Emerging norm and rhetorical tool: Europe and a responsibility to protect

Abstract

European governments, parliaments and civil societies belong to the most important supporters of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). However, despite a shared positive attitude towards R2P and co-ordinated diplomatic efforts, major European governments and therefore the European Union (EU) have never reached a consensual position on R2P. Based on 47 expert interviews and a review of official government documents, the article analyses the positions of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the common EU institutions across a series of critical junctures of the R2P debate between 2005 and 2013. The authors find that Paris and London agree with Berlin and Brussels that R2P requires longer-term multilateral norm-building. Yet, while Germany stresses military restraint and civilian crisis prevention, France and the UK continue to view R2P through their pre-existing traditions of a droit d'ingérence and the ‘doctrine of humanitarian intervention’, respectively. These differences are largely due to diverging strategic cultures based on different historical lessons on the use of force. Brussels’ efforts to co-ordinate a common EU position have been constrained by these diverging positions.

Introduction

The governments, parliaments and civil societies of Europe belong to the most important supporters of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). They subscribe to the idea that governments have a responsibility to protect their populations from large-scale violations of international humanitarian law and that there is a subsidiary international responsibility to support this protection effort. Indeed, Europe has been the only major power of the twenty-first century to unambiguously support this concept, despite internal divisions regarding its implementation. European ambassadors were crucial allies of those states and individuals that sought to include a reference to a responsibility to protect in the outcome document at the 2005 World Summit,1 where UN member states agreed to the principle for the first time.2 Since then, European countries as well as the common institutions of the European Union (EU) have been at the forefront of the global debate over R2P.3

Given Europe's support for the development of R2P, the lack of detailed studies on the subject is striking. There are no systematic comparisons of the positions of major European countries.4 Studies resort either to an analysis of the European Union as such,5 remain focused on a single country's position on humanitarian interventions6 or examine only a single crisis situation, such as NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya.7

This article, in contrast, analyses the interpretations, attitudes and practices8 of the major players in Europe—France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the common EU institutions—during a series of critical junctures with regard to a responsibility to protect between 2005 and 2013. Even though other European countries—notably the Netherlands, Slovenia and the Nordic countries—more actively support R2P than the ‘big three’, we concentrate on the largest and most significant actors in European foreign policy, since without their agreement European policy could not be coherent. The analysis is based on 47 semi-structured expert interviews in Berlin, Brussels, London and Paris and a review of a wide range of primary sources.

We show that despite a shared positive attitude towards R2P, occasional common policy positions and co-ordinated diplomatic efforts, major European governments and therefore the EU have never had a truly consensual position on R2P. As we argue in the following, this largely mirrored their diverging strategic cultures and prior ideas about R2P's conceptual predecessor, ‘humanitarian intervention’. All three countries and the EU institutions express a supportive attitude towards R2P and a common desire for the concept to be universally accepted in the international community. In that regard they understand R2P as a concept that is best promoted through support in multilateral fora and by inserting references in speeches, statements and resolutions. We term this interpretation of R2P a ‘norm-building’ approach to the concept. As we show in the present paper, for Germany this was virtually the only existing interpretation until the Libya intervention in 2011 triggered the German Government to broaden its idea of the concept: it would now also interpret R2P as a moral principle that demanded practical concepts and policies.

At the same time, France and the United Kingdom interpreted R2P from the beginning as a rhetorical tool they could employ to suit their ideas of ‘humanitarian intervention’. As will be shown, the two countries shared an interpretation of R2P that would neither constrain their freedom of movement on the Security Council nor exclude their perceived right to intervene militarily without the approval of the Council. Their desire to have R2P at their disposal as a political tool that at the same time does not constrain their actions in the face of mass atrocities was as crucial in their first reactions to the idea of a responsibility to protect in 2002 as it was 10 years later in their opposition to the idea of a ‘responsibility while protecting’. Naturally, the EU interpretation of and practices regarding R2P arose out of the limited aspects on which Germany, France and the UK could agree. Thus, the EU almost exclusively understood the concept as an emerging legal norm that needed to be supported and ‘built’ by referencing the concept in multilateral fora. Its practices regarding R2P remained constrained by differences between its major member states as the Libya intervention most powerfully showed.

The article is divided into two main parts. First, we briefly introduce those elements of each actor's strategic culture that we deem most relevant for the trajectory of its respective positions on R2P. Second and based on this, we trace the interpretations, attitudes and practices of the three countries and the EU institutions on R2P from the run-up to the World Summit to the debates around the crises in Syria and the Central African Republic.

Traumas, myths and aspirations: the origins of British, French and German R2P policies

Europe has many reasons to reflect on its role in world politics. It is a continent ravaged by wars and genocide. It has spawned colonial conquests resulting in massive crimes against humanity, exploitation and discrimination, sowing the seeds of civil war. Britain, France and Germany have experienced this past very differently. These differences have fundamentally shaped their strategic cultures in ways that influence their current positions on R2P.

The British imperial legacy is a crucial aspect of Britain's view and understanding of the world. It underlies its position on R2P since it instilled a particular sense of responsibility for international crises. Margaret Beckett, a long-serving Labour minister, summarises this sentiment like this: ‘[i]f anything, it is that you've got your hands dirty, that you have faced situations from which you could not walk away because you were the responsible power’.9 Even though the war in Iraq has been strongly contested domestically, the public remains more supportive of armed interventions than in other European countries.10

The major British political parties have converged around liberal interventionism in their foreign policy worldviews,11 as the dominance of Blair's ‘Chicago Speech’ in British political discourse over the past 15 years illustrates.12 Delivered at the height of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in April 1999, the speech was a result of lessons learned from the perceived failure of British policy in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. The Conservative British Government of the time had for years prevented a military intervention by NATO in Bosnia, where Serbian and Croatian militias were ethnically cleansing areas from Muslim populations in the multi-ethnic state.13

In proposing ‘five tests’ for an intervention, Blair relied on the British pragmatic, unilateral tradition as he underlined the importance ‘to have national interests involved’.14 Significantly, the legality of the intervention through a possible ‘UN test’ was not included among these criteria.15 Blair argued that states formed a ‘community’,16 with rights as well as obligations to each other. Reminiscent of the language associated with Britain's imperial legacy, he presented sovereignty as conditional on ‘responsible behaviour’ that could be revoked, if necessary.17

Internationalist-minded Labour politicians like Robin Cook, Jack Straw and later David Miliband supported what Cook termed an ‘ethical foreign policy’ in 1997.18 This was picked up by Conservative leaders such as William Hague and David Cameron, who largely shared Labour's depiction of the international system.19 Despite these shared principles, Hague and Cameron felt the need to distance themselves from the ‘messianic moral fervour of the post-9/11 Blair’20 and the problems encountered in the Iraq war. The tension between the support for humanitarian interventions and the perceived lessons from Iraq remained important during their time in office.

Similar to Britain's imperial legacy and despite lamentation over France's decline on the world stage by French intellectuals and politicians, the proud tradition of La Grande Nation continues to influence French foreign and security policy-makers. Two important but sometimes irreconcilable patterns of French strategic culture are relevant to the French position on R2P.

First, France expresses a desire to be self-reliant in its actions, its zones of influence and its capabilities.21 The fear of losing its place among the great world powers and of playing second or third fiddle in an American dominated world or a German dominated Europe was the trigger for the most influential foreign and security policy decisions in the recent history of France.

Second, France—by virtue of its past as a colonizer—sees itself as the cradle of human rights, the export of which is a central tenet of its continuing mission civilisatrice,22 a secular civilising mission to spread and institutionalise the universal principles of the French Revolution. Having originated in a sense of cultural superiority during the imperialism of the Third Republic between 1870 and 1940,23 it continues to influence today's foreign and security policy by lowering the threshold for interfering abroad in the name of these universal principles.

