Participants' Reports
New Aspects of Crisis Prevention and Conflict
Management in German Foreign Policy
Speech by
Claus Wunderlich
Director for Global Issues
Federal Chancellery, Berlin
at the Alumni Conference Common Global Responsibility
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
on November 8, 2003
Ladies and gentlemen,
Crisis prevention and conflict management are not new terms or concepts.
They have however become more important at the beginning of the 21st century to the extent that the international community must deal with global challenges more strongly than in the past.
Post-Cold War disputes and armed conflicts differ in many ways from those prior to 1989. Today, non-governmental actors play an important role. The so-called "privatization of vio-lence" is characterized by a complexly interwoven status quo of warlords, rebels, criminal gangs and mercenary troops, which is set against the implementation of the state monopoly on violence. The attacks of September 11th clearly demonstrated the terrorist threat to Western industrial nations. Regional conflicts and their geopolitical significance have been re-evalu-ated, and global security policy has become considerably more important.
However the significance of global issues for mankind was recognized before 9/11, and the United Nations has, for example, described ways to meet these challenges at its Millennium Summit in 2000.
In his acclaimed June 2001 report on "Prevention of Armed Conflict", United Nations Secre-tary-General Kofi Annan described how the UN would need to move from a "culture of reac-tion" to a "culture of prevention".
He summarizes the key insight from which he draws this conclusion as follows: "The earlier the root causes of a potential conflict are identified and effectively addressed, the more likely it is that the parties to a conflict will be ready to engage in a constructive dialogue, address the actual grievances that lie at the root of the potential conflict and refrain from the use of force to achieve their aims."
The conviction that conflicts must be resolved peacefully is what German foreign policy has in the past been, and continues to be, based on. It is the responsibility of governments to re-cognize conflicts and defuse them before they lead to armed confrontation.
Although this danger is frequently detected early on, intervention often only takes place when violence has already erupted and the conflict has gained public attention.
For the current Federal Government, the further development of the instruments for early detection, prevention, and successful resolution of conflicts, as well as drawing up a concept for resolving conflicts, are especially high political priorities.
The Federal Chancellor most recently reaffirmed this prior to his visit to the United Nations in September when he wrote the following in an Op-Ed article in the New York Times:
"Security in today's world cannot be guaranteed by one country going it alone; it can be achieved only through international cooperation. Nor can security be limited to the activities of the police and the military. If we want to make our world freer and safer, we must fight the roots of insecurity, oppression, fanaticism and poverty - and we must do it together."
This is the past and present-day aim of the international community's development cooperation. Already in the coalition agreement of October 1998, the coalition parties agreed that the Federal Government would do its utmost "to develop and implement effective strategies and instruments for crisis prevention and peaceful conflict resolution". In the summer of 2000, the Comprehensive Con-cept of the Federal Government on Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Peace-Building was adopted. It comprises nine elements that express the guiding principles of German foreign policy on crisis prevention.
The new coalition agreement of October 2002 then contained the obligation to present an action plan that - based on the Comprehensive Concept - should contain concrete means by which existing institutions and instruments of crisis prevention could be expanded, or new ones created, in order to strengthen the ability of the Federal Government to act in this area.
This action plan is currently undergoing comprehensive inter-agency harmonization, a process that also involves parliament, civil society, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations. It is not only a stocktaking of peace-promotion measures that have already been implemented. It also proposes a number of actions to strengthen and supplement suc-cessful measures already in place. With a view towards more sustainedly securing the peace, it points out new ways of improved crisis prevention through non-military means and new approaches to conflict resolution.
Crisis prevention must be made a permanent element of all areas of national policy, and the German contributions must then be included in multilateral approaches to crisis prevention. In this connection the United Nations plays an important role, as do regional and subregional organizations such as the OSCE, the EU, and the African Union.
It would be beyond the scope of this speech to address all our actors and individual areas of activity. However, I would like to mention some principles of and prerequisites for suc-cessful crisis prevention:
- Effective crisis prevention must target both the causes of war as well as the processes by and actors through which violence escalates. It is of central importance that institutions and political regulatory mechanisms be created to channel violent conflicts into forums where they can be settled with non-violent means. These are highly complex and long-term tasks.
