WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) -- The United Nations Security Council this week agreed that the European Union should send a military force of some 1,500 troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo to help hold the ring for the scheduled June elections in this war-battered African country. That is the kind of news about the EU, and the way it is trying to play a more active and responsible global role, that seldom makes the headlines. Instead, and understandably, the European press has been looking at a $75 million dollar French scam on their fellow-Europeans.
Members of the European Parliament were told Tuesday that the French city of Strasbourg has been overcharging the European Parliament by as much as $3 million a year in rent for the past 25 years.
The charge has blocked the expected parliamentary approval of its budget, which should have been passed this week, and has triggered a parliamentary inquiry that will be chaired by German MEP Markus Ferber.
"We need some answers from the city of Strasbourg and we need some answers from our own administration," German conservative member Markus Ferber told reporters. "We have been using these buildings since 1981, and I do not know anybody in this building, in our wonderful European Parliament, who knows what is going on."
It is not easy to probe the matter since the Mayor of Strasbourg, Fabienne Keller, has so far declined to answer inquiries from MEPs and Parliament officials. But the Parliament's anger is likely to provoke a new revolt against the French insistence that the European parliament meet monthly in the French city on the Rhine, when the Parliament has a magnificent and purpose-built building all to itself in the EU capital of Brussels.
Successive French governments have long insisted that the Parliament stick with its second home in Strasbourg, on the French border with Germany, as a symbol of the Franco-German reconciliation that lunched the project of European integration.
It is a costly symbol, since it means that once a month, the entire Parliament, its 732 Members from 25 different countries, along with over 2,000 staff members, translating staff, diplomats, the press corps, and convoys of trucks carrying files and documents, must make the pilgrimage to this seat of French national pride in Strasbourg. This costs EU taxpayers some $240 million a year, according to Green MEP Carolyn Lucas, one of those campaigning to stop the regular trek.
The overcharging claim arose almost by accident, when the Parliament was negotiating to buy two buildings in Strasbourg that it traditionally leased, and the local press noted that the city of Strasbourg could make over $30 million in compensation for lost rents. MEPs began looking deeper into their rental agreements with the city that go back to 1979, and concluded that they had been paying through the nose for the trouble of schlepping down there every month.
This is the kind of affair that gives the EU a bad name, and helps explain the institution's drooping approval ratings in European opinion polls. But the Congo peacekeeping mission reflects another reality of the EU. The EU pays just over 40 percent of the total peacekeeping budget of the United Nations, and has taken over the NATO peacekeeping role in the Balkans, and provides logistic and communications support to the African Union mission in Darfur, in the Sudan.
EU politicians pay a price for this. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has withstood a great deal of flak from the media for her promise to provide a third of the troops for the Congo mission, which will be led on the ground by French commanders. Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Sweden have also promised troops.
The EU launched its first such peacekeeping exercise, in Macedonia, in March 2003, and shortly afterwards claimed that its Rapid Reaction Force of up to 60,000 troops was available for a full range of tasks. It has not proved quite that easy and even putting together the 1,500 troops for the Congo has been a complex diplomatic business as the EU made the fundamental shift from its traditional international role of providing aid and cash, which is easy, to providing boots on the ground as well, which is tough.
Moreover, peacekeeping is not what it used to be -- thanks in part to the serious thinking that EU as well as NATO officials have brought to the concept, such as the EU's recognition of the need to bring civilian policing into the mix. Peacekeeping used to be about stabilizing a situation, repressing violence and keeping the lid on trouble. These days, it is seen as a far more active affair based on arranging and managing social transition and integration. These are dynamic rather than static concepts.
As a NATO review paper put it: "The classical task of serving as a 'neutral' buffer between consenting parties has evolved into operations geared towards managing political, economic and social change, often under difficult circumstances -- a trend fuelled by the fact that most modern peacekeeping operations are responses to intra-state, rather than interstate, conflicts."
The EU peacekeeping capability has been six years in the making, which by EU standards is pretty fast. This is, after all, a body that just seems to have caught on to the way it had been overcharged by its French landlords for the past 27 years.
