The United Nations’ and the European Union’s Conceptualizations of Peace: Risk Management, Post-Cold War Security and the Normalization of Croatia

This article explores the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) conceptualizations of international security and, through the case of Croatia, their policies for peacekeeping and peace building. It argues that in the post-Cold War period, international organizations reconceived security as risk management. International and supra-national organizations adopted a variety of strategies aimed at transforming potentially disorderly states into disciplined and predictable actors. This political rationality echoes the disciplinary and governmental modalities of rule that Foucault described as emerging in Europe in classical age. The case of Croatia suggests that in the face of increasing complexity, security is enacted through clusters of institutions that deploy a combination of mechanisms of persuasion and coercion. These instruments include legal advice, institutional design, scrutiny, conditionality, and admission into or exclusion from international associations. International security has now been reconfigured as an endeavor that seeks to mobilize the cooperation of clusters of diverse institutions and the active engagement of its targets.


Introduction
In the new millennium, human security became the organizing principle for international intervention.Peacekeeping's main goal is no longer imagined as primarily ensuring the stability of the international legal order through diplomacy and military deployments, but mainly as taming the risk of catastrophic events affecting the life of populations.A new consensus emerged among international and supra-national organizations as well as bilateral actors in the West around a conceptualization of international peacekeeping and peace building as risk management, to be undertaken by clusters of states, nongovernmental (NGOs) and international governmental organizations (IGOS) committed to the prevention of danger by normalizing potentially disorderly actors.
Ulrich Beck (1992) has argued that risk results from the intensification of interconnections at all scales.Beck portrays "second modernity" as a "risk society" in which causal relationships do not follow linear paths and the past is no longer a valid basis for understanding what can be expected in the future.In such circumstances and since causality and the interaction effects of an increasing number of variables are difficult to predict, security depends on prevention (Beck, 1992).For Beck, managing risk effectively relies on the possibility of garnering accurate information regarding a plurality of potential factors that may contribute to it.Vulnerability is directly linked to risk and while unequally distributed, is not proportional to relative power.The notion of risk also challenges "container" theories of society that take territoriality as a given for the organization of political life (Beck, 2000).Risk and vulnerability create new linkages and demand that political community be re-thought in global terms.Because interconnections among diverse variables are difficult to foresee and communities can no longer be conceptualized as contained within state borders risk management invites more holistic approaches to the challenges of governing international disorder (Note 1).
As the European Security Strategy noted in 2003, the redefinition of security as risk emphasizes dynamic interconnections and vulnerabilities: Our traditional concept of self-defence -up to and including the Cold War -was based on the threat of invasion.With the new threats, the first line of defence will often be abroad.The new threats are dynamic.The risks of proliferation grow over time; left alone, terrorist networks will become ever more dangerous.State failure and organised crime spread if they are neglected -as we have seen in West Africa.This implies that we should be ready to act before a crisis occurs.Conflict prevention and threat prevention cannot start too early (European Security Strategy, 2003: 7).
Current UN and EU security strategies encompass a variety of issue areas previously considered distinct and whose connection to international security was not firmly established before the 2000-2010 decade.During that period, international organization security discourses integrated poverty, diseases, and environmental degradation into their political rationality and populations became central both as victims and as perpetrators of potential global menaces.Unlike Cold War era wisdom, international and supra-national organizations began to see sources of insecurity as residing more in states' weaknesses than in their strengths.Indeed, the European Security Strategy argued explicitly that, "Large-scale aggression against any Member State is now improbable.Instead, Europe faces new threats which are more diverse, less visible and less predictable" (European Security Strategy, 2003: 3).That same statement listed "State Failure," together with Terrorism, Weapons Proliferation, Regional Conflicts, and Organized Crime, as primary threats to European Security.
With broad acceptance of this understanding international instruments for discerning and governing insecurity expanded to encompass direct management of populations' lives.Bio-politics (Foucault, 2003) emerged as a prominent trajectory of international strategies of security.Efforts to address international disorder now focused on knowing and regulating populations' processes of living together in order to prevent danger.Thus, the Stockholm Program (European Council, 2010) argued population migration represented a fundamental global challenge and highlighted the dilemma of, "how to respect the fundamental rights and freedom and integrity of the person while guaranteeing security in Europe" (p. 4).Since security was conceptualized as taming risk by preventing a series of variables from combining in unpredictable ways and thereby generating catastrophic events, knowing and monitoring populations with a view to promoting their "health and wealth" came to be seen as a shared responsibility of the EU, state administrations, international organizations, and NGOs.
