful environment, aregional ‘constitutional momentum’ has existed in Europe in thelast few years. It is true that this impetus has stalled after theFrench and Dutch referendums on the draft European constitu-tion, but nothing excludes a continuation of the European consti-tutional process under different conditions in the future.

A similar ‘momentum’ is not detectable at global level today.And yet, global threats, risks and challenges call for immediateand concerted action. ‘In a world of global threats, global marketsand global media’, to replicate the words of the European SecurityStrategy, we do not have the proper global institutions. Individualstates continue to take the lead in the resolution of the world’sproblems. But the main task of governments within states is toadvance the interests of their own citizens, not to look after ‘globalinterests’. When governments decide to cooperate, some globalchallenges can be tackled; if they choose not to cooperate, thosechallenges continue to fester on. The ‘reaction gap’ that existsbetween alarming global problems and the available institutionshas been eloquently described by Jean-François Rischard in hisbook High noon, 20 global issues, 20 years to solve them.1 Rischard, theWorld Bank’s vice-president for Europe, wrote in 2002:

The most important and urgent global problems . . . have twothings in common: They’re getting worse, not better, and thestandard strategies for dealing with them are woefully inade-quate to the task. The real problem, in other words, is that in ourincreasingly crowded, interconnected world, we don’t have aneffective way of addressing the problems such a world creates.Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solvingthem belong to the past.

The EU and its member states could have an important role infinding imaginative solutions to this undesirable situation. Infact, they have declared that ‘effective multilateralism’, ‘well func-tioning international institutions and a rule-based internationalorder’, as well as ‘strengthening the United Nations, equipping it

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Conclusion - UN reform: as necessary as it is difficult

1. Jean-François Rischard, Highnoon, 20 global issues, 20 years to solvethem (New York: Basic Books,2002). This book was also pub-lished in French as 20 défis pour laplanète, 20 ans pour y faire face (Arles:Actes Sud, 2003).

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to fulfil its responsibilities and to act effectively’ are their priori-ties. However, when it comes to putting into practice thesedeclared objectives, the Europeans are hesitant. As was pointedout in the introduction to this Chaillot Paper, UN reform perhaps isboth too much and too soon for the European Union. Governmentshave not promoted a public debate on UN reform in Europe. Thisissue has been mainly confined to a technical exchange amongstdiplomats and has not received much attention from parliamentsand politicians. One cannot find many references to UN reform inthe conclusions of EU foreign ministers’ meetings or the Euro-pean Council.

Points of agreement and disagreement

During the preparation of the 60th General Assembly, throughpermanent contacts in New York, Brussels and elsewhere, the 25EU member states have indeed reached agreement on a number ofissues, but they continue to diverge on others. Let us examinepoints of agreement and disagreement amongst the Europeans fol-lowing the check list provided by the President of the UN GeneralAssembly in his first ‘draft outcome document’, dated 3 June 2005,for the 60th Anniversary High-Level Meeting, where he sum-marises items at the centre of UN member states’ discussionswithin four clusters: development, peace and security, humanrights and the rule of law, and strengthening the United Nations(meaning reform).

The EU members basically agree on the objective of increasingdevelopment assistance to 0.5 per cent of GDP by 2009 and 0.7 percent by 2015. Also, they support initiatives – some of them alreadymentioned in the UN Secretary-General’s report of March 2005 –to alleviate debt, give priority to Africa, fight against AIDS andother infectious diseases, rethink the role of women in develop-ment, continue to work for the protection of the environment,and look for additional sources of financing for development.

On the second cluster, the EU members jointly endorse theestablishment of a Peace Building Commission, in order to ensurethat post-conflict reconstruction efforts in war-torn countries aredurable and coordinated. Various UN documents acknowledgethe EU contribution to UN peacekeeping and capability building,and more EU-UN cooperation in this field is to be expected. Other

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proposals in the peace and security area are also agreeable to theEuropeans: enhance the fight against terrorism and WMD prolif-eration and disarmament, explore and refine targeted sanctions,assign to the Secretary-General better resources to utilise his goodoffices in international disputes, and recognise the ‘responsibilityto protect’ in the event of genocide or massive violations of humanrights, defining criteria for humanitarian intervention.

As regards proposals related to human rights, the EU memberssupport in principle the creation of a Human Rights Council;however, they are divided on whether this new body should belinked to the General Assembly or to the Security Council,whether the creation of such a council should entail UN Charterreform or not, whether a ‘peer review mechanism’ of respect forhuman rights in UN member states should be implemented, andwhat the role of NGOs in the new body should be.

