So the situation in, say, Kosovo gets out of control. Violence reaches civil war levels, weapons are coming into the area to each side from Albania and Serbia. As a result of the conflict large sections of the civilian population are cut off from food and medical supplies and there are reports of atrocities including mass killings of non-combatants.
It is a hypothetical scenario but by no means an outlandish one. In such circumstances the United Nations Security Council would meet and adopt a decision on whether it should mandate an international force to be sent to the region, and what role that force should have.
In recent years the UN has adopted a policy of asking regional organisations to organise and take command of such international forces in their own regions, rather than have them run centrally through a UN command structure. Thus, for example, the S-FOR force in former Yugoslavia, while operating under UN authorisation, was organised and is under the command of NATO.
Up to now NATO was the only European regional organisation likely to be asked to organise any substantial military force for combat purposes. The Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe has organised a number of lower level international actions, notably the post-Dayton Bosnian elections. The Western European Union (WEU) has been involved in low level missions including sending an international police force to Albania.
But the Amsterdam Treaty strengthens the link between the EU and WEU and envisages a stronger future role for the WEU in peace keeping, humanitarian and peace making missions, with the EU making the key decisions on whether and when to get involved. So it would be open to the UN Security Council, once it had voted to send a military force to Kosovo, to ask the EU to mandate the WEU to organise and command part or all of it. For this to happen the European Council would first have to meet to decide on a common strategy in relation to Kosovo, and on whether it would make a military force available through the WEU. There would be a number of options.
The WEU could provide a force to escort and protect humanitarian convoys, or to prevent the import of weapons into the area, or to protect pockets of civilians at risk. If the lessons of Bosnia have been learned it could provide a more robust force to prevent the killing or, as ultimately happened in Bosnia, to attack the military capability of the aggressor.
The latter course would fall under the category of peacemaking, and although it is theoretically possible for the WEU to be asked to operate and command such a force, it is highly unlikely that a combat military mission would be run by anyone other than NATO for the foreseeable future. If the WEU is asked to participate in actions in situations such as happens in Kosovo, it is much more likely that it will be asked to provide police forces, peacekeeping and humanitarian forces rather than combat troops.
Once the nature of a WEU mission was determined by the European Council, the WEU would then set about recruiting the force, asking member states including this State, to contribute troops. While this State is an observer at the WEU rather than a full member, the Treaty states that once it decides to participate in a WEU force it has an equal voice in the planning and decision making with regard to the force.
A Government decision in principle to provide troops for a WEU force would then have to be approved by the Dail, just as the Dail must approve the sending of troops to UN commanded missions.