The Security-Development Nexus on the Institutional Track

chapter 4 The Security-Development Nexus on the Institutional Track

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preserva- tion of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. niccolò machiavelli, 1532 ∵

From its founding fathers to its current leaders, the European Union has been governed by a great believe in the role of institutions and institutional change. To many of the obstacles the European integration project has come across throughout its nearly 60 years of existence, a substantial part of the answer has been delivered in terms of institutional and administrative restructuring. The creation of ecsc institutions to indurate peace on the European continent, the establishment of the High Representative for the cfsp in reaction to the Balkan crisis of the late 1990s and the formation of new supervisory bodies in response to the current economic and financial crisis in the Eurozone, are just a number of examples illustrating the Union’s deep-seated trust in the problem-solving potential of institutions. As acknowledged by former European Council Presi- dent Herman Van Rompuy: “[w]e have in the Union a tendency of solving prob- lems by creating new institutions, new jobs”.1 The approach is generally one of accumulation rather than rationalisation. Institutions are only rarely abolished and institutional changes leave deep marks on the eu’s governance system. As “the present and the future are connected to the past by the continuity of to- day’s institutions”, they can learn us a lot about the nature of the eu beast.2 With regard to the cfsp such institutional fiddling has often attempted to better connect it to other (ex ec) external policies. Nonetheless, the Union’s

1 x, ‘Van Rompuy opposes direct election of the eu’s top leaders’, EurActiv.com, 30.11.2012. 2 D.C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge Univer- sity Press, Cambridge, 1999) vii.

142 chapter 4 institutional framework has always remained “[s]ingle by name, dual by re- gime, multiple by nature”.3 On the positive side, the fact that the nexus is managed in a single institutional framework implies that “it should be politi- cally possible to resolve any issues of coherence resulting from bipolarity”.4 On the negative side, the eu’s institutional arrangements have been called “a divorce between development and security”,5 with the differentiated roles and institutional balance contributing more to fragmentation than coherence.6 The most recent and thorough institutional reorganisation was undertaken by the Lisbon Treaty of Lisbon, which reformed the function of High Repre- sentative, gave rise to the creation of a single foreign service and transformed the old Commission Delegations into genuine Union Delegations. eu leaders confidently announced that these innovations would finally “give the Union a single voice in external relations”,7 overcome the fragmentation of the past and make it “work more efficiently and effectively”.8 This signals a strong con- viction that the absence of these mechanisms “was responsible for the under- whelming effect of the Union’s foreign policy and, accordingly, that their in- troduction would place the Union in its well-deserved place at the very centre of the world stage”.9 The above statements provide ample reason to analyse the impact of these institutional innovations on the conduct of eu external action, by focusing on their advances to enhance the link between development cooperation and the cfsp. For this purpose we will first scrutinise the traditional love-hate rela- tionship between the Commission and the Council in managing the security- development nexus, which preceded the Lisbon Treaty (4.1). The subsequent

3 S. Keukeleire and J. MacNaughtan, The Foreign Policy of the European Union (Palgrave Mac- millan, Houndmills, 2008) 66. The singleness of this framework used to be laid down in ex Article 3 teu, but is now only included in the teu preamble, as if it was no longer necessary to be emphasised. 4 A. Dashwood, ‘The Continuing Bipolarity of EU External Action’ in I. Govaere, et al. (eds), The European Union in the World: Essays in Honour of Marc Maresceau (Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden, 2014) 14. 5 C. Gourlay, ‘European Union Procedures and Resources for Crisis Management’ (2004) Inter- national Peacekeeping 11(3), 404–421. 6 G. De Baere, Constitutional Principles of eu External Relations (Oxford University Press, Ox- ford, 2008) 273–274. 7 Commission Press Release (ip/07/1922) ‘Commission welcomes signature of the Treaty of Lisbon and calls for its swift ratification’, Brussels, 13.12.2007. 8 cfsp High Representative Speech (S 194/08) ‘eu Foreign, Security and Defence Policy’, address to the European Parliament by Javier Solana, Brussels, 04.06.2008. 9 P. Koutrakos, The eu Common Security and Defence Policy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), 55.