What are the differences between Eufor peacekeepers and NATO's?

December 3, 2004 12:03 AM

From the BBC:
"EU force starts Bosnian mission"

"A ceremony in Bosnia-Hercegovina has marked the start of the European Union's largest-ever peacekeeping mission as it takes over from Nato.

A ceremony in Bosnia-Hercegovina has marked the start of the European Union's largest-ever peacekeeping mission as it takes over from Nato.

About 7,000 Eufor troops will be deployed across the country to maintain peace and stability, nine years after the Bosnian war ended.

Nato will keep a small base to deal with issues including military reform and tracking down war criminals." [end quote]

So what are the differences between Eufor peacekeepers and NATO's? Like, how are their respective forces raised, maintained, and commanded? How does either differ from UN peacekeepers? How is it decided which of these bodies of armed persons will become peacekeepers in any particular place? And where would I look for more info and/or what search terms would I throw at a search engine?
posted by davy to law & government (8 comments total)

Don't
hit
enter
after
every
sentence.
posted by stovenator at 12:49 AM on December 3, 2004

Don't
be
a
formating
Nazi.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 2:09 AM on December 3, 2004

Consider a visit to the page on peacekeeping on the UN website.

Eufor, despite its name and the fact that it operates under the EU flag actually has 33 nations donating troops, including Switzerland. IIRC The lead is given by the UK. You might also want to have a look for 'Rapid Reaction Force' and EU as the EU has recently approved the body, regarded by many as a first step towards an EU army. Sorry not to write more, I'm a bit short of time. (and yes, you did piss in the Ask front page a bit there)
posted by biffa at 2:15 AM on December 3, 2004

Next time, make the intro copy shorter.
posted by grouse at 3:00 AM on December 3, 2004

you ask how it's decided.

at this level, my impression is that it's all about politics. which country wants to spend money, which alliance can be made. what won't be vetoed.

the un tends to be both more difficult to arrange (since its constitution emphasises working in unison there are a lot of possibilities for veto) and have a more international emphasis (african states aren't that happy about sorting out europeans when wuropeans don't give a damn about the mess in africa).

nato is largely american, and america is currently stretched to its limit in iraq. and it's not clear how civilising the psychopathic idiots of the former yugoslavia helps stop terrorism. so american probably wants out.

europe, meanwhile, is growing. it's accumulating new members and there's strong support for a pan-european military force. it's also worried about refugees and instability. so europe both cares about the problem and wants an excuse to have people with guns running round shouting.

so this way everyone is happy. and nato is still staying in some role that i can't work out but which probably reflects america's desire to control everyting, anyway.
posted by andrew cooke at 3:30 AM on December 3, 2004

for finding out more:

in general, for euopean things, viewrops tends to be quite good. however, i can't find anything there on this subject and it doesn't have an "ask viewrops" section yet.

also, the bbc is good. some of your questions are almost answered in the text you link to, and it has a bunch of links elsewhere. click around on that page.
posted by andrew cooke at 3:33 AM on December 3, 2004

I don't know how European countries run their militaries, but I imagine it is probably similar to the way the US does. When the US has a NATO mission it assigns a unit, and that unit goes out, does the mission and comes back to the US. Kind of like a loan of troops. I imagine that EUFOR will be made of the same kind of thing, "Loans" from individual member states. In fact, the same units could be involved in NATO missions at some other time. Raising and Maintaining of the troops in between missions would then be up to the individual member states.

The command structures, I won't even guess.
posted by Apoch at 3:48 AM on December 3, 2004

So what are the differences between Eufor peacekeepers and NATO's? Like, how are their respective forces raised, maintained, and commanded? How does either differ from UN peacekeepers? How is it decided which of these bodies of armed persons will become peacekeepers in any particular place?

The differences are minor; all this is about is who's the boss (and to some extent, who pays for it). A UN peacekeeping force has to be authorized by the Security Council, and then Kofi Annan has to go around begging UN members to contribute forces. The US doesn't like too many peacekeeping missions, because we underwrite roughly 1/4 of all costs (due to the size of our economy, which sets our membership contribution). The US also doesn't like participating in UN missions because we won't put our troops under UN command (the last time we did, we got Black Hawk Down).

So although the UN had some role in Yugoslavian peacekeeping, the primary missions were undertaken through NATO. Clinton and Albright and Wes Clark had the bright idea that this would strengthen the Atlantic Alliance in an era when the Soviet threat was diminishing. So we cajoled Brussels into setting up the first-ever NATO peacekeeping force, appealing to European pride in policing its own sphere of influence. (A subtext we shouldn't utterly discount might have been the idea of Pakistani peacekeepers lording it over white Bosnians.) It was also the price of getting more US troops (and $$), so Europe went along.

Simultaneously, and going back many years, there has been Euro discomfort with being part of a treaty where there's one Snoopy and a whole bunch of Woodstocks. There have been various attempts at creating "European-only" joint forces going back 50 years, but this only really began working in the late 80s/early 90s. Now that the European Community is becoming the European Union, and more like a unitary federal nation-state, there's recognition that a common security policy and common military response are going to be needed (and the Balkan wars were no small factor in this realization). The EUFOR is basically formalizing lots of bilateral military cooperation under a common command that's sort of dash-lined up to the European Presidency (a committee, actually) in Brussels. The Bosnian peacekeeping mission is basically the first real operation it's been assigned, ever.

This has fortuitously, in some ways, coincided with the US going into Iraq and needing to pull back on its overseas commitments like Yugoslavia (which Bush was committed to ending, anyway, going back to his 2000 campaign). So the US bugs out and leaves it all to Europe, unless there's something that only the US can do.

That said, the troops on the ground are largely exactly the same people as they were under the NATO mission (except now there are non-NATO countries participating too). They'll have MPs from Holland, mine specialists from Germany, civil affairs officers from Spain. The only difference is the paper saying whose command they're under. With EUFOR, it won't be the Americans, which is just about the only thing clearly different.
posted by dhartung at 9:46 PM on December 3, 2004