In embracing a vision of international security that questions views based on "container" theories of society, the 2003 European Security Strategy acknowledged a discrepancy between the ongoing globalization of threats and the localized character of governance.In a world where controlling all known relevant variables that may generate danger is increasingly difficult, a consensus emerged among international policy makers that security strategies should shift in focus from containment to knowledge intensive endeavors of reformation.Security in summary depends on addressing sources of risk by transforming potentially rogue states into visible and predictable western type democracies and liberal economies.The Stockholm program argued that in the face of the blurring of state borders, the security of Europe now depended on the normalization of areas at its boundaries and on cooperation among states and international organizations: The High Representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy, who is also a Vice President of the Commission, the European External Action Service and the Commission will ensure better coherence between traditional external policy instruments and internal policy instruments with significant external dimensions, such as freedom, security and justice.Consideration should be given to the added value that could be achieved by including specific competence in the area of freedom, security and justice in Union delegations in strategic partner countries.Furthermore, the legal personality of the Union should enable the Union to act with increased strength in international organisations (Stockholm Program, 2010, C 115/34).
Pace Keohane and Nye (1977), who argued that increasing interconnections among states and populations would lead to an increased likelihood for peace, the Program conceived interdependence as resulting in increasing vulnerability for states and their populations.The Stockholm Program perceived the security of Europe as a task that could not be pursued by any individual member state alone.Instead, European security now rested not only on the cooperation of law enforcement agencies, but also upon a complex web of relationships among countries that must actively support a holistic program of reforms addressing institutional, economic and social development.Articulating this same rationale, the European Security Strategy had some years earlier observed, The post Cold War environment is one of increasingly open borders in which the internal and external aspects of security are indissolubly linked.Flows of trade and investment, the development of technology and the spread of democracy have brought freedom and prosperity to many people.Others have perceived globalisation as a cause of frustration and injustice.These developments have also increased the scope for non-state groups to play a part in international affairs.And they have increased European dependence-and so vulnerability-on an interconnected infrastructure in transport, energy, information and other fields (European Security Strategy, 2003, 2).
Vulnerability and the need for new modalities that relied on cooperation and holistic approaches for governing disorder also served as the central organizing concepts of the United Nations new millennium security strategy.The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change Report (United Nations General Assembly, 2004), for example, argued that in the current international configuration of threats, all nations are at risk, regardless of their relative capabilities.No single state, alliance of states, or community is secure.That is, shared vulnerability implies a need to reinforce the UN-led collective security system.The High-Level Panel redefined and broadened the notion of international threat in bio-political terms to include, "any event or process that leads to large-scale death or lessening of life chances and undermines States as the basic units of the international system" (United Nations General Assembly, 2004: 12).More specifically for the Panel, international threats, partially reprising the 1994 UNDP components of human security, included six types:  Economic and social concerns (poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation);  Inter-State conflict;  Internal conflict, including civil war, genocide, and other large-scale atrocities;  Nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons;  Terrorism;  Transnational organized crime (United Nations General Assembly, 2004: 12).
While the Panel acknowledged threats to state security these were treated as one among many others menaces with which the UN must concern itself.The Report argued that because threats were now interconnected, the world body must strengthen its international governance capabilities and equip itself more effectively to launch and oversee long-term normalization initiatives following forcible intervention, as well as to monitor and assess economic and social conditions and to protect human rights.

Taming Risk, Normalization and Disciplinarity
As noted above, in the face of increasing recognition of complexity and vulnerability, the EU and UN now envisioned peace building as requiring a multiplicity of institutions, which, taken together, would deploy a range of instruments of persuasion and coercion, from legal advice to institutional design to conditionality to admission into or exclusion from international and supra-national organizations (such as the UN and the EU) as well as military intervention.I argue these diverse instruments must be analyzed as interlinked and inseparable features of the post-Cold War liberal international security regime.This regime, based upon a broad consensus about the nature of insecurity as risk, relies upon techniques that are isomorphic to disciplinary ways of governing populations that emerged in Europe in the classical age and that Foucault explored in his work on disciplinarity and governmentality (Note 2).
