There are two basic facts which should be borne in mind by the governments who will review the EU's foreign policy as part of the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) during 1996 and 1997. The first is that one in four of the world's people live in a state of absolute want - and that number is increasing. The second is that 27 million of these people are in that state because they have been forced to flee from wars: the number of refugees and displaced people has increased by nearly 60 per cent in the last five years.
When the Maastricht Treaty was agreed in December 1991, it committed the EU to a "campaign against poverty" around the world, and set up the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), one of the aims of which was to improve Europe's contribution to preserving international peace. That neither aim has been successful is perhaps obvious; poverty and the suffering caused by conflicts have increased more in the 1990s than at any time for 50 years. This paper argues that the EU has not simply been swamped by global trends but has failed because of a lack of political will to seriously tackle issues beyond its narrowest interests. In this, EU foreign policy since Maastricht compares unfavourably with positive interventions in the 1980s such as those in central America.
The IGC, launched at the Turin summit in March 1996, will review the incipient CFSP and set its course for the future. This comes at a time when the EU and its members are widely seen to have failed even where they have focused - in former Yugoslavia - as well as having offered little to prevent the spreading conflicts in many parts of Africa and Asia. Of these, the situation in Rwanda, Burundi and their neighbours continues to be one of the starkest examples.
EU governments now have an opportunity to revise the CFSP in order to improve their collective impact internationally - and to tackle the big challenges of reducing poverty and insecurity in line with the broad principles to which they committed themselves in the Maastricht Treaty.
This paper argues that EU foreign policy has failed to address these global challenges for two basic reasons:
Both these trends have been made possible by the vagueness of the Maastricht Treaty's mandate for the CFSP, which the IGC will now be able to revise.
Preparing for the IGC, EU member governments appear to be divided into those who, on the one hand, take a narrow, short-term view, and those taking a wider and longer-term perspective of the EU's interests. Eurostep argues for the latter view: that the CFSP requires a clear purpose based upon the protection of basic rights around the world, wholly consistent with the need to uphold what Maastricht called - but did not define - the EU's "common values" and "fundamental interests".
The paper sets out how the IGC could revise the CFSP mandate to explicitly commit it to:
Such a mandate should lead to:
It would not be fair to condemn the EU as the only political entity whose foreign policy has floundered in the post-Cold War world. Nor is it the only one to exhibit the same two trends of disengaging from those parts of the developing world which it no longer perceives to represent an economic or strategic interest, and using aid as an alternative to, not as a part of, a "coherent" approach to reducing poverty and increasing security. Since November 1994, the influence of the US Congress has accelerated these trends in US foreign policy.
The challenge to the EU and its member states is not to follow the US into isolationism, not to allow the UN and other global institutions to wither, but to make Europe a leading, united and positive player in international relations. The paper concludes by arguing that the EU, in concert with governments North and South, must play a key role in injecting new momentum into the UN and making it an effective and indispensable global organisation.
The sixth Inter-Governmental Conference of the EU's member states will not only decide how Europe is to develop into the twenty-first century. It will also set out the role which Europe can play in a rapidly changing world. As part of its mandate the IGC is set to review the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy which came into being in November 1993, established at Maastricht in an attempt to give greater cohesion to European governments' international relations.
The IGC was formally convened by the Madrid EU summit on 16 December 1995 and opened on 29 March, under the EU's current Italian Presidency. The negotiations will continue through the Irish Presidency in the second half of 1996, into the Dutch Presidency in early and may not reach a conclusion until the Luxembourg Presidency which ends in December 1997.
A rapidly-changing world - a slowly changing EU
The six years since the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 have seen an unprecedented increase in the scale of conflicts in many parts of the world, and the consequent human suffering. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in November 1995 that the number of people who have fled from wars - almost all internal - has risen to twenty-seven million, ten million more than at the beginning of this decade.
As many as 43 countries (one in four of UN member states) are now caught up in major refugee crises - each one involving more than 100,000 people - as states either producing or receiving that number of refugees. At the same time, a quarter of the world's population now live in a state of absolute want, denied their basic rights to vital necessities, a sustainable livelihood - and, frequently, protection from violence.
Behind much of this violence is a world where there is more inequality and where many people are becoming very much poorer. The poorest fifth of the world's population, living beyond the margins of the global economy, now have incomes which are no higher than 4 per cent of those of the richest fifth. With 35 per cent of the world's land already degraded, the pressure on such marginalised people to fight over dwindling resources has also contributed, arguably to a very significant extent, to conflicts in countries such as Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi and Mali. Thousands find that they can indeed profit through war, as in Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Sudan. The 1990s has become the least stable decade since the 1940s.
As insecurity has risen, the response of the international community has been weakened by the growing isolationism in the US and in Europe; and the decline in support for the UN as a vehicle for both development and collective security. The heady optimism of 1990-91, when it was hoped that the Cold War would be replaced by peace, has evaporated. In its place, we see a vacuum of will - a refusal by most governments to seriously engage in problems beyond their short-term interests.
