The EU wants to play global good cop to America's bad cop.

Spiked-Politics
December 16, 2004
By Philip Cunliffe

The European Union (EU) has been trying to delineate a common European security identity, free from the US-dominated NATO that defined transatlantic security throughout the Cold War period.

On 15 September 2004 the Study Group on Europe's Security Capabilities presented its 'Barcelona Report', entitled A Human Security Doctrine for Europe, to the European Union (EU) security chief Javier Solana (1). The group was convened to put the flesh of policy prescription on the bones of the 'European Security Strategy' (ESS), agreed by the European Council in December 2003.

The focus on 'human security' proposes to base security policy around individual vulnerability, rather than on the Cold War mindset of threats to states (such as cross-border invasion). This, the report's authors argue, will bring security policy more in line with the reality of 'insecurity' in the post-Cold War period, defined by threats to the physical integrity of the individual (such as terrorism or gross violations of human rights in third world civil wars). In our contemporary era of 'global interconnectedness', the report claims, the 'insecurity' of human rights victims in 'failing states' will impact on the security of EU citizens via the spread of terror and organised crime.

The report seeks to differentiate EU security policy from that of the USA by flagging up the EU's 'strengths', such as its relative military weakness in relation to the USA. It smugly notes the limitations of air power and information technology, the linchpins of US military supremacy: 'Air power…does not help troops with imposing and maintaining order or protecting civilians - with coping, for instance, with suicide bombers who have relatively unsophisticated technology, or preventing ethnic cleansing as in Kosovo after the war in Yugoslavia.' (2) What cannot be achieved by US cruise missiles and cluster bombs, it suggests, can be achieved by the EU.

The report's choice of policy jargon occasionally offers glimpses into the mentality of the EU elite. Among the buzzwords used in connection with 'post-conflict reconstruction' (aka, nation-building) - 'bottom-up approach', 'communication', 'consultation', 'dialogue', and 'partnership' - one word that is noticeably absent is 'democracy'. Indeed, the very idea of a security policy oriented around individual rather than state vulnerability suggests an EU elite desperate to forge links with atomised individuals.

Whatever 'human security' may mean for EU citizens, for the EU elite it also seems to mean being securely defended from any trace of irony. The report's earnestness would be laughable if it were not so alarming. It sincerely asserts that the unique features of the age grant the EU an unprecedented opportunity to forge a foreign policy that synthesises both 'realism' and 'idealism' (4). Despite claiming sensitivity to the historical experience of the EU's new eastern European members (5), the report also argues that the EU should prioritise certain crises over others on the basis of 'special responsibility for neighbouring countries' (6). As if reviving the Brezhnev Doctrine of 'special responsibility' for client states wasn't enough, it moves on to repackage Europe's colonialist history as a sanitised bunch of 'historic ties and responsibilities' (7).

Conscious of the illegitimacy of US 'unilateralism' in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the report builds on the ESS demand for 'effective multilateralism' by emphasising the question of the legal authority of intervention. However, the authors are clearly aware that the approval of the UN Security Council (the only international body that can legally sanction a non-defensive war), may not be forthcoming for implementing the ESS mandate of 'preventive engagement'. In order to legally justify this decaffeinated version of the Bush Doctrine, the report overcompensates by plundering every conceivable scrap of international law. The result is a selective hodgepodge, a 'new legal framework [that] would build on the domestic law of host states, the domestic law of sending states, international criminal law, international human rights law and international humanitarian law' (8) - in other words, all international law except the principles of the UN Charter.

The report also proposes to merge military and civilian competencies in 'post-conflict reconstruction', specifying a division-strength (15,000-strong) 'Human Security Response Force' that should comprise at least 5000 civilians (9). In other words, all the ingredients for one-stop nation-building in a single tin: simply unscrew the lid and liberally sprinkle all your soldiers, lawyers, judges, doctors, nurses, accountants, police, gap-year students, mid-career professionals, assorted bureaucrats and others, over your third world country of choice, and stir.

Rather than pursuing humanitarian intervention 'as a purely military' affair (10), the proposed force should be more civilian in spirit: 'the lives of those deployed cannot be privileged. The aim should be to protect people and minimise all casualties. This is more akin to the traditional approach of the police, who risk their lives to save others, even though they are prepared to kill in extremis, as human security forces should be' (11). So far, so touchy-feely.

But there is actually something quite sinister in the claim that the proposed force should pioneer 'effective civil-military integration' (12). By seeking to define EU military interventions as policing operations, the report is effectively splitting world politics into those states and institutions that have the legitimate right to wage war ('policing'), and those whose resort to violence is illegal ('gross human rights violations'). By styling EU intervention as neutral policing operations, even the right to wage war in self-defence against EU forces (a right authorised by the UN Charter), would be nullified by the EU's claim to be merely policing rather than waging war.

The Barcelona Report is not merely a cipher for geo-political competition with the USA. It also brazenly proposes its vision of human security as a way of cohering popular support for the EU in the face of 'the rise of nationalist feelings as expressed in the electoral success of anti-immigration and anti-EU parties [that] weaken further the ability of European political elites to act at a European level' (13).

In a document ostensibly oriented toward human rights victims in developing countries, the frank admission of this cynical policy goal suggests that the insecurities of the 'European political elites' are much more to do with the disengagement of the European electorate than with the actual problems confronting people in the developing world.

Philip Cunliffe is a research student at King's College, University of London.

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