For Foucault, disciplinarity represented a modality of power that relies on technologies of individual transformation and domestication.Discipline is a modern governmental strategy aimed at building responsible and productive members of society through surveillance, mechanisms of reward/punishment, procedural codification, record keeping, training, tutorship and examination, along with a degree of coercion.Disciplinarity's goal is not to punish the body, but actively to shape the souls of its targets.Emerging alongside the formation of administrative states in Classical Europe, Foucault argued that disciplinarity overlapped with sovereignty as a technique of government.Not simply a manifestation of repressive power, discipline is 'productive' of modern subjects.It requires the active engagement of its targets in the process of their transformation and defines the goals and benchmarks for monitoring their compliance with that effort.
In the post-Cold War era, the UN and the EU, as well as other international organizations have come to consider international security to be the result of the "responsible" behavior of democratic states.The current period's emphasis on evaluative yardsticks and norms have elevated the notion of "abnormal" to the status of a central concern in today's discussions of security strategies.Undemocratic states are often tagged as "abnormal" in this formulation and dubbed moral monsters (Note 3).According to this political rationality, the transformation from deviance to normality and from nonconformity to responsibility must be pursued as an individualized and standardized process in which advisors intervene to provide specific counseling, and where a specific state's performance could be compared with that of others and assessed according to standardized benchmarks.Foucault (1995) had shown similarly that in the modern health clinic each patient became a "case," at once unique and situated within a web of data that established the benchmarks for his/her normalization.That is, in order to be made responsible members of a group and achieve standards of performance valid for all, individuals must be assisted with tailored programs designed to engineer their personal evolution from deviance (or disease) to normality or good health.In order to achieve these results physicians in Classical Europe applied an array of savoirs and techniques (for instance criminal psychology, penitentiary literature, clinical medical science, military training) that at the same time treat individuals to be transformed as unique entities and also include them in fields of comparison and standardization.In the post-Cold War political rationality for taming insecurity international institutions and states are charged with bringing each "abnormal" element of the international community to normality (or "health") through processes that are simultaneously individualizing and standardizing.
In the last two decades EU and UN security strategies began to portray states that did not possess transparent, codified and comprehensive internal law and electoral systems, or that did not abide by international benchmarks of "good government" as unpredictable or "rogue" and therefore as potential threats.International institutions and major bi-lateral actors now share the belief that expanding Western forms of government (i.e., "democracy" and "good governance") will yield peace.Accordingly, the UN Security Council broadened that body's peacekeeping mandates to include calls for developing liberal/democratic governments, rebuilding state administrations and public services and performing most state functions in "transitional governments."Similarly, as suggested above, the EU's 2003 Security Strategy argued that Member states' safety was closely aligned to the Union's capacity to change "rogue" states at its borders into "modern functioning democracies."Thus, The quality of international society depends on the quality of the governments that are its foundation.
The best protection for our security is a world of well-governed democratic states.Spreading good governance, supporting social and political reform, dealing with corruption and abuse of power, establishing the rule of law and protecting human rights are the best means of strengthening the international order (European Security Strategy, 2003, 10).
No longer mainly a military endeavor, border protection is now strictly linked to normalization and demands efforts to change possible rogue neighbors into democratic and "civilized" actors.As Mitchell Dean has argued, the liberal states see their security as depending on the exercise of liberty by normalized subjects (Dean, 1999, 116-117).Similarly, the EU imagines international security as the result of the "responsible behavior" of market democracies.For example, the Copenhagen Criteria that guided the process of Croatia's Accession to EU candidacy emphasized democratic government, a market economy and a functioning public administration as key criteria for admission (Note 4).In the 1990s, too, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme introduced 'good governance' as a requirement for international aid (World Bank, 1992, 1994;UNDP 1994).Similarly, the 2005 United Nations World Summit restated that body's dedication to the significance of political criteria defining international conditionality (Note 5).Likewise, the 2008 UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations manual argued that durable peace depends on effective government, including states' ability to provide security, strengthen the rule of law, support legitimate political institutions and promote social and economic recovery and development (DPKO, 2008).The European Security Strategy and the UN formulation of security each called for reforms of governmental processes as the central instrument through which social transformations ought to be (and could be) engineered.