The EU and its member states taken together, are the world's largest donor of aid - 4.054 billion ecu in 1994, representing 46.4 per cent of total Official Development Aid from all OECD countries - and a major contributor to UN peace-keeping missions. As such, they carry a significant part of the burden of picking up the pieces of the world's conflicts. Yet the CFSP has not developed into an effective diplomatic tool to help prevent conflict. In short, the spiralling scale of conflict in much of the world has far outstripped the EU's response to it, and alongside the massive human suffering caused, the citizens of the EU are paying a price for the failure to invest more in preventive diplomacy and the lack of political will to address some of the underlying causes.
EU member governments do not lack capacity. Even with current restrictions on spending, no other body besides the US combines the EU members' diplomatic, financial, political and military capacity - and therefore the potential both to exert a wide range of pressures and incentives on contending parties to avert or end conflicts, and to provide reconstruction aid to help make peace endure. What is lacking is the ability of EU member states to direct some of that capacity towards clear and common goals, which will require much greater coordination of foreign and security policy than the CFSP procedures currently deliver.
The oft-stated description of the EU as an economic giant but a political dwarf remains true. The EU's role in harmonising world trade in the final GATT Uruguay Round, and in establishing the World Trade Organisation, demonstrated its global economic leverage as never before. But meanwhile the CFSP, as currently operating, continues to highlight the EU's political weakness.
Near neighbours
Even the EU's policy towards the conflict in former Yugoslavia, which was prioritised as a foreign policy issue, failed. The early aim of maintaining the status quo ante showed a failure to appreciate the gravity of the crisis, which was then compounded by the hopeful assumption that promises of EU aid and economic sanctions would be enough to stop the brutal excesses of Serb and Croat nationalism. Indeed, the EU's recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in January 1992, at Germany's behest, is widely credited with making the crisis worse rather than better.
Only with reluctance did the UK and France eventually accept the US strategy of using force to protect UN "safe areas", after Srebrenica fell in July 1995. Under the US leadership the parties were pushed to the negotiating table in Dayton. And now, despite the $170 billion which EU members spend on their defence (at 1994 figures), and their two million active service personnel, it is also the US which provides the largest contingent of the Implementation Force - and reaps most of the political capital.
Turning to Europe's southern neighbours, the EU has played a significant role in supporting the Middle East peace process, not only in the 1990s but since the mid-1970s. Yet EU policy towards the Maghreb region of North Africa for most of this period has been marked by a failure to look ahead. Worsening levels of poverty - unemployment rates of 40 per cent to 70 per cent in the cities of Algeria and Morocco - have helped to create a highly combustible sense of frustration, and increase the attractiveness of both fundamentalist politics, and migration to southern Europe. Yet while Europe perceived a threat to its security, this was only exacerbated by years of political inertia until Algeria's fundamentalists won the (swiftly annulled) 1992 elections. Europe and the international community refused to reduce Algeria's crushing debt burden or to provide development assistance and trading opportunities to offer hope to increasingly marginalised populations.
More recent policy has been along the twin tracks of economic support - writing off debts, billions of dollars of aid through the IMF, the prospect of a free-trade area by 2010 - and the request to NATO to develop a security network for 'protecting' southern Europe from economic and political refugees and wider instability in the region. The Euro-Meditteranean Conference, held in Barcelona in November 1995, committed the EU to a "substantial increase" in aid and the progressive negotiation of the free-trade area as part of a Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The process will be overseen by regular meetings of EU and Mediterranean foreign ministers, the next being in early 1997. The question now to be asked is: would Europe's security not have been better served, and the costs of NATO's involvement reduced, if EU governments had decided earlier that the Mediterranean was a region requiring such "preventive development", the use of development assistance as a fundamental part of a strategy to tackle poverty and marginalisation and to help to prevent terrorism and conflict?
Agreeing the CFSP
Yet declarations by most western European governments that they should speak with one voice to preserve a significant world role are even older than the original Common Market, and were made at the June 1955 conference in Messina, Sicily, which prepared the way for future integration. In 1969, the Hague summit established European Political Cooperation (EPC) which became the forerunner of the CFSP. Then in 1991, the negotiations culminating in the Maastricht summit sought to establish further practice on this principle of diplomatic cooperation and to agree various mechanisms and general aims. As in all other aspects of EU policy, there was some disagreement between the more and the less cautious member states. In the case of the CFSP, the UK was joined by Ireland and Denmark arguing successfully for rather limited cooperation on foreign policy.
