GPPi contributes to Wilton Park conference on EU crisis management

On 20 February 2013, GPPi Associate Director Philipp Rotmann spoke at a Wilton Park conference on the European Union’s engagement in violent conflicts. As part of a panel discussion on improving EU coordination in these particularly challenging contexts, Rotmann made a case for enabling bottom-up leadership wherever possible.

The panel included Catriona Laing, until recently the senior British diplomat in Southwest Afghanistan, and Jean-Marc Pisani from the European External Action Service in Brussels.

The conference addressed a relatively recent discussion about creating a ​“comprehensive approach” to the various EU instruments for crisis engagement. Building on an earlier conference and a policy paper (“Joint Communication”) issued by the European Commission and the External Action Service in December 2013, participants explored ways to better coordinate EU military, police, rule of law missions as well as the EU’s ongoing development cooperation programs and diplomatic engagement. 

In his remarks, Rotmann called for a realistic appraisal of the barriers to effective coordination. Many of the obstacles that the EU’s ​“comprehensive approach” seeks to address are deeply rooted in national politics. In treaties, institutional design and budget decisions, member states have created some impermeable legal and bureaucratic boundaries in Brussels.

Rotmann called on officials in Brussels to make it their task to create space for field-level officials in EU delegations and crisis management operations to innovate from the bottom up. To do so, the focus should be on reducing the constraints of administrative and financial regulations that are ill-suited to conflict situations, cutting back on the micromanagement of EU missions by member states from Brussels, and looking to the United Nations for inspiration on flexible models of organizing field leadership among heterogeneous institutions.

The conference program can be downloaded here.