The EU must ensure it is a force for good in Haiti
Civitas, 20 January 2010
The earthquake in Haiti 8 days ago wreaked untold pain, and the international community is right to exert every effort to help those affected by the tragedy. The EU has announced that it will send €430 million of humanitarian aid (the 2 biggest contributions coming from Britain [€25 million] and France [€20 million]).
The relief effort in Haiti over the past week has drawn criticism, but the trouble does not appear to be a lack of available aid; it is a lack of coordination to distribute the aid. This might be a case of “too many cooks” (the UN claims to be directing the relief effort, whilst the might of the US army is on full display at Haiti’s main airport, yet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has insisted that the Haitian Government is really calling the shots…) The EU must avoid causing further confusion.
As Gavin Hewitt at the BBC comments “certainly the EU, as an institution, is not essential for rescue work to be effective. Nations have acted decisively and quickly without referring to international institutions”. Hewitt also criticises the EU’s “current obsession to be seen as a ‘player’ on the world stage” and states “it is often easy for that desire to translate into wanting to act as if the EU were a state. It isn’t. It has no military capacity”.
And there lies the rub. The EU is not a state.
The EU will never work more effectively by simply binding states closer and closer together. As Maxime Lefebvre (a French diplomat and academic at IEP de Paris) recently commented in reference to the Lisbon Treaty, “there is a risk of fracturing… as member states may be tempted to engage less. [The EU needs] less unilateral, more consultation”. Whilst the international community must exert every effort to relieve the suffering in Haiti, a combined European effort for long-term rehabilitation and re-development could be more suitable. It may not catch the attention of the world media, but it could answer the frequently cited concern: “what will happen when the TV cameras leave the disaster zone”?