When Title V of the Maastricht Treaty agreed in December 1991 to set up the CFSP, it set out its purpose in terms so general that most of them could have been written at any time since Messina. They hardly reflected the fact that, even by 1991, Europe was facing a very different world from that which had persisted under the Cold War. Maastricht's Article J.1 (2) stated the CFSP's aims as:
To safeguard the common values, fundamental interests and independence of the Union; to strengthen the security of the Union and its member states in all ways; to preserve the peace and strengthen international security, in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter as well as the principles of the Helsinki Final Act and the objectives of the Paris Charter; to develop and consolidate the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms
The Maastricht Treaty was not consistently quite so vague on all the EU's external policy. Title XVII, which covers development cooperation, includes (in Article 130u) commitments to foster: "the sustainable economic and social development of the developing countries, and more particularly the most disadvantaged among them . . (and to) campaign against poverty in the developing countries". Article 130v also stated that "the Community shall take account of the objectives referred to in Article 130u in the policies that it implements which are likely to affect developing countries".
The EU thereby committed itself to eradicating poverty, to focusing upon "developing countries" and to making efforts towards the "coherence" of other external policy, including the CFSP, with its development cooperation. The Maastricht Treaty recognised the moral and - in the long term - enlightened self-interest of reversing the global trend of increasing poverty and conflict.
Looking east
This commitment to "developing countries", and the CFSP's stated objective to strengthen "international security", might have been taken to mean that the EU would have a global foreign policy, including support for the UN, responding to the changes of an increasingly unstable world. In effect, however, the early years of the CFSP have seen a stark mismatch between these ambitious but vague global principles and the reality of a pursuit of ever narrower interests.
Following the priorities set at the EU's Essen summit in December 1994, the EU has focused primarily on the security and stability of the current EU's "near abroad" central and eastern Europe (much of it envisaged to become part of the enlarged EU over the next five to fifteen years) and the twelve Mediterranean countries which may join the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership.
Though dominated by policy towards former Yugoslavia, there has been a wider turning to the east, including the Stability Pact, proposed by former French Premier Edouard Balladur and agreed with nine prospective members of the EU in March 1995. The Pact process codified existing international agreements and helped to broker new ones on border disputes and minority rights, and set up two regional round tables to help to diffuse tensions in the Baltic states and in south-eastern Europe.
In presenting the Commission's report in November 1995 on the EU's future enlargement, Commission President Jacques Santer reiterated that successful enlargement to the east would be vital for the peace and stability of Europe. That the EU should focus considerable resources on the east is quite justified, not only for that reason, but also because of the region's increasing poverty, and the human suffering which will follow a failure to prevent further conflict. For example, UNICEF reported in 1995 that, of the Russian population, 60 per cent were now below the poverty line, and 23.4 per cent living in extreme poverty. Even the more affluent countries of central Europe, the so-called Visegrad Four - Slovenia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic - are poor by western European standards; the last, the most prosperous country in central and eastern Europe, has a per capita income only half that of the EU average.
There are real prospects of further abuse of human rights, and of conflict. There are tensions over Russian minorities in the former Soviet Baltic states, over Crimea's relations with the Kiev central government, and over Hungarian minorities in central Europe; and it is still possible that the precarious peace in former Yugoslavia may collapse and conflict spread further south into the Balkans.
The need for generous aid to the EU's neighbours around the Mediterranean as well should not be in dispute. But what is not justifiable is the disproportionate attention, and use of resources in the Mediterranean, and central and eastern Europe, compared to other regions of the world, many of which are home to more people living in poverty, and at even more risk of further conflict.
The Human Development Index for each country, calculated annually by the UN Development Program (UNDP) is the most widely respected benchmark of comparative poverty around the world. The latest (1992) figures published in the 1995 Human Development Report places only four European countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Romania - in the bottom half of the league table of 174 states for which comparative statistics are available (which does not include former Yugoslavia). Most Maghreb countries also lie near the middle of the league: for example, Algeria is number 85. Without exception, all the states beneath 100 are in the South, with a strong correlation between the low ranking and conflict.
The bottom twenty countries include Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Uganda, Mali, Ethiopia and Somalia. EU funds to those countries in 1994 totalled nearly 90 million ecu; but in the same year, funds to former Yugoslavia amounted to 269 million ecu. The balance of need is not reflected in the distribution of EU aid around the world.
Though EU aid actually increased by 75 per cent between 1990 and 1993, the majority of this represented the surge in aid to central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (from zero to 719 million ecu, excluding humanitarian aid) and the trebling of assistance to the EU's Mediterranean neighbours (from 103 to 353 million ecu). Including all forms of aid, and aid from member governments as well as through the EU, assistance to the east between 1990 and 1994 totalled 38.7 billion ecu. Of the 1996 budget for EU humanitarian aid, 1.5 billion ecu of the total 3.34 billion is designated for central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
At the June 1995 Cannes summit of EU heads of government, allocations from the Community budget alone to the EU's Mediterranean neighbours were projected by the Commission to increase further in absolute terms by 108 per cent in the five years to the end of 1999 (to 4.685 billion ecu), and to central and eastern Europe by 41.5 per cent (to 6.93 billion ecu), excluding the former Soviet Union.
