Monday, September 10, 2007

EU wants to be Important

The People of the EU want to be more influential or as they say it, take more global responsibility.

The vast majority of Europeans want the European Union to take greater responsibility on the world stage - according to a new poll by the US German
Marshall Fund - especially in aid development, trade and peacekeeping missions.
But that’s the thing of responsibility, it is there for anybody to take but you have to be all in. It is good that they want to aid development, trade and peacekeeping but what about where there isn’t any peace to keep?
There was little support (20%) for committing troops for combat missions.

Keeping peace is easy when no one wants to fight. What do you do when one side is committed to killing or enslaving all who opposes? What do you do if one side doesn’t want peace or only wants peace on their terms? Peacekeeping is a great phrase but how effective has it been?
As discussed, peacekeeping, since its beginnings over 50 years ago, has not been an overwhelming success. The ideal peacekeeping mission would have a clear entry plan, establish a lasting peace, and leave behind a set of stable institutions for ensuring that peace, all in the timeframe of two to three years. As it stands, of the 55 U.N. PKOs, 15 are ongoing. Of those, at least 10 have been going on for more than 10 years and five of these have been going on for more than 20 years.[20] Five of the 15 are too recent to be evaluated. Thus 10 of the 15 ongoing PKOs could be automatically labeled failures according to Downs and Stedman's criteria. Of the remaining 40 cases, Downs and Stedman only analyze 16, but of these only six qualify as unmitigated successes. PKOs do not have a promising track record. What can be done to improve the probability of success in peacekeeping missions?
The same essay goes on.

The only hope for success in peacekeeping operations requires sustained interest from the international community, along with detailed plans for state building after the core goals of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration and reconstruction.


Violent people/group/armies tend to resist being disarmed and then tend to do it in violent manners. That means if you want peace, you have to fight for it. It is one of those life contradictions that makes perfect sense to some and is completely lost to others.

Diplomacy should always be the first, second and third thing tried, hopefully it works. There are going to be time that it doesn’t, when diplomacy has to be combined to additional steps. Unfortunately history has shown time and time again that war does solve something, so there will be time that combat will be necessary. If one side is unwilling to go that far then they are at a disadvantage to those who are more than willing to kill and die for their cause.

EU please do take a “global responsibility”, even if you don’t work directly with the US…

Almost 90% of Europeans want the EU to play a bigger role globally while slightly more than half (53%) feel that the EU should cooperate with the US in dealing with global threats, compared with 43% who feel the EU should address threats independently from Washington. France was the only country where a majority (58%) feels the EU would do better to address global threats alone.
… as long as you work toward peace and democracy.