While the first pattern informs an approach to international institutions that allows unilateral missions if deemed necessary, the second pattern provides a reason for French willingness to consider military intervention abroad for humanitarian goals. More generally, French policy-makers regard military instruments as essential in their security policy, especially when weighing options to exert influence in the francophone, former colonial countries (like in Françafrique).24 In line with a tradition of classical realpolitik that is prominent in the bureaucratic apparatus of the French foreign ministry, France has always decided on a case-by-case basis which institutional setting suits its preferences best, and allows close and efficient co-operation with a small group of like-minded partners.25

In contrast to this strong realpolitik tradition in French strategic culture, public opinion is swayed strongly by humanitarian justifications for interventions. References to R2P are generally well received in the public,26 building on a long-standing activist, intellectual and political debate on the issue that runs deeper than in the case of Germany or Britain: France views itself as the inventor of both a right and a duty to intervene on humanitarian grounds.27 Bernard Kouchner, the controversial and charismatic founder of Médecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and later foreign minister under President Sarkozy, popularised the term droit d'ingérence humanitaire (‘right to a humanitarian interference’)28 in the 1980s.29 His experience was shaped by humanitarian crises from the genocidal events in Biafra, Nigeria, in the 1960s to the famines in Ethiopia in the 1980s, which is why his notion of humanitarian intervention was always centred on humanitarian access, even without state consent.30 Powerful intellectual public discourses on humanitarian intervention led by thinkers like the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy have a lasting impact on French foreign policy in the tradition of Kouchner.31 Inevitably, the public support for interventions on humanitarian grounds, but not necessarily strategic ones, creates an incentive for French policy-makers to frame interventions in R2P terms.

German foreign and security policy is deeply rooted in the country's sense of responsibility for starting two world wars and committing the crimes of the Holocaust.32 After the end of the Second World War, widespread destruction of German cities and guilt for the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews and others, policy-makers of the Allied-controlled West Germany vowed not to take potential international leadership lightly. For decades, its foreign policy was so closely aligned with its Western partners that it was hard to detect at all.

Swearing to leave their belligerence in the past, the Germans strongly supported a notion of ‘shared sovereignty’ and prefer a rules-based international order with a commitment to multilateralism and international law.33 Germany's basic law sets narrow limits on the use of force by Germany, explicitly forbidding renewed aggression.34 The requirement of parliamentary approval for the deployment of the German armed forces abroad has been an important feature of this system of checks on the executive since a constitutional court decision in 1994.

In the early 1990s Germany's pacifist tradition, reinforced by a vocal civil society, came into conflict with the ‘multilateral reflex’35 and alliance politics as Western partners asked the reunified Germany to contribute to the interventions of the 1990s. The parliamentary debate over the Kosovo mission, Germany's first active combat mission since the Second World War, showed a shift in discourse—from interpreting the German history of aggression as the reason why Germany should not use its military abroad to precisely the reason why Germany should do so to save human lives.36 As then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer from the Green Party summarised: ‘I stand on two principles: War, never again; Auschwitz, never again—genocide, never again; fascism, never again’.37 This re-interpretation of Germany's lessons from the Second World War, however did not take hold in the majority of German society or elite discourse.

After the German participation in the Kosovo intervention, some German policy-makers and academics developed yet another more realist notion of German foreign policy. They argued that the German participation in the Kosovo intervention showed the ‘normalisation’ of German foreign and security policy—Germany might become more like its main European allies in considering the use of force as a tool to pursue its political objectives.38

With the Iraq war and discussions about the drawn-out intervention in Afghanistan, however, policy-makers drew other conclusions from this development of a more autonomous Germany. Chancellor Schröder stressed German ‘confidence’ when saying no to Iraq,39 contributing to his narrow election victory in 2002. Being ‘more normal’ could thus also simply imply a more independently minded foreign policy, including openly disagreeing with traditional allies on important foreign policy issues.40

At the same time, the German Government started to expand its civilian crisis prevention capacities in the early 2000s, by establishing, for example, a specialised office to train civilian specialists for peace-building missions.41 The continuing aversion towards the use of military force is a function of deep scepticism in German society. Contributions to missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006 and off the coast of Lebanon since 2006 as well as resurgent debates about the nature of the mission in Afghanistan reinforced this perception.42 The ‘culture of restraint’ remained a ‘cornerstone of German strategic culture’.43 Despite the rhetoric of the new German Government in early 2014 regarding ‘more German responsibility’ abroad,44 this is unlikely to change any time soon.

The distinct strategic cultures of Britain, France and Germany ultimately result in a patchy consensus on foreign and security policy in the EU. The recently created European External Action Service (EEAS), which is headed by the Vice President of the Commission and High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), has in practice not altered the underlying divisions and competing priorities among the key European states. The common EU institutions are thus largely limited to a co-ordinating role, supporting those elements of the responsibility to protect that do not touch upon the fundamental differences in strategic cultures between key member states.45

The evolution of European R2P positions

The preceding overview of key elements in the strategic cultures and worldviews in France, Germany and the UK already suggests the principal reasons for differences between these actors in their interpretations, practices and attitudes regarding the responsibility to protect. The following part traces these interpretations, practices and attitudes in detail in the European debate about R2P. We divide the narrative into eight interrelated phases in which we observe either a pertinent illustration of the European actors’ interpretations of the responsibility to protect or a change in those interpretations.

2001 to 2005—setting the stage

When in December 2001, the Canadian sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published its report suggesting that the international debates on humanitarian intervention be refocused on the responsibility of states to protect their populations, the reception of the report in London, Paris and Berlin illustrated the different starting points for the development of the positions on the responsibility to protect of the three key European countries.

As prior proponents of humanitarian intervention, both France and the United Kingdom supported the idea of a responsibility to protect put forward by the Commission.46 Similar to the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, however, they rejected any constraints on the powers of that body.47 Germany, in contrast, barely took note of the ICISS deliberations despite having been represented in the Commission by retired General Klaus Naumann, who was the lead drafter of a chapter on military options of the report.48

The rift over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 dealt a blow to a superficial European unity about R2P. Tony Blair's use of humanitarian justifications for the war,49 in particular, diminished British credibility as an advocate for humanitarian causes and left German policy-makers much more cautious about R2P. When Blair tried to include the ICISS criteria for the use of force in a declaration of a summit of social-democratic leaders in July 2003, German Chancellor Schröder rejected the attempt, fearing it would implicitly justify the invasion of Iraq.50 David Hannay, a former UK ambassador to the UN in New York and member of Kofi Annan's 2004 UN reform panel, also found that Britain's perceived instrumentalist use of humanitarian justifications hampered an ambitious R2P agenda. At one point he claims to have said to Blair: ‘I think the greatest help you can give me, Prime Minister, is not making any more speeches like the Chicago speech just for the moment, thank you’. (According to Hannay's account, Blair laughed and said: ‘OK, I will make sure I don't’.) 51

While European statesmen sought to recover from internal rifts over Iraq, mass atrocities in Darfur sparked the first attempt to apply the newly minted principle of a responsibility to protect to a situation of ongoing mass atrocities. While UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan used R2P language in regard to Darfur on as early as 2004,52 the European powers remained largely aloof, not least because there were few feasible options to stop the ongoing atrocities. Britain found itself overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan,53 France was more interested in neighbouring Chad,54 and German policy-makers felt constrained by the lack of its public's interest in Africa.55 Therefore, the very limited debate over Darfur did little more than to demonstrate to policy-makers that a responsibility to protect could matter in the real world.56

2005—World Summit

London, Paris and Berlin, the latter fresh from high-profile Security Council membership in 2003–2004, found common cause again in supporting Kofi Annan's effort to reform the United Nations at the ‘World Summit’ meeting in September 2005. Not least as a result of the advocacy of ICISS co-chair Gareth Evans, the preparatory report of Annan's high-level panel as well as Annan's own reform agenda ‘In Larger Freedom’ included a suggestion to adopt a commitment to the responsibility to protect. The point about R2P was just one proposal among many, and not among the most important ones for most delegations. With many key issues at stake, the end result would inevitably be a package deal, meaning that not everybody would be satisfied in every respect.57 Yet the Summit was the first time that many governments formulated an official position on R2P.

