Daniel Korski & Richard Gowan
Foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno
Executive summary
The European Union prides itself on its so-called "civilian power". The EU is meant to be able to deploy almost 10,000 police officers to faraway theatres, to exploit the expertise of more than 40,000 diplomats, to dip into the world's largest development budget - and to ensure that its deployed civilians are able to work hand-in-glove with military deployments. This is an essential element of power in a world where stability in Afghanistan, Yemen or Somalia is seen as key to security on the streets of Hamburg, Marseille and Manchester.
But this supposed civilian power is largely illusory. The EU struggles to find civilians to staff its ESDP missions, and the results of its interventions are often paltry. For example, international crime networks still see the Balkans as "as a land of opportunities", despite the fact that EU police trainers have been operating in the region for the best part of a decade. Ten years after the creation of ESDP, most EU missions remain small, lacking in ambition and strategically irrelevant.
The Bosnia template
The EU's 2003 police training mission in Bosnia established a template for subsequent missions: "capacity-building" through long-term police and security reform, usually in the form of small teams of European experts training and mentoring local law-enforcement officials.
The "Bosnia template" may have made sense in the Balkans, a region with a legacy of authoritarian policing dating back to the communist era.3 But elsewhere this model has proved ineffectual. The EU has focused on judicial reform in places where basic security has not been properly established, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo, or in theatres where locals have no incentive to co-operate politically, like the Palestinian territories.
The sites of future EU deployments are unlikely to resemble the Balkans; the next generation of security challenges will require a far stronger emphasis on crisis management skills. The experience the EU has acquired over six years of ESDP missions may not leave it best placed to cope with these challenges. When the EU has deployed into hostile environments, its personnel have usually been protected by UN, US or NATO troops; when it has managed to deploy speedily and without protection, as in Aceh and Georgia, its civilian capacities have been put under severe strain. EU civilian missions are woefully ill-prepared to deal with threats to their own security, and the EU has struggled to co-ordinate the activities of its civilians with military forces - even its own peacekeepers.
The member state problem
The EU has no standing civilian forces and so relies on member states to round up personnel for its missions. Most governments are failing in this task. The so-called Civilian Headline Goal (CHG) process, approved in 2004, was a rigorous attempt to get member states to commit civilians for potential deployment scenarios. Each member state pledged a certain number of civilians, and yet the CHG process does not appear to have helped the EU get boots on the ground. The most high-profile ESDP missions in recent years - Kosovo and Afghanistan - have never reached full strength; the Afghan mission alone is 130 staff short.
Some of the difficulties in recruitment are common to all member states. Civilian personnel tend to have day jobs in courts or police stations, and many will not be keen on spending six months or more away from their families. And few incentives exist for managers to release personnel; when an employer receives a request for staff, all too often it simply means a financial and staffing headache. Even civilians who do pre-commit to overseas deployments may get cold feet when faced with the prospect of six months in Helmand.
Yet despite these common problems, individual member states must shoulder most of the blame for the sorry state of ESDP recruitment. Our comprehensive survey of the civilian capabilities of all 27 member states reveals a melange of approaches to training, planning, debriefing and recruitment - and, of course, the numbers of civilians sent on missions. Some countries appear to take their ESDP responsibilities extremely seriously; others barely make the effort.