Turning aside from the South
In contrast, the allocations of the European Development Fund to the so-called African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of 70 countries, under the fourth Lomé Convention, are set to stagnate in real terms (at 13.3 billion ecu) for the same five-year period. Aid to Asia and Latin America, which comes from the Commission's core budget, is also expected to remain static when it is agreed in early 1996 for the years up to 1999.
Beyond the "near abroad", EU assistance has still been concentrated upon economically-advanced regions, as made clear by the June 1995 Communication from the Commission which set out the main focus in the South as the ASEAN (Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei) and Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay) countries. Whilst there is extreme inequality and large numbers of poor people in several of these countries, the poorest of these, Indonesia, is still ranked by UNDP as better off than 70 countries in the world, making these countries potentially better able to address poverty.
This distribution of resources does not correspond to the regions where the existing general principles of the CFSP are most threatened - where peace and international security are in greatest peril. What it does reflect is the EU's overriding economic interests - in effect, overriding other "fundamental interests" - and its desire to see central and eastern Europe become more stable and prosperous, and become ready for entry into the EU, and to reduce the perceived threat of migration and terrorism from across the Mediterranean.
The wider view
Exceptions to this - for example, significant European support for the peace processes in South Africa, and, in the mid- and late-1980s, in central America - serve to illustrate the general preoccupation with narrow priorities; but they also illustrate the EU's potential to make a difference, even in regions where it has little direct interest, when it chooses to do so.
Between 1983 and 1990, the European Community played an active role in seeking to end the conflicts in the central America countries of Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, which together killed 160,000 during the 1980s. It supported the Contadora Group of Latin American governments involved in negotiating peace, including in the formal dialogue between them and the EC known as the San Jose process. The EC gave economic assistance to the Sandinista government to help to limit Nicaragua's dependence upon the Soviet Union, and hence the capacity of this regional conflict to become a major crisis for the then critical East-West relations. Though EC policy was not "pro-Sandinista", and "democratising" Nicaragua was one of its stated aims, the EC lobbied the US and others to accept the legitimacy of the Sandinista government and its basic aims, and supported Latin American diplomacy to prevent the US excluding Nicaragua from the peace process, and in preventing direct US military involvement.
As a 1995 study of European policy to the region concluded:
EC policy formed part of the international opposition to US policy. The EC's contribution was significant in that it provided diplomatic support to Latin and Central American diplomacy and also 'legitimate' - that is, non-Communist - opposition to US policy (Hazel Smith: EU Foreign Policy and Central America).
EC policy was therefore successful and beneficial, and - though driven primarily by the European view that the policies of both Presidents Reagan and Bush unnecessarily threatened East-West stability - it was not based upon a narrow, short-term interest.
One part of the motivation appeared to be the genuine desire to support central America's inter-related economic and political development, the same pursuit of regional peace and prosperity upon which the EC itself was based.
Sadly, the end of the Cold War has produced a considerable decline in EU diplomatic interest in central America. Nor has there been a major diplomatic focus on the increasing scale of conflicts in Africa and, for example, substantial support for the Organisation of African Unity's efforts at conflict-prevention on the continent. Instead, the 1990s have seen EU attention increasingly concentrate on the new dangers and opportunities in eastern Europe.
The pressure of enlargement
It is ironical that, while the Maastricht Treaty gave the EU's development objectives their first basis in European Community law, and the CFSP was born with the ambitious if vague aim of promoting "international security", the reality since 1991 has been that the EU's increasing preoccupation with enlargement and the "near abroad", and the pressures of economic competitiveness and trade relations, are all at the expense of commitments to the world's poor countries and poorest people.
It is perhaps the prospect of enlarging the EU to the east which has had the greatest impact in concentrating the focus of so much EU aid, and of the CFSP. Yet the timetable for enlargement is far from certain. Optimists speak of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic) and Malta and Cyprus acceding by the year 2000. Perhaps all other eastern European states, including Russia, could be members by 2010. Yet other observers doubt whether progress will be so swift. For many countries, as Budapest University's Laszlo Andor has written: "Entry to the European Union [remains] a mirage on a receding horizon."
The cost of inaction
As the foreign policy-makers of the EU have predominantly looked east, the response to the increasing scale of conflicts in parts of the South has been largely left to those giving humanitarian aid. And yet when the official EU, US and the UN humanitarian agencies gathered in Madrid for their first ever Humanitarian Summit on 14 December 1995, they concluded that:
It is clear that humanitarian assistance is neither a solution nor a panacea for crises which are essentially man-made. This is true in Rwanda and Bosnia, but also in many other parts of the world forgotten by the media, such as Afghanistan, Northern Iraq, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Tajikistan and the Sudan.
