Turning ploughshares into swords - the world needs peace groups, not battlegroups, writes Edward Horgan.
Most peoples' hopes for global peace rest with the UN in spite of its litany of failures, the worst of which was Rwanda. There are many calls for UN reform, but few indications that the necessary transformation will be forthcoming.
The five permanent members of the Security Council use their vetoes to maintain the status quo to their own unfair advantage.
These five have refused to allow the UN to perform its collective security role, and to get around this, secretary-general Kofi Annan appears to be grasping at straws by looking for ways of contracting out its own failed collective security role.
On his visit to Ireland, Mr Annan canvassed support for use of EU battlegroups in peace-enforcing missions around the world.
This is an ill-conceived attempt to get around the abuse of the veto in the Security Council.
The UN's failure in Bosnia led to NATO intervention. NATO conducted the Kosovo war without UN approval and the US responded to September 11th with a unilateral retaliatory attack on Afghanistan without seeking UN approval.
In the Iraq war, UN approval was refused, but the illegal pre-emptive war and occupation went ahead anyway, causing the most serious damage to the UN since the Korean War in 1950. In Africa, attempts to use African regional security for peace-enforcement, led to serious abuses in the Congo and West Africa throughout the 1990s.
Use of French forces in Rwanda in 1994 and the Congo in 2004, with questionable UN authorisation, has also proved problematic, although Mr Annan cited this as an example to justify the case for EU battlegroups for UN peace-enforcement. The UN has been bypassed and international law flouted.
The EU has proposed the creation of so-called battlegroups for peace-enforcement outside of Europe. The idea is that larger EU member-states would each provide a battlegroup of 1,500 troops ready for immediate deployment to trouble spots.
Some smaller states such as Sweden and Finland have agreed to form one such battlegroup between them. The UN and Ireland appear to have swallowed the battlegroup bait, without realising there are hooks and lines, or strings, attached. The EU wants to project its economic interests abroad by use of military forces in order to compete with the US, which has been abusing its military power since the second World War, as did Britain and France. France and Germany want to recruit other EU member-states to achieving their objectives of projecting EU power.
Britain wants a foothold in both camps. Continued exploitation of the majority world by the West is the goal. As with past empires, this will be done under the guise of bringing peace and civilisation to the world.
The alternative, as envisaged by the UN Charter, is that such peace enforcement forces should be provided to the UN which would provide an independent and unbiased command structure, supported by international jurisprudence.
This system of collective security ran foul of the veto system and superpower rivalry and has never been properly implemented.
This emphasis on peace enforcement at the expense of conflict prevention has always been at the core of the failures by the UN to achieve international peace. Conflict prevention was quickly abandoned by the five veto powers as soon as they realised that their vetoes allowed themselves the exclusive right to engage in military conflict in their national interests, without UN interference.
The proposal to set up a European Army, or Rapid Reaction Force, and an EU peace enforcement capacity under the guise of battlegroups, that might be made available to the UN, is taking root like bindweed.
Its supporters have failed to specify, however, what controls will apply to the application of such large-scale lethal force. There are some important questions that are likely to remain unanswered.
What will prevent the larger EU states from using their own components of these battlegroups to promote their own national interests, or to engage in military actions that are not approved by the UN or by the EU?
Britain's involvement in the Iraq war is one example, and several EU states participated in the Kosovo war. Ireland's entanglement with such EU military forces will involve us directly with armies that possess and reserve the right to use nuclear weapons.
Will the UN and Ireland approve the use of such nuclear weapons as soon as we join in such alliances? The Government says that a so-called triple lock will apply to protect Irish neutrality and the use of Irish troops. This means that approval by the UN, the Government and the Oireachtas, will be required. No such locking system was applied to the loss of Irish neutrality resulting from the use of Shannon Airport by US troops engaged in the Iraq war.
Fifteen or 20 such battlegroups could exist within the EU, with or without a clear-cut command structure. Europe would then have a multitude of overlapping and possibly competing armies, including the armies of each state, NATO, EU Rapid Reaction Force/Battlegroups, and the Russian army.
With a weak, ineffective UN, this anarchy of armies will be a threat to peace. Armies, once assembled, tend to find a use. The world needs additional armies like it needs a hole in its ozone layer. It behoves small countries such as Ireland to push for reform and reinforcement of the UN, rather than bypassing it. Stanley Kubrick reminded us that great nations act like gangsters; small nations like prostitutes. Ireland should be promoting a strong reformed UN rather than joining competing military structures. We cannot serve three military masters, the UN, the US and the EU. We need to choose between peace and aggression. The UN, or its improved successor, should be the road towards peace. Ireland risks turning our peacekeeping UN ploughshares into EU swords. Our neighbour is no longer all mankind, just the rich people next door.
• Edward Horgan is a former UN peacekeeper in the Middle East, and has also worked in south-east Asia, Africa and the Balkans. He is completing a PhD on UN reform at the University of Limerick.