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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 05/05
Feasibility Study on the European Civil Peace Corps
Catriona Gourlay
March 2004
Executive Summary
This study explores how the proposal for a European Civil Peace Corps (ECPC) might contribute to EU civilian capacities for conflict prevention, crisis management and post conflict peace building. It tracks the progressive identification of EU civilian crisis management with the activities conducted within the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in the Council, and shows how this approach is limited and institutionally divorced from conflict prevention and crisis management activities supported by the Commission.
Part one of the study provides a short overview of the history of the ECPC proposal and the development of EU civil crisis management, which forms an integral part of ESDP today. The study explains that the idea, first developed in 1994, of creating a ECPC was a response to the ineffectiveness of the EU to deal successfully with inter and intra-state conflict in the early 1990's. Since then, the ECPC proposal has been modified in line with ESDP developments, but it maintains the objective of enabling the EU to access and mobilise the wide range of civilian capacities that exist outside governments for crisis management and peacebuilding tasks.
The study argues that the Council's pursuit of 'headline goals' in four distinct areas (police, rule of law, civil administration and civil protection) was a self -limiting one and notes that, with the exception of police missions, it has proved difficult to realise. In contrast, the Commission has been engaged in activities to strengthen the rule of law in a number of countries for over a decade, where these activities are often implemented by individual consultants, the UN, OSCE or specialist NGOs. While it has not been responsible for managing large-scale deployments of civilians for rule of law missions, it has gained relevant experience in managing electoral observation missions and the civil protection mechanism. The inter-governmental and the Commission's approach to civilian crisis management remain largely disconnected, however, and this trend looks set to continue with recent attempts to bolster the EU's mission support and planning capacities strictly confined to the Council General Secretariat. In this fragmented institutional context, the study identifies a number of shortfalls in relation to training, recruitment, deployment, planning and funding civilian crisis management activities.
The second part of the study explores how the ECPC proposal could usefully be developed to bridge institutional divides and fill capability gaps in these areas. Specifically, it should aim to strengthen the link between training and recruitment, increase the involvement of non-state specialists and provide a more holistic approach to planning and managing civilian missions, including the potential deployment of cross-disciplinary teams. The study argues that such integrating mechanisms would be best developed within a crosspillar structure and supports the Commission's preference for a common platform for civilian crisis management planning as well as the proposal by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) for a European Peacebuilding Agency. The EPLO Agency idea aims to help generate capabilities and strengthen links between short-term crisis management actions and longer -term peacebuilding efforts through, inter alia, the closer involvement of national directors of internal security and justice agencies, including police, and the Commission in capabilities generation and planning.
In addition the proposal explores the possibility of establishing a distinct ECPC 'service' which incorporates relevant expertise from non-state experts into the Union's growing cris is management toolbox. Three compatible options are identified: 1) the creation of integrated teams capable of rapid deployment to lay the ground-work for longer-term peacebuilding and reconstruction. These would include governmental and nongovernmental experts and could be managed and paid for by member states, the Commission or a combination of both; 2) the creation of a mechanism within the Commission for the rapid deployment of larger scale teams or a 'corps' non-state professional volunteers. Their activities could either be managed by the Commission directly, or indirectly through specialist organisations that perform a similar function at a national level; and 3) the adaptation of the EU monitoring missions to include non-state volunteers and to take on additional specialised tasks.