In the Madrid Declaration, Emma Bonino, EU Commissioner responsible for the European Commission Humanitarian Office (ECHO), together with the heads of the UN agencies and of USAID, made an appeal to the international community at large. In their first point, they said: "Determination is required to take whatever resolute and decisive action may be necessary to resolve crisis situations - and not to use humanitarian aid as a substitute for political action."
Yet political inaction has meant that humanitarian aid has indeed been a substitute for diplomacy. This was one of the conclusions of a major evaluation of the International Communities response to the conflict and genocide in Rwanda. When faced by conflicts or emerging crises beyond the "near abroad", the EU and its member governments have largely failed to take timely and determined diplomatic action to help to prevent or resolve conflicts. Once a conflict has started, they have also failed adequately to support peace-keeping missions which could have helped to protect the civilian victims of those conflicts; and once a conflict is over, they have failed to provide sufficient effective long-term development aid which can help to make peace endure. In short, the EU's heavily-branded, televisual humanitarian aid has masked a policy vacuum on how to deal with conflicts.
Rwanda
The genocide in Rwanda stands out as the most extreme example. Eurostep's member organisations have worked in the country for 30 years and spent over 40 million ecu in response to the 1994 genocide and the subsequent refugee crises in neighbouring countries. In March 1996 the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda was published. It concluded that despite close observers anticipating mass violence and the advocation of swift interventionist action, the major powers, including Member States of the EU, that controlled the UN peacekeeping operations paid only cursory attention to Rwanda and there were no contingency plans except for withdrawal. The report notes that:
The failure by the international community to make effective demands on its relationship with a regime whose involvement in organised killings of civilians was generally suspected and carefully documented in two 1993 reports - one from a joint NGO mission and the other by a Special Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights - was an act of omission that carries at least some moral co-responsibility for subsequent events in Rwanda. Acts of Commission carry heavier responsibility.
The warnings referred to were repeated in the months leading up to April 1994, when the genocide began, and came from official sources as well as human rights organisations. In January, the commander of the UN force in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, clearly reported that the ruling MRND party was already training its Interhamwe militia in the use of weapons, explosives and close combat tactics, that they had stockpiles of weapons, and that they had begun registering all Tutsi in Kigali for what an informant to Dallaire concluded was a plan for "extermination".
This EU failure to take sufficient preventive action was all the more astonishing given that four EU members - the UK, France, Belgium and Germany - had been heavily involved in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, both historically and in the immediate run-up to the Arusha Accords. European views also had a crucial influence on how the UN Security Council decisions, including the fateful one of April 1994 to reduce the size of the UN operation, UNAMIR, which even in its limited state was able to save the lives of thousands of hunted Tutsi. Once the Security Council decided to increase UNAMIR in May 1994, EU governments, alongside others, failed to commit the financial and technical resources swiftly enough to enable the enhanced force - largely composed of troops offered by a number of African governments - to protect tens of thousands of others.
The EU did, however, then contribute heavily to the humanitarian relief effort, primarily to refugees from the conflict, giving 18 million ecu within 1994 alone. Though vital, this European attention came too late for most. While about 100,000 people have died from non-violent causes in the region since April 1994, between five and ten times that number were deliberately killed in Rwanda's genocide. Further, it is without doubt that some of those 100,000 would not have died if direct humanitarian assistance had not been so seriously constrained, first by the genocide in the second quarter of 1994, and then by the insecurity in Goma and other refugee camps, the scenes of severe intimidation by former government militia until at least March 1995.
The generosity of EU aid is therefore in contrast to the diplomatic inaction through the CFSP. In the terms and language of the EU, in which the CFSP is governed by an entirely intergovernmental "pillar", and aid is part of the European Community pillar managed by the Commission, the response to Rwanda can be seen as a dramatically "incoherent" set of policies. It was an example of the EU using aid policy as an alternative to foreign policy - rather than both as parts of a "coherent" response.
The precise amount of suffering which could have been avoided by more timely and concerted international action is impossible to gauge, though many observers conclude that it was the majority. What is beyond reasonable doubt is that at best the genocide could have been averted altogether, and at worst far more lives could have been saved, if there had been a greater and more assertive deployment of UNAMIR from August 1993, combined with considerably more robust diplomatic pressure on the Rwandese Government. While it was pressure from the US, as much as from EU governments, that kept UNAMIR small to minimise costs, this does not absolve the EU of its responsibility. In a very real sense, therefore, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Rwandans died as the victims of political inaction.
Similarly, it is at least worth asking how much of the vast cost to the EU and the rest of the international community, of dealing with the outcome of the genocide, could have been saved by timely action in 1993. Even a large preventive deployment of UN troops, giving an unequivocal message to those planning the massacres, could have been an economy compared to what has been spent since then on the continuing relief operations.
It is also worth noting that, when EU governments choose to, they do not lack the capacity to respond. When France - reported to have armed the former Rwandese Government both before and since the genocide - decided to intervene directly in south-west Rwanda in June 1994, its Operation Turquoise was deployed within days. France's role has been characteristic of some EU members who have pursued their perceived national interests at the expense of a common EU approach. In action and inaction, the foreign policy of different EU governments, incoherent therefore with each other as well as with EU aid policy, failed to meet the challenge of genocide.