While the support of European governments was vital to see a responsibility to protect adopted in the outcome document, France and Britain were much more active in pushing for the concept than Germany. The German Government saw itself as ‘fully in agreement’ with the recommendations of the ICISS report,58 but it was consumed by its commitment to Security Council reform. An undisclosed interviewee in a detailed thesis on the World Summit ‘singled out [the Germans] as contributing “almost nothing” to the negotiations because of their SC ambitions’.59 While R2P was referenced as an achievement in the British and French statements at the high-level element of the actual Summit, the concept did not make it into the speech of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.60

In contrast, the French and especially the British were seeking international confirmation of R2P as a political signal to mobilise and enable international (military) action in the face of mass atrocities, according to their traditions of a droit d'ingérence and liberal interventionism. For British diplomats, for example, ‘[a]greement on the Responsibility to Protect populations from the worst human rights abuses, consistent with the Prime Minister's 1999 Chicago speech’61 was ‘among the first rank’ of their political priorities during the Summit negotiations.62 The British delegation turned out to be the most important European supporter of R2P at the Summit.

The final wording of the outcome document, however, only partially reflected the French and British interpretations of R2P. In the document, member states emphasised the primary responsibility of each state to protect its own population and affirm the exclusive authority of the Council over any coercive action regarding four core crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing).63 London and Paris supported a wider scope for humanitarian intervention. However, there was widespread agreement in the EU that the four core crimes would be sufficient. In any case, limiting the scope of R2P was seen as a necessary condition to bring sceptical countries from the global south on board.64

Both Britain and France said they were ‘flexible’ regarding discussions on criteria for the use of force as proposed by the high-level panel.65 Having actively advocated for Tony Blair's Chicago speech criteria, the UK was open to having a discussion on such principles.66 Yet both London and Paris shared the other P5 members’ resistance to any possible language that would constrain their freedom of action in the Security Council.67 Criteria were therefore never seriously discussed during the negotiations, and the P5 maintained their right to still ‘go through every case by case’.68

Regarding authorisation of military interventions under the framework of R2P, Britain and France initially pursued different approaches during the negotiations. The British considered inserting the caveat that Security Council authorisation would be sought ‘wherever possible’,69 partially because they wanted to avoid language that would imply that the Kosovo intervention was not in line with R2P.70 They soon realised, however, that this was ‘a political non-starter’ and gave up the attempt.71 In contrast to the UK, France—two years after opposing unilateral intervention by the United States and the UK in Iraq—supported the positions of Russia and China with respect to language that did not allow for any ambiguity on the exclusive authority of the Security Council.72

Regardless of the British or French stances in the negotiations, the language in the outcome document giving the sole authority to the Security Council did not change their support of their own doctrines of humanitarian intervention.73 In their analysis, however, this was the only way that the concept was going to be included in the final document.74 (As one British diplomat put it, this was ‘as much as the market would bet’.)75

The statements by the European Union supported the concept throughout, using the language agreed to by its member states. This meant, for example, that the EU also started emphasising the exclusive authority of the Security Council after there was an internal agreement among its members.76 Since the British held the rotating presidency of the EU in the second half of 2005, their activism often translated into action by the EU. The EU was a key supporter of the ‘president's proposal’ prepared by the UN Secretariat: when a day before the Summit there were so many elements in the outcome document's text that were not agreed upon—largely because of US opposition—it was feared that the Summit would fail completely. The Secretariat, however, had prepared its own draft. Supported by the EU, a British diplomat suggested to Jean Ping, the President of the General Assembly, to leave only ‘a nanosecond’ between proposing the text and taking it as consensually accepted, without letting any state speak in the final meeting—a risky but successful sleight of hand.77 Ultimately, the EU was one of the important supporters in favour of anchoring R2P in the World Summit outcome document, but as then Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown remembers ‘not because we won the argument’.78

2005 to 2008—nurturing language and avoiding controversy

The hit of the gavel by Jean Ping on the outcome document disguised differences in European associations with R2P. France and Britain had pushed for a concept that they saw mostly as a political tool. For Germany and the EU the two paragraphs in the outcome document rather provided a reference point for further building of the norm. The years immediately following the World Summit were characterised by low-key engagement that avoided much controversy.

A 2006 German White Paper on security policy referred to R2P as an ‘international law doctrine’ that would ‘in the long term […] affect the mandating of international peace missions’.79 This understanding of R2P as an emerging legal norm continues to characterise the German position as of now. Yet between 2005 and 2008, the German Government and German public largely ignored the concept.

The EU reacted in a similar way to R2P during those years. It ‘strongly welcome[d] the endorsement’ of the responsibility to protect at the World Summit.80 Even though in 2005 the EU Council predicted that the principle would become ‘an important tool of the international community for addressing the worst atrocities’, EU officials subsequently understood the responsibility to protect as an emerging legal concept that needed the EU's full support and—like other human rights principles—constant nurturing of language at the multilateral level to gain acceptance.81 The implicit EU interpretation of R2P underlying this work was that of an emerging norm that needed norm-building. Accordingly, in the years following the World Summit, the European Union took the reference in the outcome document as a basis to start the ‘slow multilateral work’ that would be necessary to increase its backing.82 The aim was to ‘safeguard’ the language that was agreed upon, to ‘consolidate’ and to cautiously advance it from that basis ‘block by block, stone by stone’.83 One EU official summarised this approach and the European contribution by saying that the EU ‘built the policy from the beginning’.84

In line with this approach, the EU reaffirmed its commitment to R2P in its intra-institutional document on a ‘Consensus on Humanitarian Aid’ in 2007 and started including the concept as one of its priorities for the General Assembly at the UN in 2008.85 A reference to the responsibility to protect in the EU's report on the implementation of the European Security Strategy exemplified the EU interpretation of the responsibility to protect as an emerging legal concept in contrast to a political tool: ‘[w]ith respect to human rights’ the report reads, ‘the EU should continue to advance the agreement reached at the UN World Summit in 2005’.86 Most of these references to R2P were included in drafts by a handful of EU officials who supported the concept—reflecting a somewhat independent role of the EU bureaucracy in the European position on R2P. Yet as one EU official points out, these references were uncontroversial and ‘never debated by anybody’.87

At the same time, France and the UK tried to use R2P on the Security Council. The two countries led the negotiations on resolution 1674 on ‘the protection of civilians’ (POC) that for the first time referred to R2P and provided an important reference document for both further Security Council debates on the protection of civilians and R2P.88 Yet the fierce resistance to the R2P reference during the negotiations on resolution 1674 made both countries reluctant to bring up R2P in resolutions on peacekeeping missions in the following years.89 They subsequently concentrated on the POC agenda without specific references to R2P. Among other missions, London and Paris pushed the authorisation of the then largest peacekeeping mission ever mandated in Darfur (UNAMID) in July 2007 and refocused the mandate of the peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) on the protection of civilians in 2008.90

While France and Britain were in the lead or very supportive in drafting the mandates of these and similar missions, and though they—like Germany—financed a large part of the peacekeeping missions, personnel contributions by these three states remained minimal.91 Two French-led missions conducted in the framework of the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) included the implicit goal of the protection of civilians around the elections in DRC in 2006 and in Chad in 2008. They were generally seen as successful but proved controversial in the European Union—especially between cautious Germany and activist France. The EU has largely focused on civilian and training missions since then.92

In early 2008, diplomatic efforts by Kofi Annan to stop post-election violence in Kenya were supported by the EU and major European governments.93 The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called for support for Kofi Annan's mediation process ‘in the name of the responsibility to protect’ in January 2008.94 British threats to impose sanctions, including asset freezes and travel bans, on leading Kenyan politicians helped maintain the pressure on the negotiating parties.95 Germany sent a State Secretary from the Foreign Office to explain to the parties how power-sharing agreements work in the German coalition system.96 Advocates of R2P such as Edward Luck later hailed the prevention of further violence in Kenya as the first successful case of the prevention aspect of R2P.97