Finally, proposed formal changes in the UN Charter are verymodest, and EU members have not yet made up their mind on thisaspect. It seems that both the Trusteeship Council and the refer-ences to the ‘enemy states’ in the Charter will be removed, but it isless clear that provisions on the Military Staff Committee will dis-appear. The UN General Assembly’s agenda will be streamlinedand the status of ECOSOC will be enhanced, and annual meetingsat ministerial level might be planned with European backing. TheEU member states would equally support a reinforcement of theUN Secretariat. The most striking source of disagreementamongst Europeans, however, is reform of the Security Council.Even if there is consensus amongst the EU member states on otherissues, their lack of a common position on UNSC reform will beperceived as a failure of the EU common foreign and securitypolity.

In order to make an overall assessment of European attitudestowards UN reform, one should take into account that the variousinitiatives mentioned so far belong to three different categories:(a) UN member states’ action (for instance, increase developmentaid, measures to fight WMD proliferation and advance WMD dis-armament); (b) improve the UN’s working methods (for instance,streamlining the General Assembly’s agenda and reinforcing theUN Secretariat); and (c) changes in the UN Charter. While the EUmember states are united on most of the issues pertaining to cate-gories (a) and (b), they are conspicuously divided on crucialaspects of UN Charter reform.

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Disappointment

Nevertheless, beyond the specific points of agreement and dis-agreement amongst Europeans, the real question is: will the Euro-pean input to the negotiations lead to a reform of the UnitedNations that ‘strengthens’ the organisation and ‘equips it to fulfilits responsibilities and to act effectively’? The answer is a fatalistic‘no’. Initiatives listed below represent a ‘lowest common denomi-nator’ arrived at before the 60th anniversary summit. This denom-inator accords poorly with the EU’s ambitious proclamationsabout effective multilateralism and the global order.

In the absence of American interest – as a result of the currentUS government’s attitudes towards the UN – the European Unionand its member states are not in a position to have a decisiveimpact on the reform process. And yet, bearing in mind its contri-bution to the UN and its collective stance and prestige, the EU hadthe means to exert a positive influence in the forthcoming reform.The EU could have acted as an ‘honest broker’ between a reluctantUnited States and a Third World majority, could have tried toinclude democracy and human rights at the centre of UN action,could have introduced protection of the environment as one of thekey objectives of the global order, could have insisted on recogni-tion of the role of regional organisations, and ultimately couldhave engaged most UN members in the creation of a new UnitedNations with the necessary resources to fulfil its vital missions.

In various degrees, the preceding chapters of this Chaillot Papershare the same general sentiment of disappointment vis-à-vis theEuropean role in the current UN reform process. They containmore demands than both the EU and the European governmentsseem able to take on. Let us summarise their conclusions andclaims:

Global Public Goods, development and security. In his chapter, SvenBiscop affirms that the EU should promote policies that ensurebetter access to ‘Global Public Goods’ (physical security, politi-cal participation, development, health services, education and aclean environment) for everyone. In his view, a ‘positive agenda’– not just an agenda focused on threats – should inspire the EU’scontribution to UN reform. Bearing in mind the causal link thatexists between poor economic, social and cultural conditionsand security, he proposes to pay more attention to the Millen-

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nium Development Goals, and to give the ECOSOC an‘enhanced profile’. True, the European Union is committed toincreasing its assistance to developing countries, to povertyreduction and debt relief, but, as Biscop points out, this com-mitment has yet to materialise and has to be consistent with theEU’s external trade policies.Human rights and protection of the environment. Francesco Fran-cioni analyses these two crucial issues and puts forward a seriesof useful recommendations for the EU and its member states.Regarding human rights, he suggests three lines of action:‘streamlining’ of the present UN system of human rights sur-veillance and implementation; ‘mainstreaming’, or systemati-cally incorporating human rights in all UN policies and actions;and ‘entrenching’, i.e. reaffirming the intrinsic value of humanrights at a time of globalisation. On the other hand, protectionof the environment should be a distinct European priority.Francioni presents two options. Protection of the environmentcould be ensured globally either through a reform of existingschemes, and most notably the United Nations EnvironmentalProgramme, or via the creation of a new, independent globalenvironmental organisation, an option which he slightlyfavours. Again, all these proposals are more daring than theideas contained in EU documents and in the UN Secretary-Gen-eral’s report of March 2005 – perhaps excepting the creation of aHuman Rights Council.Peacekeeping. In his chapter, Thierry Tardy explains how EU-UNcooperation for peacekeeping purposes has been increasingsteadily since the year 2000. Although direct participation ofEuropean military and civilian personnel in UN-led operationsis not very high, the Europeans have an important contributionto make to UN peacekeeping through financing, ‘enabling capa-bilities’ and dialogue and cooperation between politico-militaryauthorities in Brussels and New York. Since Operation Artemisin summer 2003 and the joint EU-UN declaration of 24 Septem-ber 2003, the EU has defined a number of scenarios: for instance,the scenario where a EU-led operation receives UNSC authorisa-tion and the ‘bridging model’ scenario, or a rapidly deployed EUoperation that allows the UN to mount an operation of its own.However, as Tardy points out, the problem is that, given the dif-ferent EU and UN agendas, UN ‘demand’ does not always find apositive response on the part of the EU.