Europe's "common values"
The CFSP should instead represent the EU's "common values" abroad; this is the term used in the Maastricht Treaty, though those values were not defined. The EU has a tradition of solidarity with Europe's former colonies and, indeed, some wider sense of internationalism: a sense of responsibility without borders. However imperfectly, this is already manifested in the Lomé Convention with African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, and in the EU's total aid spending. Supporting its "common values" around the world should now also be demonstrated through the EU's wider foreign policy.
That is not just because the EU has a role and an interest in supporting positive developments around the world. It is also because the electorates of EU member states perceive that an EU which fumbles in its foreign policy, without a vision of its role in an interdependent world, may not be an entity that inspires confidence in the future. Public support for European integration rests fundamentally on the EU's perceived performance. Chancellor Kohl observed, at the time of the Maastricht ratification debates and referenda of 1992, that the EU's performance on former Yugoslavia, already judged as a failure, was one element of the disillusion with European integration which, at one time, seemed to threaten its progress, and which remains a sobering lesson to Europe's political leaders.
Though not specified in the Maastricht Treaty, the EU would seem to be based upon two common values which are highly relevant in shaping the CFSP in response to the increasing scale of conflict around the world. For Jean Monnet and the other founders of what is now the EU, their task was fundamentally, at least in part, an exercise in conflict-prevention. The first half of this century had seen two wars arising from a combination of rivalries between the major European powers, particularly France and Germany, tensions over minorities, and the national resentments which poverty can breed. The experience of the Weimar Republic demonstrated that poverty, and unemployment in particular, were the breeding grounds for a populist politics of ethnic supremacy and aggression. The leaders of post-war Europe were determined that the second 50 years of the twentieth century would be different. That they were successful is an enormous achievement - but also represents a challenge to uphold the principle of conflict-prevention in Europe's external policy.
Fundamental to that achievement has been the grounding of western Europe's peace in prosperity - unprecedented prosperity for most, though certainly not all, of the EU's citizens. The EU should apply the same lesson to its external policy. The Commission Directorate-General responsible for development, DG VIII, has already set conflict-prevention and poverty-reduction as strategic priorities for EU aid. The former depends upon the latter.
Secondly, the success of preventing major conflict in western Europe has been based upon, as well as economic performance, the acceptance of diversity within and between EU members: the acceptance of ethnic, religious and political differences. In some contexts - between France and Germany - this was achieved remarkably quickly after 1945; in others, it has moved tragically slowly. This principle upon which modern Europe is based should be among the "common values" which it represents in its policy towards countries where intolerance lies at the root of conflicts.
At the same time, it is important to uphold the same value within the EU, as intolerance to refugees and immigrants is increasing in many EU. Unofficially, this is illustrated by the rising number of racially-motivated attacks. Officially, it is manifest in tighter restrictions on the admission of refugees and asylum-seekers and on their rights once admitted. In January 1996, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees criticised the UK Government on both the planned asylum and immigration bill, and new legislation to deprive some refugees of social security payments. According to UNHCR, the latter would put the UK "squarely in violation" of its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Much has been written elsewhere on the causes of conflicts in the 1990s which this paper will not attempt to reiterate. Nevertheless, it is clear that the rise in ethnic communal politics, often because those communities are becoming poorer, has been a major factor in the increasing scale of internal conflicts around the world. To counter this should be a priority for the EU, through support for minorities' rights, and generous aid which is conditional on governments' respect for every person's basic rights. The IGC should define the "common values" underlying the CFSP, and place the prevention of conflict and the protection of diversity at their heart.
Time to mature
The Maastricht summit in 1991 left a deliberate ambiguity about the CFSP - and on the related defence issues - and postponed decisions until 1996. The heads of government who meet at the next IGC will not have the same luxury. It is no longer tenable for the EU to have an incipient foreign policy sheltering under the US as the dominant player in international relations.
The rise of isolationism in the US, as it no longer seeks to contain Soviet communism, but merely protect its economic interests, leaves a void in the global body politic. The United Nations as a whole, and all states who wish to contribute to effective collective policy and action, are weakened by the reduced interest in the UN shown by its most powerful member. Unless this void is filled by the EU - not alone but working with the US and other governments, making some reality of the idea of an international community - the years around 2000 could see the effective demise of global institutions, and of the international will to find solutions to global problems, from environmental destruction to increasing poverty.
This medium-term trend of growing US isolationism is probably not fundamentally altered by the short-term initiative, responding to EU failure in former Yugoslavia, to lead and dominate the process towards peace in that region. Yet the Dayton agreement of November 1995 was a commentary on the EU; and the cautious approach to the CFSP of some Member States of the EU. European governments have been seen to fail in preventing or resolving a major conflict on their continent.
