Taking Stock of EU Military Conflict Management
Over the last decade, the EU has established itself as a player in the international field of conflict management. Both its civilian missions and military operations have played a significant part in this development. This article takes a closer look at the EU’s military endeavours in conflict management. It presents a theoretically grounded definition and a corresponding set of criteria for success in military conflict management and evaluates the operations accordingly. The article provides a comprehensive review of all the EU military conflict management operations to date. The analysis is structured and focused around the criteria for success, which provides a more nuanced picture of the Union’s operational achievements throughout its first decade in military conflict management.
Regional and International Conflict Regulation: Diplomatic, Economic and Military Interventions
There is considerable case-specific and anecdotal evidence of the impact of international organisations in conflict regulation, but conceptual frameworks and systematic comparative research are lacking. We begin by categorising different strategies of regional and international conflict regulation and then offer one possible macro-framework to account for its success or failure. This framework combines a focus on factors internal to the relevant organisation (i.e. its capabilities to act, fund and coordinate and cooperate) with an analysis of the conflict context (at the local, state, regional and global level). We find six factors to be particularly important: availability of resources and willingness to deploy them to strategic effect, commonality of interest among member states or a lead nation/s, long-term and continuously sustained conflict regulation efforts rather than ad hoc/on and off crisis management, effective external cooperation with major partners, a permissive conflict context and local interest in ending rather than continuing the conflict.
Analysis: The Agenda 2007 Proposals: Evolution or Revolution?
On 10 February 2004 the Commission published its proposal for the financial perspective 2007-2013. A week later it adopted the third report on economic and social cohesion. These two documents form the basis of the so-called ‘Agenda 2007 reforms’. They will be the greatest challenge for the enlarged EU after the intergovernmental conference, since they will determine the financial basis for EU policy-making until the middle of the next decade. The Agenda 2007 proposals certainly hint at courageous reforms, because they place a previously unheard-of emphasis on performance and quality. Under the proposals, structural operations should generate value for money, and the funds should focus on projects which generate added value at a European level. Overall the Commission’s proposals point in the right direction, because they balance, on the one hand, solidarity for the new Member States and weak regions in the old Member States with, on the other hand, investments in future tasks. Moreover, they constitute a paradigm shift. For the first time, the Common Agricultural Policy will not be the dominant expenditure category. Now it is up to the Member States to examine the proposals politically and find a compromise between sometimes very divergent interests. It is to be hoped that, during the debate over expenditure limits and division of funds, national interests do not outweigh European interests.