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Security Council reform. Far from presenting grand proposals, Jef-frey Laurenti adopts a realistic approach, which leads him toconclude that UNSC enlargement is highly unlikely. Opposi-tion to candidates to new permanent members from currentpermanent members (especially, China vis-à-vis Japan), andfrom regional powers (for instance, Argentina, Italy, Pakistan –who would oppose Brazil, Germany and India respectively) willmake it impossible, in Laurenti’s opinion, to reach the requiredtwo-thirds majority, including all permanent members, toapprove UN Charter reform. The United States is comfortablywatching those neighbourhood disputes, as it is not enthusias-tic about UNSC enlargement. Laurenti suggests, thus, thatinstead of ‘rearranging the furniture in the Security Councilchamber’ some more pragmatic measures could be adoptedwith a view to implementing its decisions effectively and rein-forcing the Council’s capabilities. En passant, he points outthat, due to divisions within the EU on UNSC reform, ‘Europe’smutually cancelling passions on the subject have produced EUpassivity’. The EU, regional organisations and collective security. The last chaptermakes a plea for the deeper involvement of regional organisa-tions in collective security. Kennedy Graham (writing withTânia Felício) suggests that regional organisations haveacquired such an important role in conflict prevention and cri-sis management that the forthcoming reform will encounterthe following dilemma: either to continue with ‘business asusual’ or commence the process of formalising the relationshipbetween the UN and regional organisations with a view to mak-ing it more effective. The issue is not, however, a formal recogni-tion of the EU as a ‘Chapter VIII regional organisation’, for theEU is actually acting as such an organisation; rather, the issue iswhether the EU is ready to lead a debate about the role ofregional organisations in collective security.

Three conclusions

Three main conclusions can be drawn from the preceding analysis.Firstly, the relations between the EU and the United Nations pres-ent a mixed balance sheet. On the one hand, the EU and its memberstates share a common language and common objectives with the

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United Nations. The EU is cooperating with the UN on a wholerange of issues: development, human rights, protection of the envi-ronment, peacekeeping, etc. This ‘commonality’ applies to all 25EU members, including first and foremost the two UNSC perma-nent members. The same cannot be said of other UNSC permanentmembers, who are less involved in either respect for human rightsor peacekeeping or protection of the environment or all of them.On the other hand, however, the Europeans have not had greatinfluence during the preparation of the debate on UN reform thatwill take place from September 2005. In other words, while day-to-day EU-UN cooperation is working efficiently, the EU and its mem-ber states have failed to seize the symbolic opportunity of the 60thanniversary to define a common vision for the future of the organ-isation. The Europeans have the ideas and the means; what is lack-ing is self-confidence, leadership and determination.

Secondly, irrespective of other changes in the UN that can besupported by the Europeans, reform of the Security Council willbe the most important issue, both in the public perception andhistorically. Unfortunately, the EU member states have alignedthemselves along global fracture lines instead of trying to definean intra-European consensus. There are at least four Europeanpoints of view on this issue: (a) Germany has presented its candi-dature as new permanent member; (b) France and the UnitedKingdom have supported the 4 + 1 new permanent membersoption – i.e. Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, plus an African candi-date; (c) Italy and Spain – along with other states such asArgentina, Pakistan, Republic of Korea – oppose the prospect ofnew permanent members; and (d) other EU member states – aswell as the European Parliament – believe that the EU’s effortsshould be targeted at creating a single EU seat in the future.

Although it seems perhaps too late to reach an agreementamongst the Europeans, it is worth trying. The EU and its memberstates should not reproduce divisions that are present in other con-tinents, but should rather try to find ways to break the deadlock inUNSC reform. Enlargement of this body is needed in order toenhance its perceived legitimacy. If none the less UNSC enlarge-ment is eventually delayed owing to lack of global agreement dur-ing the 60th anniversary UN summit, the EU and its member statesshould start thinking afresh on this issue in the coming years.