Though the implementation of the Dayton accord has deployed 20,000 US troops around Tuzla in north-east Bosnia, these are due to be withdrawn by the end of 1996, and the reluctance with which US public opinion and Congress accepted the involvement does not suggest that the deeper trend to isolationism has been reversed. In addition to the internal pressures on the EU to mature into a political as well as an economic entity, changes in the international situation demand that the 1996-97 IGC is used as an opportunity to develop a serious and "coherent" common foreign policy.
Coherence and clarity
The need for greater clarity for the CFSP is not contentious. The Reflection Group preparing for the IGC has recognised the need to clarify objectives, and cited the EU's enlargement to the east as one factor making this a necessity. However, simply clarifying the CFSP's role in relation to central and eastern Europe would be an inadequate response from the IGC when the world surrounding Europe is increasingly unstable.
Some EU governments argue that clarity should be based on geographical areas of prime interest to the EU. This would be to formalise the increasing tendency of the EU, and the US, to divide the world into two: areas of economic importance to those blocs - and the rest of the world, and its poor and marginalised people, from which the EU and US are increasingly disengaging.
Instead, the IGC should take up the proposals of other member governments, including the Netherlands and Sweden, to state that the EU's "fundamental interests" include the protection of global principles, including human rights and democracy. This is a crucial area for further debate at the IGC. The Reflection Group has already accepted the broad argument that Europe's "territorial integrity" can not be immune from new post-Cold War threats resulting from profound changes taking place outside the Union. In its interim report of September 1995, it identified in particular "internal civil strife, protection of minorities, human rights violations, ecological disaster risks".
The task is now to recognise how the wider and longer-term threats to the EU, and threats to its "common values", can be met by a clearer CFSP with more coherence with the rest of EU external policy. According to the December 1994 report of the High-level Group of Experts on the CFSP (commissioned by Hans van den Broek, the EU Commissioner for External Relations) "the crisis in our (the EU's) system of beliefs and values", as well as new threats to Europe, must be addressed by the CFSP. The IGC should ensure that the CFSP is about more than protecting the short-term and narrow interests of member governments.
The IGC opportunity
The IGC has the chance to agree a more detailed mandate for the CFSP which specifically includes in its aims, and success criteria, the priority of reducing poverty and conflicts, and strengthening respect for civil and political, economic and social rights, and international humanitarian law. As part of this, it should also commit itself to making the CFSP coherent with the EU's trade, development cooperation and humanitarian aid policies.
Eurostep recommends that the IGC updates the purpose of the CFSP, stated under Title V, Article J.1 (2) of the Maastricht Treaty, to:
Under Articles J.2 and J.3 of the Maastricht Treaty, mechanisms were agreed to formulate "common positions" and "joint actions" as the vehicles for the CFSP. The IGC should also state explicitly that the prevention and resolution of conflicts are relevant uses for these tools.
That these should be applied to internal, as well as international, conflicts reflects the fact that virtually all modern conflicts are internal. It also reflects the increasing acceptance over the last ten years that the historic respect for absolute national sovereignty should not be a fundamental obstacle to the protection of universally agreed human rights. Without such acceptance, international law has little relevance to the great majority of current conflicts. In a revised CFSP mandate, such a reference to internal conflicts would build on the practice during the 1990s of EU Member States supporting the series of UN initiatives in internal conflicts.
Most issues relating to arms exports are also, at present, excluded from the EU's common trade policy. It is important that when the IGC comes to review this, as is already agreed, the resulting treaty sets common conditions on future arms transfers to safeguard civilians' right to protection from violence.
Improving the structures
The Maastricht Treaty set down that the CFSP is the second of the three so-called pillars of the European Union. Like the third, Justice and Home Affairs, it is an intergovernmental process. It is only the first pillar, the European Community, which allows for exclusive Commission initiative, and gives the European Parliament a substantive role. Under the second pillar the Parliament merely has the right to be informed about the CFSP and, once a year, to debate its implementation. Other than the CFSP, all EU external policy, including development and humanitarian aid, is under the Community.
There are arguments on whether or not the CFSP should continue as an entirely intergovernmental process, and on how coherence should be ensured in the decision-making on the CFSP and on the Community's other external affairs. What is certain is that the IGC must establish some means for swift, decisive and transparent decisions which do not allow future policy to be paralysed at the lowest common denominator of what all EU governments can agree. This will not necessarily mean an extension of qualified majority voting to some or all CFSP decisions; in any case, it is clear that no EU Member State will be bound, against its national government's will, to deploy its forces in any conflict resolution.
It must also establish some capacity - presumably in the Commission or the Council of Ministers' Secretariat - to plan and monitor policy, and make recommendations to the decision-making structure. This task currently falls between two intergovernmental bodies: the meeting of the Permanent Representatives of each government to the EU, and the Political Committee of senior foreign ministry officials from each state.
