Orwellian Risks in European Conflict Prevention Discourse

Conflict prevention has been the nomenclature of a non-military type of security policy, but that is changing. During the Cold War, the OSCE was a forum for conflict prevention at an interstate level. After the Cold War, OSCE conflict prevention turned to domestic affairs, comparable to NGO activities. This practice tends to be overshadowed by the EU. The EU has turned conflict prevention into an aspect of the ESDP. This practice competes with the way in which NATO includes conflict prevention. By developing conflict prevention beyond the context of the UN Security Council, and by adding a military dimension to it, conflict prevention can easily become an offensive intervention policy serving self-interested power politics, or mixed motives at the least. Moreover, nonmilitary forms of conflict prevention politics are problematic too. They run the risk of burning in a hell of good intentions. Thus, the development of the conflict prevention discourse should be followed with scepticism.