2008 and 2009—changing gears in the debate

Due to crises in Myanmar and Georgia, the appointment of a UN Special Advisor on R2P and the first General Assembly debate on the concept, European (and global) engagement with R2P increased significantly in 2008 and 2009. In May 2008 French Foreign Minister Kouchner referred to R2P with regard to a crisis in Myanmar, sparking a disagreement between France, Germany and Britain on whether the concept applied to the situation. When cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar (also known as Burma) on 3 May 2008, national authorities refused to let in foreign aid agencies, even though they were struggling to cope with the situation. On 7 May, French Foreign Minister Kouchner told reporters in New York that France was seeking an active role of the Security Council to deal with the crisis in Myanmar:

We are seeing at the United Nations if we can't implement the responsibility to protect, given that food, boats and relief teams are there, and obtain a United Nations’ resolution which authorises the delivery (of aid) and imposes this on the Burmese government.98

His suggestion was to use British and French navy vessels cruising off the coast of Myanmar for this purpose. This move irritated British and German diplomats and politicians actually involved in the negotiations in Myanmar and New York, as it undercut their efforts to display international aid deliveries as non-forceful, non-military and with no strings attached.99 Officials close to Kouchner understood that this was very much his personal initiative, even somewhat isolated from the rest of the French Government100 and the mainstream French media debate.101 It was perfectly in line, however, with the long-established French understanding of the droit d'ingérence, which involves military interference to provide relief items and had been the subject of considerable unease among Kouchner's fellow NGO activists.102As Britain's tradition of liberal interventionism did not share these roots in humanitarian assistance, this experience underlined the nuanced differences in the positions between the British tradition and the French thinking.103 The British Government, which was also chairing the Security Council in May 2008, was opposed to invoking R2P and enforcing aid shipments.104

Kouchner's proposal sparked a debate about the scope of R2P that also took place among the British,105 German106 and European107 parliaments and foreign policy elites, respectively, and heightened the profile of R2P. The European Parliament even passed a resolution that echoed Kouchner's sentiment.108 Some German politicians joined Kouchner's call, including the Minister for Economic Co-operation and Development Wieczorek-Zeul.109 In the end, however, Kouchner's attempt to link R2P to the Myanmar crisis was widely rejected, including by other European governments and policy-makers.

Amid this controversy, Germany slowly started to wake up to the concept of a responsibility to protect. The head of the federal foreign office's UN department at the time, Peter Wittig, invited Edward Luck to Germany after the Columbia University professor was appointed special advisor on the responsibility to protect by the Secretary-General.110 In early 2008, Luck started a consultation process for a first report of the Secretary-General, in which he sought to articulate the implications of R2P, as defined at the World Summit, in greater detail.111 Just by preparing policy-makers for meetings with Luck and by having him speak in front of parliamentary committees in the UK, Germany and the EU, member states’ foreign ministries and legislatures began considering more nuanced positions on the different elements of the concept.112

In July 2008 Secretary-General Ban held a speech in Berlin in which he outlined his approach for implementing R2P for the first time.113 In the fall of 2008, Wittig published a personal article about R2P in a cautious attempt to consolidate Germany's position.114 Before Wittig wrote his article, the German foreign policy bureaucracy had not addressed the issue in any detail.115 If official documents or speeches referred to R2P at all, they did so with brief or vague language, largely repeating or citing the 2005 World Summit outcome document.116 For a German strategic culture focused on multilateralism and international law, it probably seemed logical to take a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to R2P. Yet thanks to Wittig's and Luck's efforts, Germany started to engage more with the concept in 2008.

Two more crises reminded European diplomats of the controversy around R2P and the limited consensus over a liberal human rights agenda. In August 2008, European governments were united in rejecting the attempt by Russia to justify its military intervention in Georgia by pointing to the responsibility to protect117 civilians from ‘humanitarian catastrophe’.118 From the perspective of those who supported a wide interpretation of R2P, the use of R2P by Putin and Medvedev, contrary to the original intention of countries such as France and Britain, emphasised the danger of Kouchner's activism with regard to Myanmar.

In early 2009, as a reaction to atrocities committed by the conflict parties in Sri Lanka during the final phase of its civil war, where up to 40,000 civilians were allegedly killed in just a few months,119 European governments lobbied for a special session of the Human Rights Council.120 They tabled a draft resolution that condemned the Sri Lankan Government. In an embarrassing defeat, however, the special session ended up passing a resolution that supported the Sri Lankan Government's counter-terrorism efforts—thereby approving of the manner in which the Sri Lankan Government had conducted its operations in the last few months of the civil war.121

As the first General Assembly debate on R2P drew closer in the summer of 2009, the controversies over Myanmar and Georgia and the isolation of the West in the Human Rights Council on Sri Lanka might have heightened the fears among European governments and the EU foreign affairs bureaucracy of a backlash that might jeopardise the language agreed to in 2005.122 Rather than focusing on bold language, European diplomats were focused on maintaining the existing consensus: this illustrates their shared interpretation that the concept had to be supported by maintaining and refining language on R2P in multilateral resolutions.

The debate was based on the Secretary-General's report on ‘Implementing the Responsibility to Protect’. The report defined a ‘narrow and deep’123 approach focused on the four crimes mentioned and based on the agreed-upon language of the 2005 World Summit. By introducing the ‘three pillars’ of state responsibility, capacity-building and intervention, Luck sought to broaden the debate beyond the question of military action alone.124 Despite Luck's efforts to reach out to sceptical countries, the Nicaraguan President of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, circulated a highly critical concept paper and hosted a panel discussion with the anti-interventionist public intellectual Noam Chomsky at the start of the debate.125 To oppose these critics, the EU delegation in New York co-ordinated a large diplomatic push by the EU, complete with ‘complex charts and burden sharing’ arrangements that laid out which member state would lobby which group of UN member states.126

The respective statements of France, the UK, Germany and the EU Council presidency were co-ordinated to support the key points of the Secretary-General's report: prevention as the most important aspect of R2P and the crucial role of capacity-building in support of regional organisations.127 EU member states took care not to appear too forceful to avoid R2P being viewed as a purely ‘Western’ concept.128 The UK and France explicitly emphasised that the ‘principle of non-indifference’ was ‘enshrined in the AU Constitutive Act’129 and recalled that R2P was ‘developed by prominent figures from every continent’.130 After the debate, instead of getting behind a more substantive resolution proposed by Guatemala, the EU supported a procedural resolution 131 that welcomed Luck's report and mandated further debates in the General Assembly.132

The report was received positively by a large majority of states at the United Nations, because it de-emphasised military means of enforcing R2P. Luck's three pillars also allowed the Europeans to focus their rhetoric on the prevention elements of a responsibility to protect. For Germany and the EU, in particular, prevention presented a way to discuss R2P without facing up to the controversy over military intervention. They could now relate the principle to their general focus on prevention and civilian crisis management.133 A former European official said that since 2009, in all internal discussions between member states in the EU Council's UN Working Group (CONUN), all countries agreed that the most important element of the responsibility to protect was prevention. It was always left to either Britain or France to note that ‘this is also about the use of force’.134 None of these countries, however, launched any initiatives with the purpose of the prevention of mass atrocities in 2009 or the following years.135

2011—Libya

The European R2P positions were thrown into the spotlight more than ever before by the Libyan crisis in spring 2011. When in February 2011 the Libyan ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi started to violently suppress protesters in his country and threatened to kill members of the opposition showing ‘no mercy’,136 the Security Council dealt with the crisis unusually early and forcefully. Resolution 1973 marked the first time the Security Council authorised a military intervention against a functioning state to prevent imminent mass atrocities.137 That decision has since been hailed by its supporters and opponents both as proof that the responsibility to protect has become an established international norm138 and—because of the controversies surrounding its implementation by NATO which effectively ended up aiding the rebel forces overthrow the Gaddafi government—as the beginning of its end.139

For the European position on R2P, the Libyan crisis is revealing for three reasons. First, it demonstrated the way in which France and Britain understood R2P as a more acceptable term than humanitarian intervention to justify their national priorities. Second, with Germany just having taken its 2011–2012 seat on the Security Council, Libya woke up a broader public in Germany to the existence of R2P and expanded the Government's interpretation of the concept. Third, the crisis showcased the extent of disagreement between major European governments about R2P, and the resulting paralysis of the European Union as a whole to support or implement R2P in practice.

