By Josephine Liebl, Policy Officer with EPLO, European Peacebuilding Liaison Office in Brussels, Belgium

The launch of the European External Action Service (EEAS) on 1 December, one year after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, was mainly symbolic. A range of senior-level posts have not been filled yet and the detailed structure of the Service will be decided on in the coming weeks. As it is not yet clear whether the unit in charge of peacebuilding and crisis response will receive adequate financial resources and standing vis-ŕ-vis the rest of the Service, the potential of the EEAS to fulfill the Lisbon Treaty commitments to 'preserve peace, prevent conflicts and strengthen international security’ (Art. 21.2(c)) cannot be judged at this point.

The European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) has long argued that the establishment of the EEAS could be used to overcome one of the key challenges the EU is facing in implementing its commitments to conflict prevention and peacebuilding, namely the lack of internal policy coherence. In that respect, the way in which the Service relates to policy areas that remain outside its mandate but that can potentially trigger or aggravate conflict will determine EEAS’s success in promoting peace. Trade and investment policy, the latter becoming an exclusive EU competence with the Lisbon Treaty, are cases in point. Another example is the European Investment Bank (EIB). The EIB is the EU’s long-term non-profit financing institution which only invests in projects that further EU policy objectives. A ruling of the European Court of Justice in 2008 further clarified the EIB’s function as a development bank and reiterated that EIB lending in third countries has to fulfill the EU’s development policy objectives.

Given the lending volume of the EIB - in 2009 lending amounted to € 79 billion, € 9 billion or which was spent outside the EU - and the type of activities that are typically supported by lending (natural resource extraction, construction of power plants, hydroelectric dams and other large scale infrastructure projects, for example), there is significant potential for the EIB to do harm by fueling and exacerbating conflict, but also to do good by promoting peace. In order to do good, though, adequate safeguards addressing human rights, as well as environmental and conflict risks, must be integrated into EIB lending. 

So far, the EIB has included commitments to conflict sensitivity in the Panel of the Wise Persons’ Report on the Review of External Lending Mandate (p.16 & 18) and the Statement on Environmental and Social Principles which states that 'the EIB does not finance projects that give rise to conflicts or intensify existing conflicts’ (para 47). However, despite this dedication to conflict sensitivity on paper, the EIB still needs to develop the necessary capacity, skill and institutional mechanisms to put it into practice.

The need to operationalise these commitments becomes especially important considering the countries eligible for EIB lending listed in the recent Commission proposal on EIB lending outside the EU, among them the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel, Georgia, Colombia, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Western Balkan Countries.

Apart from strengthening due diligence processes within the Bank, EIB lending projects should be subjected to further scrutiny regarding their potential to fulfill EU policy objectives in relation to development and the promotion of peace and human rights. For this reason, EPLO argues in the paper 'Towards a Peacebuilding Strategy for the EEAS’ that the Service should play a role in the evaluation and appraisal of EIB project proposals. Moreover, the EEAS should be involved in the drafting of all regional operational guidelines. This would not only ensure that EIB lending is integrated into the overall political co-ordination of EU’s external action but also counter the tendency of the EIB to be a promoter of the unchecked economic interests of the 27 Member States who are the stakeholders of the Bank.

The EPLO Policy Paper “Towards a Peacebuilding Strategy for the EEAS” can be downloaded here.

The EPLO Policy Paper “The EU as a Global Force for Good: Putting Peace at the Heart of the European External Action Service” is accessible here.

For further information on the “Panel of the Wise Persons’ Report on the Review of External Lending Mandate” please see here.

The EIB Statement of the Environmental and Social Principles and Standards is available here.

Published in: ECC-Newsletter, December 2010