Soft power? Hard work ahead

The European Union prides itself on being able to deal with security challenges outside its borders, from Kosovo to Kabul, because of what it believes to be its unique combination of "hard" and "soft" power: the ability to persuade through trade, diplomacy, aid and the spread of values. This comprehensive approach is meant to give the 27-country Union its foreign policy strength.

Central to this claim are the EU's state-building, or "civilian", capabilities. The EU is supposed to be able to call upon almost 10,000 police officers, dip into the world's largest development budget and ensure that its soldiers work hand-in-glove with aid workers and NGOs. But a lack of imagination and broken promises from member states have lessened the impact of the Union's "soft" power. Its Afghan mission has highlighted the limits of the EU's civilian capacity. With little more than 200 personnel in theatre, the EU police mission is at just half its authorised strength. No member state has offered to fill the gap. Though everyone agrees that a US military surge must be complemented by a European civilian surge, little has happened since the Obama administration sent its European allies a list of suggestions. Yet the EU is meant to have 6,050 policemen on stand-by for missions like this.

The problem is not unique to Afghanistan. European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) missions from Kosovo to Iraq struggle to deploy specialists - of the 11,112 people reported by EU governments in 2008 as ready for ESDP deployment, only 1,928 were actually sent.

Even when member states sustain a significant civilian presence, the results are often paltry. The EU has mentored Bosnia's police for most of this decade, but Europol - the EU's law enforcement agency - has detected no discernable impact on crime rates.

In the first ever audit of the civilian capabilities of all 27 member states, written with Richard Gowan, the severity of the situation is uncovered. Problems include conceptual confusion and, more importantly, the absence of capacity in almost all of the member states.

The first set of problems is down to the EU's method of designing its operations, which is flawed in many ways. Since 2003, when the EU deployed its mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, all subsequent missions have followed the same logic. The idea is that co-location and training of senior law-enforcement officials by Europeans - particularly police officers - organised in an international mission, will gradually raise the standard of local forces. But by relying on its "Bosnia template" for its missions, the EU ignores reality on the ground. The naïve use of the template means the EU struggles to deal with fragile states and post-conflict recovery. The 2005-2006 mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo was rendered largely irrelevant because EU planning failed to take into account corruption and the country's size compared to Bosnia.

The survey also shows that EU governments do not have the resources, institutional systems, training regimes and recruitment processes to allow civilian staff to work in trouble spots and alongside the military. No member state has deployed even half of what they promised in the 2004 "civilian headline goal" process, and the EU has a shortage of 1,500 personnel across its 12 ongoing EU state-building missions.

Fifteen EU countries are either indifferent or opposed to improving their civilian capacities. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain report poor inter-ministerial cooperation and admit that civilian crisis management does not enjoy a high level of political visibility. The worst offender in breaking promises is Spain, which deploys less than three percent of its pledged civilian experts. Britain does little better, fulfilling only seven percent of its promises. France is more than twice as likely to stand by its undertaking, but the country's civilian missions have serious flaws elsewhere - for instance, its debriefing procedures are very inconsistent.

In future, more effort will be needed at every level to develop the EU's civilian capacities, especially but not exclusively in the member states. The focus on civilian capacities does not mean the EU should obsess over civilian missions or work exclusively with NGOs on non-violent peacekeeping, at the expense of military solutions. But to develop a comprehensive approach to crises, the EU needs to turn its attention to the area it has neglected the most: its civilian capabilities and how these work with its military tools. We have had one decade with ESDP. The next decade should focus on the EU's civilian capacity.

This piece is based on Daniel Korski and Richard Gowan's report, Can the EU rebuild failing states? A review of Europe's civilian capacities

It first appeared in E!Sharp on 19 October 2009.