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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/03
Conflict Prevention
June 2006
Abstract
The Barcelona Declaration has to be considered as an international peacebuilding regime. International peacebuilding regimes, according to the definition of the International Crisis Group-ICG, are “international laws, norms, agreements and arrangements - global, regional or bilateral in scope - designed to minimise threats to security, promote confidence and trust, and create frameworks for dialogue and co-operation”. They are geared to prevent conflict and to post-conflict management (including preventing conflicts from re-escalating).
The Declaration is not specifically devoted to conflict prevention in the sense that it never mention the latter. Furthermore, conflict prevention has been only very seldom called in by the varying drafts of the Charter for Peace and Stability the Senior Officials took into consideration. However, as just pointed out, as a peacebuilding regime, the Declaration is inherently devoted to conflict prevention.
That conflict prevention is the basic task of the Barcelona process is indirectly confirmed by two circumstances. One is that the Barcelona Declaration excludes conflict resolution from its goals when it says that the “Euro-Mediterranean initiative is not intended to replace the other activities and initiatives undertaken in the interest of the peace, stability and development of the region”, making it clear in the following that by such exclusion it refers principally to the Middle East Peace Process. In contrast, it does not exclude conflict management and prevention. The second circumstance is that, at the end of the chapter illustrating the political and security partnership, the Declaration makes reference to the “long term possibility of establishing a Euro-Mediterranean pact to that end”. Although it does not specify the kind of pact, we know from the preparatory talks that the Europeans, in particular France, put forward the idea of a pact of stability. The Southern Partners were not prepared to such commitment, although they did not want to rule it out. What is left is an allusion to a typical instrument of conflict prevention, i.e. that pact of stability the EU members implanted successfully in the CSCE/OSCE framework and later on in the Balkans. Anyway, this allusion is important to understand the feelings that presided over the establishment of the Euro-Med Partnership and the broad direction that is embedded in it.
Thus, conflict prevention looks like an inherent and important character of the Barcelona process. What concept of conflict prevention does fit with it?