Disciplinarity demands a subject's assumption of responsibility for its success.In most UN pro-democracy peacekeeping initiatives of the "new generation" (that is, those efforts launched in the post-Cold War period) as well as in the 2003 European Security Strategy the use of force has been considered a "last resort" and when employed, must be coupled with institutional reforms aimed at transforming disorderly state actors into responsible and active members of the "international community."EU admission has emerged as a mechanism that deliberately seeks to enact identity formation and moral reformation in applicant states.Accordingly, the Union has conditioned admission as well as the distribution of international economic assistance on state's willingness to achieve internationally established standards concerning a range of issues, from a nation's efforts to ensure human rights to its economic and political organization."Community" as Nicholas Rose has argued, represents a modality of liberal government, a field of inclusion/exclusion that fosters normalization (Rose, 1999).The Stabilization and Association Process (SAP) puts in place technologies of performance to promote "responsible autonomy."(Note 6) The inclusion in virtuous communities is a way of promoting "ethical reconstruction," an instrument of government that works towards normalization of deviant actors (Rose, 1999).
In keeping with the reconceptualization of security as a complex endeavor of moral reformation, UN peacekeeping operations have relied upon an increasing number of actors, each performing different roles in the re-subjectification of deviant states into more orderly members of the "international community."Active participants in peace operations now include NGOs, other civil society entities and for-profit private firms in addition to traditional actors, such as states and international organizations.With the increasing complexity of peace building processes, cooperation has emerged as key to building peace as well as to making Europe safer.
This reconceptualization has been evidenced not only in broad strategic documents but also in operational ones, such as the 2008 UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations' peacekeeping manual (DPKO 2008).Here the UN claims for itself in that effort the broad task of regulating a wider array of actors now considered relevant to peacekeeping and peace building.In addition to creating a secure and stable socio-political and economic environment while promoting reconciliation and developing 'legitimate and effective institutions of governance,' the core functions of multidimensional peacekeeping operations now include providing, "a framework for ensuring that all United Nations and other international actors pursue their activities at the country-level in a coherent and coordinated manner" (Ibid, p. 23, emphasis added).Likewise the EU has put at the center of its Security Strategy the cooperation, support and financing of various non-governmental organizations and civil society actors.The EU's 2010 Stockholm program also highlighted cooperation with other actors as a key security strategy.
In summary, in the last decade a broad consensus emerged among international policy makers around a political rationality of intervention based on conceptualizations of insecurity as risk and on disciplinarity, implemented through a cluster of actors sharing this conceptualization, as a way of taming it.The process of pacification and Europeanization of Croatia well exemplifies this process.I argue below that the UN-monitored peace accord (the Erdut Agreement) as well the European Union's Standardization and Association Process constituted disciplinary projects aimed at pacifying Croatia and at normalizing its state institutions before admitting that nation as a EU candidate member.Both the UN and the EU defined the effective functioning of state institutions and local administrations as a key requirement of their strategy for peacekeeper withdrawal and for EU admission.The SAP sought to re-design Croatia's state administration via mechanisms of reward and punishment and it required performance assessments in a multitude of issue-areas, including measures of the well-being of the nation's population.The SAPaimed to reform Croatia's institutions and transform it from a potentially disorderly state into an orderly and "responsible" member of a community, able and willing to fulfill its obligations.

Normalizing Croatia by International Peace Agreements and Euro-Atlantic Integration (Note 7)
The process of Croatia's accession to the EU exemplifies both the redefinition of international security strategies along disciplinary trajectories and their dependence on the engagement of a cluster of actors that share a broad consensus on the nature of insecurity and an array of normalizing techniques aimed at addressing it.I turn next to explore these specific efforts to pacify and Europeanize Croatia, from the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia (UNTAES) to the formal admission of Croatia as a candidate to the European Union.
The United Nations in 1995 brokered a peace accord in Croatia, known as the Erdut agreement (Note 8) that, taken together with its annexes, set the framework for international efforts to normalize, discipline and otherwise oversee the nation government's practices as they emerged from years of war and set expectations for the Croatian government's long-term conduct as well,.The central organizing idiom of the UNTAES mandate, as outlined in the Agreement was "respect for human rights."The UN carried out the territorial integration of Eastern Slavonia in exchange for respect for the rights of the Serb minority residing there.Erdut elicited the Croatian government's active engagement in these changes under the continuous tutorship, examination and assistance of a cluster of international organizations.It also institutionalized ongoing scrutiny of the state's actions and activities by establishing a diplomatic body for monitoring its performance, the Article 11 Commission, composed of Ambassadors of willing European countries, in addition to EU representatives.
