BRUSSELS, March 9 (UPI) -- The European Union is anxious to become a major player on the world stage. Haunted by it failure to stop bloodletting in the Balkans in the 1990s and taunts that it is an "economic giant but a political and military pygmy" -- in former NATO chief George Robertson's memorable phrase -- it has started to project power more muscularly in recent years. But the inability of EU defense ministers to rustle together enough troops to monitor elections in the Congo Tuesday shows how far the bloc has to go to convert its lofty goals into reality.
In January, the United Nations asked the European Union to provide 800 troops to make sure Congo's first free elections since independence over four decades ago pass off peacefully in June. The poll is seen as a chance to bring peace to the sprawling Central African country, which has lost four million people to war and famine since 1998 in what aid groups describe as the deadliest conflict since the end of World War Two.
The 25-member bloc has agreed in principle to the U.N. request but is torn over which country should lead the operation, where the force should be based, how long it should remain in theater for and how many troops each state should contribute. In fact, the only point defense ministers seemed to agree on was the need to dispatch EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to Kinshasa to sound out what is expected of the Union on the ground.
France and Britain have refused to lead the mission, citing commitments in Afghanistan, the Balkans, West Africa and, for the latter, Iraq. This leaves Germany as the most obvious candidate to front the deployment -- not only because of the size of its armed forces, but because it currently heads a rotating EU "battlegroup" whose aim is to airlift up to 1,500 European troops into global hotspots at short notice.
However, Berlin is reluctant to take charge of the operation without firm troop pledges from other EU states. "We have always said we will not sidestep a responsibility, but there is an overall responsibility for Europe here," German Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung told colleagues at a meeting in the Alpine town of Innsbruck. "Germany can't commit to sending 1,500 soldiers."
Despite its doubts, Germany is likely to accept to lead the operation at a meeting of EU foreign ministers later this month, but on condition that the bulk of the back-up force is stationed in a neighboring country and that the mission has a four-month expiry date.
Even this caveat-strewn commitment appeared too much for Germany's press to bear Wednesday. "Europe is setting off to an unnecessary adventure," fumed the Die Welt newspaper, pointing out that around 750,000 soldiers would be needed to do the job properly. "Europeans cannot and do not want to send that many troops, and rightly so."
Forget 750,000, Europe's 25 member states have enough problems cobbling together a force of 800 troops with six months warning.
According to accounts of the Innsbruck summit of EU defense ministers, Britain and Italy have refused to take part in the mission, France and Germany have agreed to commit troops but will not say how many until other states make commitments, and Belgium has been rallying support for an EU intervention but is constitutionally banned from sending soldiers to its former colonies.
Meanwhile, the EUobserver.com Web site reports that Portugal and Austria have said they might "symbolically" send half a dozen soldiers, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has expressed Madrid's "good intention" of sending troops but diplomatic sources have dismissed the chances of this happening as "minimal" and Finnish Defense Minister Seppo Kaariainen said Helsinki might consider sending a few staff officers to the operation, but no soldiers.
"This is a test case," says Sven Biscop, a senior research fellow at the Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations. "We have had a lot of rhetoric from EU leaders about helping Africa and supporting the United Nations, but it seems to be a problem when Europe actually has to do something."
The European Union is keen to develop its own defense capacity independent of NATO and the United States. But the troubles the Brussels-based club has encountered rounding up troops for its Congo mission highlight three fundamental problems with this goal.
Firstly, European nations simply do not have enough readily deployable troops. At present, only 60,000 of the bloc's two million men and women in uniform are stationed overseas, yet EU defense ministries still complain of overstretch. Belgium, perhaps the most extreme example, has 40,000 soldiers, but less than 700 can be deployed at any one time. Individual European nations appear to be better at force projection than they are collectively. In 2003, the European Union sent 1,200 troops to eastern Congo within a fortnight to prevent further bloodshed in the region. But the only reason it was able to do so was because almost the entire force was composed of French troops taking orders from Paris.
Secondly, as the Dutch debate about whether to send troops to southern Afghanistan demonstrated, some European governments have developed an almost pathological aversion to risking the lives of their soldiers. As one senior EU official told reporters recently: "One casualty on any EU operation is one casualty too many."
Finally, European states have yet to answer former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's question about whether Europeans would be prepared to die for the European flag. Expressing solidarity with Africa and unqualified backing for the United Nations in international forums is one thing. Asking European governments to risk their soldiers' lives to back these ideals appears to be another.