At first, the European and international reaction to the crisis in Libya demonstrated an unusual capacity and willingness to act together in the face of mass atrocities. Less than two weeks after the outbreak of major violence in Libya, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1970.140 Brought about jointly by the UK, France and Germany, the resolution recalled the Libyan government's responsibility to protect, imposed targeted sanctions and referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court.141

When the crisis in Libya continued unabated, however, this common European position fell apart. The deep division between the UK and France on the one side and Germany on the other side over whether and how to use military force to address the situation in Libya reflected the key differences between their strategic cultures. The diverging strategic cultures also shaped their different interpretations of the responsibility to protect.

France and Britain led the charge for military intervention in Libya. For France, Libya was a clear-cut case of an acute humanitarian emergency that screamed for intervention. In addition, Libya's location on the southern shore of the Mediterranean made it part of an important zone of influence for France.142 Political analysts also wrote that Sarkozy might have wanted to cover up his previously good relations with the Gaddafi regime, gain popularity by showing international activism a year before the presidential elections or distract from the fact that in the beginning of the Arab Spring, France had offered support for the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali.143 It is possible that the public efforts of the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévy helped to tip the balance. Lévy flew the rebel leadership from Libya to Paris and arranged meetings with Sarkozy, amid public demands for action.144 After their meeting, Sarkozy started to compare the situation in Benghazi to Rwanda and Srebrenica, employing powerful historical analogies that buttressed the moral case for intervention.145 In parliament, Foreign Minister Alain Juppé stressed the responsibility to protect in the context of resolution 1970.146

For London, the crisis in Libya passed the ‘five tests’ that Tony Blair had laid out in the Chicago speech, including evidence, military feasibility and national interest. In addition, the British Government's experience from Bosnia and Iraq led to a concerted effort to seek a UN Security Council mandate and regional support. Both efforts were successful; the latter partly because of William Hague's lobbying of Arab states to support a no-fly zone over Libya.147 Especially in the week leading up to the decision on resolution 1973, ‘[t]here was a very strong feeling at the top of this government that Benghazi could very easily become the Srebrenica of our watch’, according to ‘a senior government source’.148 Quite possibly, the moral fervour could have eclipsed the commitment to conducting a mission in line with international law, i.e. with a Security Council mandate. Cameron later noted in an interview: ‘I've always thought it odd the argument that because there's a Russian veto [at the UN], suddenly all the other moral arguments are washed away. I don't believe that’.149 Cameron swept aside internal critics, including Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke150 and Liberal Democrats, who were traditionally sceptical towards interventions and were only persuaded by the perceived imminent threat to civilians in Benghazi.151

In contrast to Britain and France, Germany argued against military intervention in Libya and abstained on Resolution 1973, joining Brazil, Russia, India and China on the Security Council. While German officials were annoyed about what they saw as insincere French activism on Libya, they did not assess the risk of a massacre in Benghazi as being lower than their main European allies. In line with the German ‘culture of restraint’, however, the German Government and the German public were much more sceptical about the chances for success and afraid of the dangers of a military mission in Libya.152 Foreign Minister Westerwelle—a staunch supporter of the ‘culture of restraint’153—played a key role in opposing the intervention, as did the fear of all senior government officials to ask the Bundestag for a mandate shortly before an important regional election.154 After the sudden change of position in the US Administration155 that included the introduction of a paragraph in the resolution that called for ‘all necessary measures’ to protect civilians and thereby a much broader authorisation of the use of force than a no-fly zone would have been, with less than 35 hours to decide on how to vote on the resolution and no time for a new debate in the Bundestag again before the vote, the German Government decided to abstain on resolution 1973.156 Foreign Minister Westerwelle and Chancellor Merkel portrayed the link between the vote in the Security Council and the provision of troops to the operation as inseparable,157 an idea for which they were widely criticised in Germany afterwards.158

The controversial German abstention led to a surge of discussions on the responsibility to protect in Germany—both as a matter of emerging international law and, for the first time, as a moral principle that demanded practical concepts and real-world action. In the following year, opposition parties included the topic in parliamentary motions159 and major national newspapers explained it to a larger public.160 In the fall of 2012, the foreign office appointed a high-ranking ‘focal point’ on R2P and designated civilian conflict prevention projects as related to R2P. In early 2013, the German focal point for R2P referred to the concept as a ‘norm under construction’ and explained that it ‘takes several decades to establish international customary law, until state practice and legal opinion are sufficient to call it a binding norm’.161 Since the Libyan crisis, however, Germany's interpretation of R2P additionally demands practical projects to prevent mass atrocities.

For the European Union, the fundamental rift between the major European states about military action left the EU only with rhetorical tools to act. Both High Representative Ashton and Council President Van Rompuy referred on several occasions to the Libyan Government's responsibility to protect.162 Yet EU member states could not agree on joint EU action to support the intervention.

Responsibility while protecting

While the crisis in Libya prompted a change in the German interpretation of R2P, debates on the Brazilian proposal of a ‘responsibility while protecting’ soon afterwards demonstrated that, in contrast, the key aspects of the French and British positions on R2P had largely remained constant since 2001.

The perceived violation of the mandate of the UN Security Council by NATO forces in Libya was more relevant for international debates on the responsibility to protect than the agreement on the resolutions 1970 and 1973 themselves. Even promoters of R2P criticised what amounted to the de facto assistance for a rebel movement to remove the Gaddafi regime.163 Dissatisfaction over Libya motivated Brazil to present an amendment to the responsibility to protect: its proposal of a ‘responsibility while protecting’ (RwP).164 The concept proposed a ‘chronological sequencing’ of the three pillars of responsibility of the state: international assistance and enforcement measures; the consideration of a series of criteria before the Council authorises the use of force; and the establishment of a monitoring mechanism to oversee the implementation of military interventions authorised by the Security Council in the context of the responsibility to protect.165

Reminiscent of their first reaction to the ICISS report in 2001, France and the UK, who had been the political driving force behind the NATO operation, were vehemently opposed to RwP, because they did not want to start discussions on any kind of criteria or monitoring mechanisms that would have limited their freedom of action in the Security Council.166 The French Government in particular saw this as an attempt to render R2P more inflexible. It saw RwP as a direct criticism of the operation in Libya that France had played a leading role in. The French opposition to RwP was so profound that the French Government tried to prevent the inclusion of language supportive of RwP into a motion by the European Parliament by writing a letter to every French member of the European Parliament (MEP) on the Foreign Affairs Committee, asking them not to support the motion.167

Given the strong opposition by London and Paris and the support of RwP by Portugal and other Southern European countries, agreeing on a common European position on the Brazilian proposal was very difficult—so much so that some EU officials feared the EU would end its unbroken chain of common statements on R2P since 2009.168 The large majority of states was critical on some of the suggestions but welcomed the Brazilian initiative as such. They sought to encourage discussions on issues that the French and British were strictly opposed to, such as the monitoring mechanism.169 After first being equally sceptical of the Brazilian proposal, Germany joined those EU states and the EU delegation in New York that argued for ‘embracing the concept’ and working constructively with the Brazilians, giving weight to those states arguing for a middle ground in Brussels.170 Since the Foreign Office in Berlin had just produced a strategy paper arguing for more engagement with new emerging powers such as Brazil, officials there had argued—initially against the opinions of their colleagues in New York—for a more conciliatory approach towards the concept.171 Illustrating the persisting German legalistic approach, the German mission produced a detailed analysis of the Brazilian proposal, outlining those elements that were already part of international law.172

The European External Action Service managed to soothe heated differences sufficiently for a common statement during an informal discussion on the concept in February 2012,173 illustrating the added value of the European Union bureaucracy on discussions on R2P: without the institutional memory of the EU delegation in New York and its moderator role in this process, a common EU statement would have been unlikely. Despite the agreement on the common statement, however, the discussions in the EU Council's UN Working Group continued during almost every meeting of the following year without yielding a truly common European position.174

Syria and the Central African Republic: confirming old patterns or new opportunities for European cooperation?

