The European Union and Peacebuilding: A Sysyphean but Essential Responsibility?: Introduction

The early years of the twenty-first century witnessed an important shift in how international and supra-national organizations as well as state leaders defined security. Once widely understood as primarily linked to the protection of state borders from attacks by foreign military forces, the United Nations (UN) redefined international security as risk management during the 2000-2010 decade. The 2003 European Security Strategy, the Stockholm Programme (2010-2015) and other strategic documents reflected this new conceptualization. These international agreements treated threats-that now included weapons proliferation, organized crime, terrorism, natural disasters, cyber-piracy, energy shortages, failed states, climate change, chronic and dire poverty, communicable diseases and population movements-as multifarious and unpredictable. In the presence of non-territorialized dangers and the expansion of potential sources of menace, nations and international organizations increasingly organized their security discourse around the notion of vulnerability, i.e., exposure to unpredictable risks that derive from intensified transnational connections.United Nations and European Union (EU) adoption of the concept of human security, the argument that individuals should be the focus of security efforts, reflected a broader trend to reconceive national risk and security. Defending borders, a traditional concern of statehood, began to be defined by regulation of what inevitably porous borders cannot contain, including migrant populations, weapons, diseases, cyber threats, pollution and more. Nations began to view migrating populations as potential loci of terrorist attacks, communicable diseases, crime and even cultural contamination. In this emerging scenario of fresh and newly arrayed risks, international and state leaders were likely to consider states dangerous not because of their might, but because of their weakness, and their inability to prevent criminal or other undesirable actors from thriving within their bounds and/or the capacity of such actors to trespass their borders. European Union leaders began to define security not so much as efforts to maintain stable Member boundaries, but as initiatives aimed at normalizing the environment surrounding the Union itself. In this changed situation, military intervention is but one form of European Union involvement with specific nations. Indeed, the EU has embarked on long-term programs of rebuilding societies and states by mobilizing an array of actors, including NGOs and other local political and civil society organizations. The Union has embraced rebuilding societies in its borderlands as a way of addressing Europe's perceived vulnerability.In fact, as early as 1993, good governance, vital market economies and well-functioning state administrations were stipulated in the Copenhagen criteria for EU admission, while also widely viewed as tools that could help make the Union more secure. A decade later, the2003 European Security Strategy called for a ring of well-governed states at the EU's frontiers. Prevention, intended to reduce the possibility that diverse threats might come together to create catastrophic events, emerged as a key element of the EU security strategy. The Union has sought to oversee the range of risks and threats its new understanding has identified by vigorous deployment of technology and knowledge intensive instruments for monitoring an array of variables, ranging from weather trends to population movements. Similarly, security for the EU is no longer the province of national leaders alone, but now encompasses a variety of additional actors, including international government organizations, nongovernmental organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, local politicians, other civil society organizations, and the private (for-profit) sector. The Union must now mobilize and coordinate all of these potential stakeholders to craft security and peacebuilding strategies suitable to the new era. …

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