Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

DEVELOPMENT: ‘Security An Essential Prerequisite’

Stefania Bianchi

THE HAGUE, Sep 28 2004 (IPS) - There is a growing recognition of the ”interrelationship between development and security”, according to two top European development officials.

”Security is the first condition for development, but development is also a precondition for security,” Poul Nielson, European Union (EU) Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, told IPS on the sidelines of an international conference exploring relations between foreign policy, security, trade, and development.

The two-day conference on ‘Europe and the South: A New Era? – European Development Cooperation: towards policy renewal and a new commitment’ opened in The Hague Sept. 27 and is organised by the Society for International Development (SID), a Rome-based international non-governmental association of individuals and organisations with members and activities in 125 countries.

Nielson said that although he would like to see the EU’s development cooperation presented as a ”separate entity”, it was virtually impossible considering the current global climate.

”We cannot carve out a special arena for EU development cooperation without other existing issues. I am a puritan and would like it exist on its own principles, but if we want clout we have to live with the doubt,” he said.

Nielson, who will be replaced by Belgian Louis Michel in November under José Manuel Barroso’s Commission, said a key example of security and development working effectively side-by-side was evident in the recently established African Peace Facility.

The Commission says that the Peace Facility, which was established earlier this year using 250 million euros from the European Development Fund, will support African-led peace keeping operations in Africa, as well as capacity building for the emerging security structure of the African Union (AU).

”If we look at the countries where we haven’t been able to perform such as Eritrea, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo we can see that each time this was because of conflict or a breakdown of democratisation,” Nielson said.

He added: ”In the case of the African Peace Facility, this is an example of the EU getting something organised to change the situation rather than waiting for conflict to scare away investors, ruin tourism and make regional trade impossible.”

Tom Kitt, Irish minister for development, had earlier also acknowledged the converging relationship between development and security policies when he addressed the 200 development experts from Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia, saying ”we should recognise that development cooperation is strengthened by the advent of a foreign policy that can really deliver, for example by enhancing security to create a platform for reducing poverty”.

Kitt, whose country held the rotating presidency of the EU during the first six months of 2004, said that with terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction threatening peace and security in developed and developing countries alike, the EU was responding to overriding security concerns.

”As a Development Minister, I believe that the EU’s wish to address these negative developments is genuinely motivated by an essential concern to promote our common security in an increasingly dangerous world, and is not part of a scheme to ‘securitise’ development, to quote a term recently used by some NGO colleagues,” he said.

He added however, that as the EU takes on greater international responsibility, ”there is a need to examine how best to pursue, in a mutually reinforcing way, its foreign, security and development policies”.

Sketching his own image of a single European development machine spending money solely on development itself, Kitt said it was important that the EU paused ”to consider how one might respond to concerns, especially in the non-governmental development community, about the future of development cooperation”.

Addressing in particular the financial aspect of the EU’s development cooperation, Kitt said there is a ”worrying divergence” between the EU’s poverty reduction objective and its practice in other major aid programmes ”funded under the European Community budget”.

Speaking about the EU’s new Financial Perspectives for 2007 to 2013, which will be adopted before the end of next year, Kitt said he welcomed Commission proposals to ”simplify the architecture of the budget by reducing the number of instruments to six from over a hundred” as this would result in ”greater efficiency and lower administrative costs”.

But he insisted that the eventual outcome of these negotiations should ensure that all development cooperation funding remains in a single instrument where it can support poverty reduction objectives and help towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

”To achieve this, we suggest the creation of a single development instrument which covers all developing countries, with resources to be allocated on the basis of need and performance,” he said.

Nielson responded by saying there is ”no one secret formula to permanently safeguard development cooperation”, but insisted that ”political will” would help.

He insisted however, that such issues are concerns for the incoming EU executive.

”On paper the situation is that the new Commission will start out with the same concerns as the outgoing one,” he said. ”It will all continue.”

Remarking at the same time about other concerns such as the sometimes difficult relationship between the EU commissioners for development and external relations, Nielson said that in spite of ”anomalies” in the bloc’s ”strange implementation flows”, great things have been achieved.

Referring to the bloc’s development cooperation before a new development policy was introduced in 2000; Nielson said that during his five years at the helm of development in the EU executive, ”we have reversed the trend of development cooperation”.

He added that the Commission’s directorate general (DG) for development should be confident in its achievements.

”This self-assurance is well-justified as EU development cooperation has never been as well organised as today,” he said.

He added, however, that he will not leave his post a ”completely happy commissioner”.

”I am in the business of the development aid and it would be foolish not to say that more work needs to be done. However, there has been such a magnitude of difference over the past few years that I don’t regret one second of it,” he said. (END/IPS/EU/DV/IP/ES/MD/SB/RAJ/04)