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Samantha Power was wrong in claiming that Europe has backed down from UN peacekeeping

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Samantha Power

A couple of days ago, Ambassador Samantha Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, gave a speech on peacekeeping in Brussels that, among other things, lamented a decline in the participation of European personnel in UN peacekeeping missions:

Twenty years ago, European countries were leaders in UN peacekeeping. 25,000 troops from European militaries served in UN peacekeeping operations – more than 40 percent of blue helmets at the time. Yet today, with UN troop demands at an all-time high of more than 90,000 troops, fewer than 6,000 European troops are serving in UN peacekeeping missions. That is less than 7 percent of UN troops.

The same day, Mark Leon Goldberg wrote a post for UN Dispatch (here) that echoed Ambassador Power’s remarks and visualized her point with a chart that was promptly tweeted by the US Mission to the UN:EU peacekeepers

When I saw that chart, I wondered if it might be a little misleading. As Ambassador Power noted in her remarks, the number of troops deployed as UN peacekeepers has increased significantly in recent years.

With so much growth in the size of the pool, changes in the share of that pool contributed by EU members could result from declining contributions, but they could also result from no change, or from slower growth in EU contributions relative to other countries.

To see which it was, I used data from the International Peace Institute’s Providing for Peacekeeping Project to plot monthly personnel contributions from late 1991 to early 2014 for EU members and all other countries. Here’s what I got (and here is the R script I used to get there):unpko contribution comparison

To me, that chart tells a different story than the one Ambassador Power and UN Dispatch describe.

Instead of a sharp decline in European contributions over the past 20 years, we see a few-year surge in the early 1990s followed by a fairly constant level of EU member contributions since then. There’s even a mini-surge in 2005–2006 followed by a slow and steady return to the average level after that.

In her remarks, Ambassador Power compared Europe’s participation now to 20 years ago. Twenty years ago — late 1994 and early 1995 — just happens to be the absolute peak of EU contributions. Not coincidentally, that peak coincided with the deployment of a UN PKO in Europe, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which European countries contributed the bulk of the troops. 

In other words, when UN peacekeeping was focused on Europe, EU members contributed most of the troops. As the UN has expanded its peacekeeping operations around the world (see here for current info), EU member states haven’t really reduced their participation; instead, other countries have greatly increased theirs.

We can and should argue about how much peacekeeping the UN should try to do, and what various countries should contribute to those efforts. After looking at European participation from another angle, though, I’m not sure it’s fair to criticize EU members for “declining” involvement in the task.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering like I was, here’s a comparison of personnel contributions from EU members to ones from the United States over that same period.

The US pays the largest share, but on the dimension Ambassador Power and UN Dispatch chose to spotlight — troop contributions — it offers very little.unpko contribution comparison eu us

SEE ALSO: Russia is turning Crimea into a forward operating base against NATO

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