- Crisis prevention should be primarily of a non-military nature. In individual cases military means may be required as an instrument of crisis prevention and management in order to avert or end the violent settlement of conflicts (examples: Bosnia, East Timor, Afghani-stan). Crisis prevention therefore frequently includes close civilian-military cooperation within the framework of a comprehensive security concept. The Federal Government's actions are based on such an expanded idea of security that includes political, economic, ecological, and social stability.
- Crisis prevention must follow a multidimensional approach, that is it must work on differ-ent levels and with different actors. Although governments still play a key role, inter-national organizations, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector are becoming increasingly important.
- Finally, it is difficult to implement conflict resolution by applying pressure from outside; rather, it requires "local ownership", that is people on the local level must be ready for peace and actively work towards achieving it.
- First, training civilian personnel for deployment in international peacekeeping missions by the Centre for International Peace Missions, which was officially established in Berlin in June 2002. Since 1999, the Federal Foreign Office had been active in this area of basic and further training as well as placing and providing assistance to German experts with a view to their deployment on international missions, above all those sponsored by the UN, the OSCE, and the EU. Up to today, approximately 600 experts have been deployed through these efforts.
- Second, with the assistance of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Devel-opment, the German Development Service, churches and non-governmental organizations, building up the Civil Peace Service for the deployment of experts on bilateral conflict management projects. So far, 140 experts have been trained. As opposed to the experts of the Centre for International Peace Missions, they are often deployed for several years at a time in order to transform the crisis-related structures on the local level.
Since approximately 40% of all conflicts occur in Africa, the Federal Government also focuses on supporting African states with the aim of putting them in a position by the year 2010 to more effectively prevent armed conflicts with the means at their disposal and to implement peacekeeping missions in accordance with the UN Charter. The Federal Govern-ment in particular promotes regional peacekeeping training centers. The Kofi Annan Inter-national Peacekeeping Training Center (KAIPTC) in Accra/Ghana is one of three regional centers in the ECOWAS region.
Finally, I would like to mention two more areas to which Germany attaches particular importance:
First, subjecting conflicts to legal adjudication and, second, ensuring responsibility is assumed by enterprises in regions of conflict.
The further development of both customary international law and agreements under inter-national law, as well as the institutionalization of international jurisdiction, are a visible expression of the will of the international community to also implement the rule of law in international relations.
The Federal Government has taken an active part in the drafting of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as in making the Court operational which recently began its work in The Hague.
In 1999, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched the Global Compact initia-tive. The initiative, which the Federal Government has supported from the start, today receives the backing of more than 1100 enterprises worldwide. Its essential idea is the fol-lowing: Companies voluntarily commit themselves to engage in socially and ecologically responsible and sustainable business practices at the destination of their investments. Up to now, the UN Security Council has merely addressed some aspects related to this issue. During its Security Council membership term, Germany intends to launch an initiative by the end of 2004 that will unite already existing elements and that might lead to a "Business in Zones of Conflict" Security Council resolution. Such a resolution would underline the potentially important role which the private sector can play in helping to prevent or overcome conflicts within its areas of activity and appeal to enterprises to abide by voluntary systems of self-regulation which hinder the fuelling of armed conflict and mitigate its consequences.
Allow me to mention finally a few examples of successful crisis prevention and conflict management:
- The civil war in Sierra Leone was brought to an end by the largest UN peacekeeping mis-sion to date. Germany deployed a team of 16 civilian engineers of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief to help provide electricity to almost 17,000 blue helmet peacekeepers.
- A team of German administrative personnel was sent to East Timor at the request of the UN. It registered the entire population and helped make preparations for the country's first democratic elections.
- Macedonia is a good example of a successful crisis prevention policy in which military and civilian elements were interconnected and short-term measures were combined with long-term planning. The initial effort was the deployment of UN blue helmets with the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP), followed by the Ohrid Framework Agreement (signed on August 13, 2001), and continued with the NATO operations Essential Harvest (2001), Task Force Fox (2001/2002), and Allied Harmony (2002/2003). In March 2003, the EU military mission Concordia took over command from NATO.
Thank you.