A final problem in the existing structure is that the EU's external policies are represented by several senior officials of the Commission on specific issues and to particular fora and countries. As well as the Commission President's role in external affairs, External Relations Commissioner Hans van den Broek has responsibility towards central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, while the rest of the world is divided up between the portfolios of Commissioners Marin, Brittan and Pinheiro. In the future, the CFSP may need to be personified in either one Commissioner or an official of the Council of Ministers of sufficient international calibre.
Coherence with aid
Making these structural improvements will be necessary not least to overcome the divergence between the CFSP and EU aid policy. If the CFSP can develop into a genuinely global foreign policy, with conflict-prevention and conflict-resolution as priorities, both the EU's development cooperation and humanitarian assistance must be directed towards these overall goals. Conversely, the objectives of that aid can not be sustainably achieved if they are overwhelmed by conflicts which the CFSP does not seek to prevent or resolve.
Aid policy should be equally coherent with the humanitarian and human rights aims of the CFSP suggested above. The EU's humanitarian aid - 764 million ecu in 1994 - should be delivered impartially to people whose basic rights to water, food and other necessities are threatened by conflicts or (much less often) natural disasters. It would also mean that humanitarian aid was delivered, when necessary, in combination with diplomatic and, in extreme cases, security measures to guarantee that the recipients of aid were also protected from violence. Through coherent CFSP and aid policies, the EU could play a considerable role in reversing the sharp decline in respect for civilians' rights to protection, and in implementing the responsibilities placed upon all governments under international humanitarian and refugee law.
A European voice in the UN
Though the EU may have an increased role in directly supporting regional initiatives in the South, such as the Organisation of African Unity's growing activities in conflict-prevention, most of the actions of a more global CFSP should be conducted through the UN. The UN should remain the single most significant body to help to prevent conflict and enhance respect for basic rights around the world.
Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali's visit to London in January 1996, where the first UN General Assembly was held in 1946, marked the end of the UN's fiftieth anniversary year. After the disappointment of the year, in which very few real reforms were achieved, it will be in no small part up to the EU and its members to determine whether the UN continues to decline, or develops its effectiveness in addressing the global challenges of the twenty-first century.
A third of the UN Security Council in 1996 are either existing members of the EU (UK, France, Germany and Italy) or, in the case of Poland, likely to join by the end of the decade. Though Germany's current two-year term will end on 31 December 1996, its possible elevation to permanent status as part of wider changes to the Council's membership would further increase the European voice.
Though an EU seat per se may be neither a short-term prospect, nor something which would increase the EU's total representation, the influence of EU member states on the Security Council, when acting together, is very considerable. A common EU voice has already been a feature of EU involvement in other UN fora, where the country holding the EU Presidency has spoken for all, for several years.
If the US continues its trend towards isolationism, the influence of the EU could increase still further. The US is already responsible for $1.434 billion of the UN's £3.33 billion arrears (according to September 1995 figures). Whether the US Congress now implements its threat to significantly cut US contributions, or whether the method for assessing contributions is radically updated to make it more equitable (which would also let the US off the hook) the EU's proportional contribution is also likely to become greater.
The High-level Group on the CFSP said that the EU will increasingly be expected to cooperate in a "partnership of leadership" with the US. Though Eurostep strongly believes that the UN must become more accountable to Southern governments as well, there is a very real danger that, as the US role diminishes, the UN will continue its decline unless EU governments unite in its support.
EU member states have already been influential in several areas of policy to improve the UN's performance in response to conflicts. The UK and Germany led the process which resulted in 1992 in the establishment of the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, which is now, if its authority is enhanced in 1996, the body most likely to ensure a more effective and coordinated UN humanitarian performance. The Netherlands is at the forefront of proposals for a permanent UN rapid deployment force, the need for which remains one of the urgent, but so far unheeded, lessons from the crises in Rwanda and elsewhere. The EU should increasingly use the UN as one vital means to realise the humanitarian and human rights aims set out in the previous section.
Conclusion
Now is the time for the EU to develop its common foreign policy to be global in scope: contributing to preventing conflicts, reducing poverty, and upholding rights beyond the "near abroad". From experience in seven countries in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, and in the Mediterranean, there is an urgent need to address poverty and the threat of renewed or increasing violence. Eurostep supports the attention which the EU and its members have been paying to these countries in the first half of the 1990s. Yet, from the experience of Eurostep's member organisation's in 60 other countries, most of them significantly poorer, in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, we also see the dangers of the CFSP neglecting the needs of many of the world's poorest people.
If the IGC simply confirms the CFSP's limited focus on narrow and short-term interests, it will represent the EU at its most parochial. Despite the Maastricht Treaty's commitments to international security and reducing poverty, the CFSP would become the public manifestation not of an EU and its members confident of their role, but of a "little Europe", nervous of the outside world. Those suffering from poverty and conflict worldwide, and also the citizens of Europe, deserve better.