Finally, while most of the current recommendations regardingUN reinforcement and reform are laudable, the main problem

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continues to be lack of resources, and this is not sufficientlyunderlined in the present debate. Bearing in mind the broad rangeof tasks, particularly peacekeeping, that the United Nations has tocarry out worldwide, the UN is clearly underfunded. In 2003, forinstance, the assessed UN budget for regular activities wasUS$1,409 million and the peacekeeping operations budget was$2,260 million. Since $1,507 million were unpaid ($441 millionfrom the regular budget, $1,066 million from the peacekeepingbudget), the UN functioned with $2,162 million that year.2 By wayof comparison, the 25 EU members combined defence expendi-ture amounted to $166.64 billion in 2003 – whereas the UnitedStates spent $404.9 billion. In order to strengthen the UnitedNations, its human and financial resources must be augmented,and the EU and its member states, which already pay a large shareof the UN budget, should be ready to meet this challenge.

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2. Data compiled by KlausHüfner, Freie Universität Berlin;see www.globalpolicy.org/fi-nance/tables/sumbudgetand-debt.htm.

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1a1 annexes

About the authors

Sven Biscop is a Senior Research Fellow at the Brussels-based Royal Institute forInternational Relations (IRRI-KIIB), a think tank associated with the BelgianMinistry of Foreign Affairs. He has recently published The European SecurityStrategy – A Global Agenda for Positive Power (London: Ashgate, 2005).

Tânia Felício is a researcher at the United Nations University’s Centre forRegional Integration Studies, Bruges. Her current research project is on ‘RegionalSecurity and Global Governance: A study of Interaction between RegionalOrganizations and the UN Security Council’.

Francesco Francioni is Professor of law at the European University Institute,Florence, and the University of Siena. He is the editor of Environment, HumanRights and International Trade (Oxford: Hart, 2001).

Kennedy Graham is project Director at the United Nations University’s Centrefor Regional Integration Studies, Bruges. He has recently published ‘TowardsEffective Multilateralism: The EU and the UN – Partners in Crisis Management’,European Policy Centre, Brussels, November 2004.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno is Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operationsat the United Nations. He spent a part of his career in the Ministry of ForeignAffairs of France, where he was Director of the Policy Planning Staff (1989-93)and Ambassador to the Western European Union (1993-95).

Jeffrey Laurenti is Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation and the Security andPeace Institute in New York. He was executive director of policy studies at theUnited Nations Association of the United States until 2003.

Martin Ortega is a Senior Research Fellow at the EU Institute for SecurityStudies, Paris. He is the editor of ‘Global views on the European Union’, ChaillotPaper 72, November 2004.

Thierry Tardy is Faculty Member and Director of the European Training Courseat the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). He is the editor of PeaceOperations after 11 September 2001 (London: Routledge, 2004).

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a2

AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency SyndromeAU African UnionCAT Convention Against TortureCEDAW Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against

WomenCERD Convention on the Elimination of Racial DiscriminationCFSP Common Foreign and Security PolicyCIS Commonwealth of Independent StatesCRC Convention on the Rights of the ChildDDR Demobilisation, Disarmament and ReintegrationDPA Department of Political AffairsDPKO Department of Peacekeeping OperationsDRC Democratic Republic of CongoDSG Deputy Secretary-GeneralECOSOC (UN) Economic and Social CouncilECOWAS Economic Community of West African StatesESDP European Security and Defence PolicyEU European UnionEUI European University InstituteEUPM EU Police MissionEUPOL EU Police MissionFAO Food and Agriculture OrganisationFYROM Former Yugoslav Republic of MacedoniaGDP Gross Domestic ProductGEF Global Environment FacilityGPG Global Public GoodsHIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency

SyndromeHLP High-Level PanelICC International Criminal CourtICCPR International Covenant on Civil and Political RightsICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural RightsIEMF Interim Emergency Multinational Force (Operation Artemis)IFI International Financial Institution(s)ILO International Labour OrganisationIMF International Monetary FundIMO International Maritime OrganisationINTERFET International Force East TimorIPTF International Police Task ForceIRRI-KIIB Institut Royal de Relations Internationales, BruxellesLAS League of Arab StatesMDG Millennium Development GoalMEA Multilateral Environmental AgreementMONUC UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Abbreviationsannexes