The debates around mass atrocities after Libya and RwP on the one hand confirmed the above described positions of the three major European states. On the other hand they may provide a hint at a possible convergence of European positions.

Between the outbreak of violence in Syria in 2011 and the summer of 2013, all European members of the Security Council (including Germany until the end of its two year membership in 2012) acted in concert to table resolutions that threatened UN sanctions to address the ever escalating crisis in Syria—where the initial crackdown of protests by the Assad regime developed into a full-scale civil war. The European drive for sanctions and diplomatic initiatives were blocked by Russia and China.175

When the United States threatened military measures against the Assad regime after the use of chemical weapons in Syria in August 2013 old differences between the three major European countries were once again highlighted. France supported air strikes in Syria despite the lack of a Security Council mandate. The British Government demonstrated that for them, R2P had never replaced or changed their interpretation of ‘liberal interventionism’. The British Government explicitly argued that under ‘the doctrine of humanitarian intervention’ the UK would ‘still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe […]’.176 By voting down the Prime Minister's proposal for British participation in airstrikes over Syria, however, the House of Commons sent a signal that the British public was becoming wary of more interventions. In the eyes of some European analysts, the British vote showed how the country in that respect became a bit ‘more German’.177 While this might be an over-interpretation of a single decision, the growing war-wariness of British citizens might indeed provide a space for closer alignment of European positions.

Similarly, the German support for a European military mission in the Central African Republic in early 2014 could be seen as a cautious shift towards a more common European response to mass atrocities. Yet the German support to the mission was once again minimal, leaving a big gap between the rhetoric of the country's politicians and its actions.178

Debating prevention

While they were trying to mitigate differences between member states on RwP and a response to the Syrian crisis, officials at the European External Action Service were challenged by a group of academics and civil society actors that formed a ‘Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities’, launched by a Hungarian civil society organisation in 2012.179 Confronted with the proposition that the EU was not doing enough to prevent mass atrocities, EU officials argued that the European Union was strong on mass atrocity prevention and R2P because of its focus on conflict prevention.180 Yet neither the EU nor Germany—which have most emphasised the prevention aspects of R2P since 2009—were very supportive of the EU's prevention agenda in previous years. The EU's High Representative Catherine Ashton blocked the evaluation of the EU's 2011 Göteborg Programme on Conflict Prevention, which would have produced an update of the 10 year old EU policy programme on conflict prevention.181 It was Hungary, supported by the UK and not Germany that led an effort to adopt EU Council Conclusions on conflict prevention in June 2011. Similarly, the establishment of a separate conflict prevention and mediation unit in the EEAS was mostly supported by the European Parliament, the British, Finish and the Swedes—not Germany.182

Conclusion

As our analysis has shown, while European governments have a positive attitude towards R2P, they never shared a truly consensual interpretation of its most important properties and functions. Based on their distinct strategic cultures, France and Britain, on the one hand, have supported a much broader interpretation of R2P than Germany and the EU. In this, France traces its own position to humanitarian assistance and the notion of a droit d'ingérence as a legal right to interfere in sovereign territories for humanitarian reasons, building on its imperial mission civilisatrice in its strategic culture. British policy-makers have started to embrace a ‘bounded liberalism’, fusing their foreign policy with values-laden rhetoric. R2P becomes a tool to convince others in a political argument in this view, as was visible in the debate about the intervention in Libya. Germany and the EU, on the other hand, viewed R2P mostly through the eyes of multilateralism and international law. Through increased internal and public debates after Libya, German leaders and officials started to accept that there are also practical implications to the concept. They have since focused on the aspect of prevention and the establishment of a focal point in the foreign office.

These persistent differences among some of the most important supporters of R2P demonstrate the need to disentangle ‘the’ European position on R2P. Unsurprisingly, differences in their strategic cultures mean that there are diverging interpretations and practices regarding a responsibility to protect. These are not only important to take into account when further investigating the EU's engagement with the concept. They are also vital to remember in further research and policy debates on the EU's role in engaging new global powers on this concept. France and Britain have been more proactive than Germany in pursuing policies to prevent mass atrocities and in support of R2P. And while the German Government and the European Union liked to highlight the importance of prevention on every occasion, they have not been at the forefront of new or qualitatively different prevention initiatives so far. Yet that the positions of France and Britain have not changed at all since 2001 raises the question of whether London and Paris have lived up to their own demands of open engagement with global powers. A greater willingness of the two European powers on the Security Council to engage in debates on criteria for the use of force or accountability mechanisms and to discuss possible alternatives to military interventions in concrete crisis situations will likely not only benefit a stronger common European foreign policy. It will also enable a more constructive European role in engaging in a more meaningful and consistent manner in the global debate on a responsibility to protect populations from mass atrocities.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Philipp Rotmann, Oliver Read, Matthias Dembinski, Marcos Tourinho and the two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback and excellent comments. This article is part of a collaborative research project on Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect (www.globalnorms.net), generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through its Europe and Global Challenges programme.

Notes

^1.Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 51, 246.

^2.UNGA, ‘Resolution 60/1’.

^3. Cf. Vlasic, ‘Europe and North America’.

^4. Göler offers an exception, yet only with regard to the Libya crisis in 2011 and without a major focus on R2P. See, Göler, ‘Die Europäische Union in der Libyen-Krise’.

^5. See, Fiott, ‘The Responsibility-to-Protect’; Oxfam International, ‘The European Union’; Vincent and Wouters, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’; Dembinski and Reinold, Libya and the Future of the Responsibility to Protect; Vlasic, ‘Europe and North America’; Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, ‘The EU and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities’; Wouters and De Man, ‘The Responsibility to Protect and Regional Organisations’.

^6. For the UK, see Daddow, ‘Tony's War’; Daddow and Schnapper, ‘Liberal Intervention’; Davidson, ‘France, Britain and the Intervention in Libya’. For France, see Allen and Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere?’; Charbonneau, ‘France’; Konersmann, Responsibility to Protect; Davidson, ‘France, Britain and the Intervention in Libya’. For Germany, see Brozus and von Farks, ‘Germany and R2P’.

^7.Stahl, ‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Libyen-Krise’; Brozus and von Farks, ‘Germany and R2P’; Seibel, ‘Das Deutsche Abstimmungsverhalten’.

^8. See for this three-dimensional analytical framework the introduction to this special issue.

^9. Interview with Dame Margaret Beckett MP, London, June 2013.

^10. See the survey conducted by Biehl et al., Strategische Kulturen in Europa.

^11. One important exception of this convergence in foreign policy relates to Britain's relation with Europe, see Self, British Foreign and Defence Policy, 150–151; Bevir et al., ‘Introduction’.

^12. Interviews with policy-makers, London, June 2013.

^13.Simms, Unfinest Hour. His former speech writer claims that this book has influenced Cameron's thinking: see Ian Birrel, ‘This is the REAL Cameron—and his Battle with the Desert Despot may Define Him’. Daily Mail, 20 March 2011.

^14.Blair, ‘Doctrine of the International Community’.

