Effective Multilateralism and Collective Security: Empowering the UN

Abstract

In 2003, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan launched a major debate on the rules and mechanisms of multilateralism by appointing a High-Level Panel to evaluate the challenges to collective security. This debate over collective security built on earlier UN reports produced by independent commissions and panels evaluating humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping operations (see United Nations, 2000; International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001). Simultaneously, in the wake of the Iraq crisis, the EU was grappling with debates over crafting a common defence and security policy. This chapter assesses the EU’s contribution to the UN debate over the future of collective security. After outlining the organization of EU-UN relations in the field of security, the chapter looks at how the EU is pursuing the European Security Strategy’s ambitious objectives at the UN. It then looks at the contribution which the EU is willing to make to UN actions in the field of security, notably in the fields of early warning/conflict prevention and crisis management, inter alia through the partnership for crisis management between the Commission and the UN Secretariat and the availability of EU forces for operations at the request of the UN.

The authors wish to thank the various national and EU officials whom they interviewed for their kind cooperation and Valéry Arnoud, Tom Delreux, Roy Ginsberg and Bart Kerremans for their welcome intellectual input.