Patten aims to boost EU’s role in preventing conflicts

Date: 02/03/2000

By Gareth Harding

THE European Commission is aiming to boost the EU's ability to respond to crises around the world by setting up a non-military rapid reaction force to help shore up unstable governments, nip potential conflicts in the bud and clean up the after-effects of wars.

The move is the brainchild of External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten and is intended as a further step towards building an EU foreign and security policy which matches its economic clout.

The Union already has an emergency fund for responding to humanitarian disasters and took the first step towards setting up a rapid reaction force of 60,000 troops in December.

However, Patten believes that the EU's experience in the Balkans exposed the failings of its efforts to act effectively and quickly in defusing crises on its own doorstep.

He argues that the Union and its member states are already active in election monitoring, police deployment and training, institution-building, mine-clearing and counter-terrorism operations. What is needed, he says, is better coordination at the European level.

"Our decision-making is too cumbersome for crisis situations," he told MEPs and members of the NATO parliamentary assembly last week. "Our budgetary procedures are far too inflexible and even when we have decided to act and found the money, we are far too slow to deliver."

The former Hong Kong governor is confident that a 'rapid reaction facility' would allow member states to mobilise its resources "within hours or days rather than weeks or months". However, to meet this goal, EU governments will have to agree to pledge resources for non-military measures in the same way they have promised to provide troops for armed conflict.

Patten plans to unveil his plan of action to foreign ministers next month and seek Union leaders' approval at their special summit in Lisbon on 23-24 March.

Diplomats say that although this goal might be over-ambitious given the tight time-frame, there is unlikely to be much opposition to Patten's proposals. "If the EU is capable of constructing new mechanisms on the military side, it must be capable of doing the same on the non-military side," said one Council of Ministers official.

Patten also believes that new mechanisms will be needed for the "rapid delivery of EU assets". The Commission is already in the process of creating a crisis centre to work alongside officials in foreign-policy chief Javier Solana's policy unit. However, the aim is not to create a costly new body, but to draw on the resources of member states with expertise in different fields.

A Commission official said this could, for example, mean adopting Denmark's skills in border controls and using Italy's considerable demining resources.

The European Commission is aiming to boost the EU's ability to respond to crises around the world by setting up a non-military rapid reaction force to help shore up unstable governments, nip potential conflicts in the bud and clean up the after-effects of wars. The Union and its Member States are already active in election monitoring, police deployment and training, institution-building, mine-clearing and counter-terrorism operations.