^15. Daddow, ‘Tony's War’, 556.

^16.Blair, ‘Doctrine of the International Community’.

^17.Atkins, ‘A Renewed Social Democracy’, 184.

^18. ‘Robin Cook's Speech on the Government's Ethical Foreign Policy’. The Guardian, 12 May 1997; Williams, ‘The Rise and Fall’; Cf. Chandler, ‘Rhetoric without Responsibility’; Gaskarth, ‘Interpreting Ethical Foreign Policy’.

^19.Dodds and Elden, ‘Thinking Ahead’, 348–350.

^20. Daddow and Schnapper, ‘Liberal Intervention’, 333.

^21.Vaïsse, La Puissance ou l'Influence?.

^22.Irondelle and Schmitt, ‘France’, 125.

^23.Conklin, A Mission to Civilize.

^24.Chafer and Cumming, ‘Beyond Fashoda’; Koepf, ‘The Problems of French-led Peace Operations’. Rwanda proved to be a turning point in its Africa policy though: ‘France became much more careful when weighing options to intervene—it now rather promotes and supports African capacities for intervention’. Interview with Jean-Marc Châtaigner, French Focal Point for R2P, Paris, June 2013.

^25.Irondelle and Schmitt, ‘France’, 131–132.

^26. In a transatlantic survey, 76 per cent of French respondents, the second highest except for Sweden, supported the notion that the international community had a responsibility to protect civilians from violence, with 69 per cent of British and 66 per cent of German respondents replying favourably. German Marshall Fund of the United States, ‘Transatlantic Trends’, 39–40.

^27.Bettati, ‘Du droit d'ingérence’.

^28. It is not easy to properly translate this into English. In French, ‘droit’ has a stronger, legal connotation than the word ‘devoir’ that rather describes a moral duty but not a legal obligation. See Allen and Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere?’, 828. It is possible that this linguistic problem adds to the frequent misunderstandings between the European partners on the (legal) nature of humanitarian interventions and R2P.

^29.Bettati and Kouchner, Le Devoir d'ingérence.

^30.Allen and Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere?’.

^31. Interview Jean-Pierre Maulny, IRIS, Paris, May 2013.

^32.Junk and Daase, ‘Germany’, 149.

^33. Ibid., 146.

^34. Art. 26 I of Germany's Basic Law states: ‘Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be made a criminal offense’.

^35.Kaim and Niedermeier, Das Ende des ‘Muliteralen Reflexes’?.

^36.Smith, Genocide and the Europeans, 191.

^37.Fischer, ‘Auszüge aus der Rede beim Bielefelder Parteitag’.

^38.Baumann and Hellmann, ‘Germany and the Use of Military Force’; Roos, ‘Deutsche Außenpolitik nach der Vereinigung’, 29.

^39.Stahl, ‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Libyen-Krise’.

^40. For a full development of this argument, see ibid.

^41. The Centre for Peace Operations (Zentrum für Internationale Friedenseinsätze) based in Berlin.

^42. See Stahl, ‘Die Deutsche Außenpolitik in der Libyen-Krise’.

^43.Baumann and Hellmann, ‘Germany and the Use of Military Force’, 62; Noetzel and Schreer, ‘All the Way?’, 219; Junk and Daase, ‘Germany’, 148.

^44. Allison Smale, ‘Spurred by Global Crises, Germany Weighs a More Muscular Foreign Policy’. The New York Times, 1 February 2014.

^45. Cf. Dembinski and Reinold, Libya and the Future of the Responsibility to Protect, 14–22.

^46.Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect, 67.

^47.Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 183.

^48. Phone Interview with Klaus Naumann, June 2013

^49. See, for example, Tony Blair, ‘Speech given by the Prime Minister in Sedgefield, Justifying Military Action in Iraq and Warning of the Continued Threat of Global Terrorism’. The Guardian, 5 March 2004.

^50. ‘British PM Urges Tougher Stance Against Brutal Regimes’. Agence France Presse, 14 July 2003. Available at: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-23840356_ITM [Accessed 30 August 2013].

^51. Phone Interview with David Hannay, March 2013.

^52. See Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 187, for further references.

^53.Bellamy, ‘Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse?’, 32, 42, 45.

^54.Junk, ‘Humanitäre Appelle, Humanitäre Interventionen?’, 150–151.

^55. Interview with Bernd Mützelburg, then chief foreign policy advisor of the Chancellor, Berlin, August 2013.

^56. Cf. Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 187–188.

^57. Interview with Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, June 2013.

^58.Auswärtiges Amt, ‘Siebter Bericht der Bundesregierung’, 143.

^59. Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 242.

^60.Fischer, ‘Address by Joschka Fischer’; Blair, ‘Speech to the General Assembly’; de Villepin, ‘Discourse de Monsieur Dominique de Villepin’.

^61.Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ‘The United Kingdom in the United Nations’, 7, emphasis added. The Chicago speech remains a crucial reference document in the British discourse on R2P. Interviews with former British diplomats, London, June 2013.

^62. Interview with a former British diplomat, London, June 2013.

^63.UNGA, ‘Resolution 60/1’.

^64. Interviews with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013 and with Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, June 2013.

^65. Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 317.

^66. Ibid., 317.

^67. Ibid., 318.

^68. Interview with former British diplomat, London, June 2013.

^69. Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 324.

^70. Ibid.

^71. Ibid.

^72. See Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 288.

^73. Ibid., 325. Indeed, the FCO continues to cite a legal reasoning based on this doctrine in discussions on R2P, interview, FCO, London, June 2013. For the reasoning, see Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean, Kosovo. Further, see Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’. Interview with Aline Leboef, IFRI, Paris, May 2013.

^74. Pollentine, ‘Constructing the Responsibility to Protect’, 324.

^75. Interview with former British diplomat, London, June 2013.

^76.European Council, ‘Presidency Conclusions 16 and 17 June 2005’.

^77. Interview with former British diplomat, London, June 2013.

^78. Interview with Mark Malloch-Brown, London, June 2013.

^79.German Federal Ministry of Defence, ‘White Paper 2006’, 44.

^80.European Council, ‘Council Conclusions on UN World Summit’.

^81. Interview with EEEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013.

^82. Ibid.

^83. Ibid.

^84. Interview with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013, Emphasis added.

^85.European Council, ‘EU Priorities for the 63rd United Nations General Assembly’; European Parliament and European Commission, ‘The European Conensus on Humanitarian Aid’, para. 17.

^86. EU, ‘Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy’, 12. Emphasis added. It should be noted that the Report does not carry a lot of weight in Brussels.

^87. Phone interview with former European official, June 2013.

^88.Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect, 138.

^89. Ibid. The former German ambassador to the UN, Thomas Matussek, also remembered that the label R2P was avoided in SC discussions on Darfur to decrease controversy. Interview with Thomas Matussek, Berlin, 22 March 2013.

^90.UNSC, ‘Resolution 1769’; UNSC, ‘Resolution 1856’.

^91. In the beginning of 2008, less than 10 per cent of peacekeeping troops came from Western governments. Cf. Bellamy, The Responsibility to Protect, 168.

^92. Cf. Haine, ‘The Failure of a European Strategic Culture’.

^93.Babaud and Ndung'u, ‘Early Warning and Conflict Prevention’.

^94.Kouchner, ‘Violence in Kenya’.

^95. Xan Rice, ‘Rice Presses for Kenyan Power-sharing Deal’. The Guardian, 18 February 2008.

^96. Dagmar Dehmer, ‘Keine Partei Darf Dominieren’. Der Tagesspiegel, 16 February 2008. Cf. Haine, ‘The Failure of a European Strategic Culture’. Babaud and Ndung'u, ‘Early Warning and Conflict Prevention’. Kouchner, ‘Violence in Kenya’. Rice, ‘Rice Presses for Kenyan Power-sharing Deal’. Dehmer, ‘Keine Partei Darf Dominieren’.

^97.Luck, ‘From Promise to Practice’, 98.