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1a2

NATO North Atlantic Treaty OrganisationNGO Non-Governmental OrganisationOAS Organisation of American StatesOECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentOSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in EuropePBC Peacebuilding CommissionPSC Political and Security CommitteeRO Regional OrganisationSFOR Stabilisation ForceSHIRBRIG Multinational Stand-by Force High Readiness Brigade for UN

OperationsSIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research InstituteSSR Security Sector ReformUN United NationsUNDP UN Development Programme UNEP UN Environment ProgrammeUNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

OrganisationUNHCR UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Office of the)UNMIBH UN Mission in Bosnia and HerzegovinaUNMIK UN Interim Administration Mission in KosovoUNOCI UN Operation in Ivory CoastUNSAS UN Stand-by Arrangement SystemUNSC UN Security CouncilUNTAET UN Transitional Administration in East TimorUSSR Union of Soviet Socialist RepublicsWHO World Health OrganisationWMD Weapons of Mass DestructionWTO World Trade Organisation

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Chaillot Papers

n°77 Effective non-proliferation – The European Union April 2005and the 2005 NPT Review ConferenceDarryl Howlett & John Simpson, Harald Müller and Bruno Tertraisedited by Burkard Schmitt

n°76 Information security — a new challenge for the EU March 2005Alain Esterle, Hanno Ranck and Burkard Schmitt;edited by Burkard Schmitt

n°75 EU security and defence. Core documents 2004 February 2005Volume V

n°74 What Russia sees January 2005Dmitry Danilov, Sergei Karaganov, Dov Lynch, Alexey Pushkov,Dmitri Trenin and Andrei Zagorski; edited by Dov Lynch

n°73 Afghanistan : la difficile reconstruction d’un Etat Décembre 2004Olivier Roy

n°72 Global views on the European Union November 2004Amitav Acharya, Marcel F. Biato, Babacar Diallo, Francisco E. González,Toshiya Hoshino, Terence O’Brien, Gerrit Olivier and Yi Wang; edited by Martin Ortega

n°71 La cohérence par la défense. Une autre lecture de la PESD Octobre 2004Philippe de Schoutheete

BooksDefence procurement in the European Union – The current debate 2005Report of an EUISS Task ForceChairman and Rapporteur: Burkard Schmitt

EU Security and Defence Policy — the first five years (1999-2004) 2004Martti Ahtisaari, Michel Barnier, Carl Bildt, Elmar Brok & Norbert Gresch, Robert Cooper,Judy Dempsey, Lamberto Dini, Jean-Louis Gergorin & Jean Bétermier, Philip H. Gordon,Jean-Yves Haine, Gustav Lindstrom, Antonio Missiroli, Alberto Navarro, Martin Ortega,Ferdinando Riccardi, Alexander Rondos, Burkard Schmitt, Rainer Schuwirth, Theo Sommerand Laurent Zecchini; edited by Nicole Gnesotto; preface by Javier Solana

European defence — a proposal for a White Paper 2004André Dumoulin, Jan Foghelin, François Heisbourg, William Hopkinson, Marc Otte,Tomas Ries, Lothar Rühl, Stefano Silvestri, Hans-Bernhard Weisserth, Rob de Wijk;Chair: Nicole Gnesotto, Rapporteur: Jean-Yves Haine

All Institute publicationscan be accessed via the Institute’s website:

www.iss-eu.org

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This Chaillot Paper offers some ideas on how the EuropeanUnion and its member states can contribute to the reform ofthe United Nations, a theme that will be high on the agendaduring the celebration of the UN’s 60th anniversary in autumn2005. Five experts write on the following subjects: security anddevelopment (Sven Biscop), human rights and protection ofthe environment (Francesco Francioni), peacekeeping (ThierryTardy), UN Security Council reform (Jeffrey Laurenti) andregional organisations and collective security (KennedyGraham with Tânia Felício). A conclusion draws some lessonsfrom the various chapters and suggests that the EU should bemore involved in the UN reform process.

Relations between the EU and the United Nations present amixed balance sheet. On the one hand, the EU and its memberstates share a common language and common objectives withthe United Nations. The EU is actively cooperating with theUN on a whole range of issues: development, human rights,protection of the environment and peacekeeping, amongstothers. On the other hand, however, the EU and its memberstates have failed to seize the symbolic opportunity of the 60thanniversary to define a common vision for the future of theorganisation. More specifically, instead of negotiating a com-mon position on UN Security Council enlargement – one ofthe key issues – the Europeans have shown profound divisions.

Foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations.

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