A confused EU cannot fight racism

First published on www.europeanvoice.com © 2009 European Voice.

The UN's Durban Review Conference - meant to "serve as a catalyst" for "reinvigorated actions" against racism - has turned into a debacle, not only for the UN but also the EU.

While coverage has focused on Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's contribution (a brutal denunciation of Israel even by his standards), the EU made headlines by splitting over whether to participate at all. Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland joined the US in refusing to show, arguing that the summit's outcome document is anti-Israeli and calls for limits to free speech in the name of religion. The Czechs have now also withdrawn.

This marks an abrupt setback after recent successes for multilateral co-operation. In London, the G20 delivered more than pundits expected. Last week's Latin American summit saw US President Barack Obama josh with Hugo Chávez, his Venezuelan counterpart and his predecessor's foe. But at the "Durban II" meeting in Geneva, Western positions came back under attack - leaving the EU looking confused.

This raises the depressing (if not entirely surprising) prospect that as governments scrabble for a way out of the financial crisis, two worlds of multilateralism will evolve.

One world, centring on the G20, IMF and World Bank, will witness genuine co-operation - as long as protectionism is kept at bay. The second, centring on the UN, will become ever more poisonous as states try to assert themselves in high-profile fights over values. 

Ironically, emerging powers like India and South Africa that sit down with the West in the G20 for economic discussions may actually grow more anti-Western at the UN, in an effort to show that they still care about solidarity within the developing world. And Western countries may accept this as a price worth paying for economic co-operation.

But the biggest losers in this - aside from victims of human-rights abuses - might be European governments, which have staked a great deal on spreading liberal principles through international law. Their "effective multilateralism" may be coming apart.

In isolation, the events in Geneva do not represent a defining moment for the EU or UN. The conference had always seemed more likely to end in confrontation than consensus. But it matches deeper trends at the UN: as we showed in a report last year, the EU now enjoys the steady support of fewer than half the UN's members on human-rights issues.

In recent months, it had looked as if the EU might refuse to participate in Durban en bloc. Two factors stopped that happening. First, the EU and its allies managed to get some offensive language removed from the draft text; there were also hopes they might get the rest cut out.

Second, the Europeans have had one eye on the Americans. Whereas US diplomats boycotted UN human-rights talks in Geneva in the last years of the Bush administration, the new team has engaged quickly and enthusiastically. The US will even run for a seat on the Human Rights Council, where the EU has taken regular beatings in recent years.

An EU boycott of Durban II would have been unlikely if the US had wanted to stay engaged (although Italy signalled its intention to pull out early). Washington only announced that it could not bring itself to go last Saturday. The EU was left without time to agree on what to do.

The Union has become good at voting together on human-rights issues in New York and Geneva - but most resolutions involved have limited impact. Now, faced with a far higher-profile human-rights challenge, the EU has got into a mess. Not only has it temporarily lost internal cohesion, but it has also risked its relationships with those countries - primarily from Latin America - that still side with it on day-to-day human-rights debates.

Will this have any lasting ramifications? Some European diplomats predict that it will be harder to forge unified positions from now on. Others see this is a temporary problem: once everyone has calmed down, they'll see the EU has little choice but to stick together.

Longer-term, "Durban II" is significant for three reasons. First, it shows that while the arrival of the Obama administration makes multilateral co-operation easier, it cannot erase all the ideological differences that bedevil the UN. Obama's recent emphasis on outreach to the Muslim world did not defuse all the tensions over rights and religion in Geneva.

Second, it is a reminder that most governments do not fear that a fight over human rights will do any real damage to their relations with the US, let alone Europe. Hillary Clinton has stated that human rights cannot derail co-operation with China; it is unlikely that officials in Beijing are worrying about how Durban affects their relations with Poland.

Finally, these events prove that if the EU wants influence at the UN, it needs a clearer strategy for winning over countries that typically vote against it. Arguing over whether to attend an international summit is not exactly the same as setting the agenda.

If the EU wants to set an agenda on human rights at the UN, it has some concrete options available. One would be tackle head-on accusations that out of self-interest it avoids the issue of migration in UN forums, by launching a resolution guaranteeing migrants' rights.

That would invite domestic political challenges. Perhaps they are too difficult to warrant the risk. But if the EU is not prepared to take risks at the UN, international human-rights dialogues will become increasingly like Durban II: confrontational debates with Europe as a target.

Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner are the authors of "A Global Force for Human Rights? An Audit of European Power at the UN" (European Council on Foreign Relations, September 2008).