^98. Reuters, ‘France Suggested Invoking Responsibility to Protect’, 7 May 2008.

^99. Interview with Thomas Mattusek, Berlin, April 2013 and interview with Mark Malloch-Brown, London, June 2013.

^100. Apparently, the French President had particularly strong influence in foreign policy during Kouchner's time in office, as ‘whenever [something] became a bit political [the Elysée] took it away from him’. Interview, Jean-Pierre Maulny, Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques, Paris, May 2013.

^101.Badescu, Humanitarian Intervention, 141.

^102.Allen and Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere?’, 835.

^103. Interview with Mark Malloch-Brown, London, June 2013.

^104. Ibid.

^105.UK, House of Commons, ‘Debate on Burma’.

^106. The German debate took place more than a month after the disaster outbreak and was ‘put on record’ (i.e. the speeches were never actually delivered). Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Stenografischer Bericht’.

^107.European Parliament, ‘Debates’.

^108.European Parliament, ‘Resolution on the Tragic Situation’.

^109. ‘Gegen die Junta. Deutschland will Hilfe für Birma erzwingen’. Die Welt, 11 May 2008.

^110. Interview with Edward Luck, Berlin, June 2013.

^111. Ibid.

^112. Interview with German diplomat, Berlin, June 2013; phone interview with European official, June 2013.

^113.UNSG, ‘Address at Berlin’.

^114.Wittig, ‘Das Leiden der Anderen’.

^115. Interview with German diplomat, Berlin, June 2013.

^116. See, for example, Bundesregierung, ‘Working Together’, 96; German Federal Ministry of Defence, ‘White Paper 2006’, 44.

^117. Putin even compared the situation in South Ossetia to Srebrenica. See Nielsen, ‘The Kosovo Precedent’, 179.

^118. See Russia's statement at the UN Security Council that also spoke about ‘scorched-earth Tactics’ by Georgia. UNSC, ‘Meeting Records’; Bellamy, ‘Five Years On’, 151. Compare Kurowska in this issue for more analysis on the Russian position.

^119.UN, ‘Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka’.

^120.UN, ‘Report of the Secretary-General's Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka’, 14.

^121.UN Human Rights Council, ‘Assistance to Sri Lanka’.

^122. Interviews with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013.

^123.UNSG, ‘Implementing the Responsibility to Protect’.

^124. Bellamy, ‘Five Years On’, 146.

^125.UNGA, ‘Concept Note on the Responsibility to Protect’.

^126. Interview with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013.

^127.Permanent Mission of Sweden to the UN, ‘Statement on Behalf of the European Union’.

^128. For example, EU member states deliberately spread out their statements during the debate so not to appear as one bloc highlighting the same message. Interview, EEAS, Brussels, May 2013.

^129.Permanent Mission of the UK to the UN, ‘Draft Statement’.

^130.Permanent Mission of France to the UN, ‘General Assembly’.

^131. Interview with Edward Luck, Berlin, June 2013.

^132.UNGA, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’.

^133. Compare, for example, European Council, ‘EU Priorities for the 64th United Nations General Assembly’; Permanent Mission of Germany to the UN, ‘Statement in the General Assembly Debate’.

^134. Phone Interview with former European official, June 2013.

^135. Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, ‘The EU and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities’.

^136. Al-Arabiya News, ‘Gaddafi tells Benghazi his Army is Coming Tonight’, 17 March 2011.

^137.Bellamy, ‘Libya and the Responsibility to Protect’, 263.

^138.Bellamy and Williams, ‘The New Politics of Protection’; Weiss, ‘RtoP Alive and Well’.

^139. David Rieff, ‘R2P, R.I.P’. New York Times, 6 November 2011.

^140.UNSC, ‘Resolution 1970’.

^141. Ibid.; Seibel, ‘R2P and German Foreign Policy’, 11.

^142. Interview with Jean-Marc Chataigner, Paris, June 2013. Cf. Henry, ‘Sarkozy, the Mediterranean and the Arab Spring’.

^143.Elliott, ‘Viewpoint’; Santini and Varvelli, ‘The Libya Crisis’; interview with Mathieu Pellerin, Paris, May 2013.

^144.Wallace-Wells, ‘European Superhero’.

^145. Dembinski and Reinold, Libya and the Future of the Responsibility to Protect, 21.

^146.Assemblée National, ‘Première Séance’, 55–56.

^147. Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt, ‘David Cameron's Libyan War: Why the PM felt Gaddafi had to be Stopped’. The Guardian, 2 October 2011.

^148. Ibid.

^149. Niall Ferguson, ‘The British Prime Minister is Coming to America’. Newsweek, 11 March 2012.

^150. Wintour and Watt, ‘David Cameron's Libyan War’.

^151. Interview with a Liberal Democrat MP, London, June 2013.

^152. A poll published with the title ‘Germans do not want to get involved’ by the magazine Stern on the day before the UN Security Council vote on resolution 1973 found that 88 per cent of Germans opposed the involvement of German troops in an intervention in Libya. Stern, ‘Deutsche Wollen sich Nicht Einmischen’.

^153. Matthias Nass, ‘Der Anti-Interventionist’ [The Anti-Interventionist]. Die ZEIT, 9 February 2013.

^154.Brockmeier, ‘The German Abstention on the Libya Intervention’.

^155. See Junk in this issue.

^156. For a detailed explanation of the abstention, see also Seibel, ‘Libyen, das Prinzip der Schutzverantwortung’.

^157.Bundesregierung, ‘Pressestatement von Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’; Federal Foreign Office, ‘Federal Foreign Minister Westerwelle on the Libya Resolution’.

^158. Josef Joffe, ‘Eine Bundesregierung ohne Kiel und Kompass’ [A Federal Government without Keel and Compass]. Die ZEIT, 25 March 2011; Müller, ‘Ein Desaster’.

^159.Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Schutzverantwortung Weiterentwickeln’; Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Die Internationale Schutzverantwortung’.

^160. See, for example, Michael Radunski, ‘Syrien und Libyen—Schutzverantwortung für die Bevölkerung’ [Syria and Libya—Responsibility to Protect the Population]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 April 2012.

^161. Contribution by Otto Lampe at the Peace Congress of the German Protestant Church, Berlin, 14 June 2013.

^162.European Council, ‘Statement by Herman Van Rompuy’; EU, ‘Statement by the High Representative’.

^163. Interview with Gareth Evans, Delhi, April 2013.

^164.Benner, ‘Brasilien als Normunternehmer’. See also Tourinho and Stuenkel in this issue.

^165.UNSC and UNGA, ‘Letter dated 9 November’.

^166. Interview with German diplomat, Berlin, June 2013.

^167. Interview with a member of the European Parliament, Brussels, May 2013.

^168. Interview with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013.

^169. Interview with German diplomat, Berlin, June 2013.

^170. Ibid.

^171. Ibid.

^172. Interview with EEAS officials, Brussels, May 2013.

^173.Permanent Mission of the EU to the UN, ‘Elements for a Possible EU Statement’.

^174. Interview with German diplomat, Berlin, June 2013.

^175. Three draft resolutions were vetoed in 2011 and 2012 by Russia and China, all of which were co-sponsored by the European members of the UN Security Council. , ‘Draft Resolutions’, S/2011/612; S/2012/77; and S/2012/538.

^176.Prime Minister's Office, ‘Guidance’.

^177. Robert Leicht, ‘Vor dem Schießen erst das Parlament befragen‘ [Before shooting, First Ask the Parliament]. Die ZEIT, 18 September 2013; von Ondarza, ‘Nach dem Nein zum Militäreinsatz in Syrien’.

^178.Techau, ‘A New German Defense Minister’.

^179. Task Force on the EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, ‘The EU and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities’.

^180. Phone interview with member of the Task Force, June 2013.

^181.Schünemann, ‘EU Conflict Prevention’, 4.

^182. Interviews in Brussels, May 2013.