As noted above, disciplinarity demands the active engagement of its subjects in the process of their transformation against defined benchmarks and goals.The UN continued to take steps to secure Croatia's normalization even after its formal withdrawal, testifying to the enduring character of the disciplinary strategies adopted by international peacekeepers and peace builders.In a letter to the President of the Security Council (known as a "Letter of Intent"), attached as an annex to the Erdut Agreement, the Croatian government committed to respect the conditions stipulated there, defined in detail the benchmarks to be achieved, and submitted the process of transformation of its institutional arrangements to continuing international scrutiny (United Nations Security Council, S/1997/27, annex).In his final report on UNTAES the United Nations Secretary-General, while recommending the withdrawal of peacekeeping forces from Croatia, also indicated that the process of normalization that began during the United Nations Transitional Administration represented only the first step in a long-term transition that required, in addition to Croatia's commitment, the continuing joint effort of international actors in steering that nation's performance and monitoring it through a variety of means.The Secretary-General emphasized that international agencies should continue to help guide the Croatian government as it set priorities, including addressing far-reaching administrative reforms addressing a welter of concerns and social/governmental processes social welfare, education, refugee return and resettlement and local government policies (Note 9).
The process of normalization of Croatia through international disciplinary mechanisms did indeed continue following withdrawal of the Blue Helmets.The United Nations continued directly to monitor implementation of the Erdut agreement in Croatia through its Liaison Office in Zagreb until June 2003.The United Nations included minority rights, refugee return and reintegration and property rights, and judiciary system reforms in the mandates assigned to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and to the Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).Those calls made it clear, too, that each UN body was to cooperate in pursuing its activities with a number of local and international NGOs.Meanwhile, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also reported on the Croatian government's compliance with the human rights provisions of the Erdut Agreement.All of these entities actively monitored the Croatia's efforts and continuously promoted its normalization.
After the United Nations Liaison Office ceased operations in June 2003, the EU took the lead in continuing the pacifying and normalizing process for Croatia by using the nation's candidacy for membership to provide incentives for continued compliance with international goals.In doing so, the Union operated in concert with other organizations, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO, the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission as well as an array of NGOs.This cluster of actors used a carefully modulated mix of instruments, including legal advisories, monitoring the candidate nation's implementation of national and international law, mediating among social constituencies within the country, offering assistance to minorities seeking to repossess property expropriated during the war and promoting a pluralistic media system.Specifically, the EU deployed modulated inclusion/exclusion tactics in order to encourage compliance with benchmarks established in concert with its partner organizations.The EU organized the SAP process governing the accession of South Eastern European Countries as a disciplinary project (Note 10).The Union provided South Eastern European countries with incentives for reform by offering a, "credible prospect for membership once the relevant conditions have been met" (European Union, The EU Actions in support to the Stabilization and Association Process, undated).In order to be admitted, each "potential candidate" has had to undergo periodic scrutiny concerning its progress toward established benchmarks: "Effective implementation of the Stabilization and Association Agreements is a prerequisite for any further assessment by the EU of the country's prospects of accession" (European Union, The EU Actions in support to the Stabilization and Association Process, undated).
As a disciplinary project, the SAP aims to attain standardized results through individualized methods.The transformation of each candidate nation from abnormality to normality and from "deviance" to "responsibility" is at once an individualizing and a standardizing process, in which each prospective member country's performance is compared with others' and assessed according to similar benchmarks applied to all.On the one hand, each country must, "achieve the adoption of European standards."In this regard, "the destination for all countries is expected to be the same: the full realization of association after a transitional period through implementation of the same core obligations" (European Union, The EU Actions in support to the Stabilization and Association Process, undated).On the other hand, each Stabilization and Association Agreement is signed individually and, "tailored to the circumstance of each country."The EU has played a role similar to that of a tutor, a trainer or a psychologist as it has guided Southeastern Europe's nations to normality: "the EU will work with each country to bring them closer to the standards which apply to the EU" (European Union, The EU Actions in support to the Stabilization and Association Process, undated).As with any personalized training or program, the "Stabilization and Association process is … designed to be a flexible and dynamic process, evolving in line with changes in the region, the EU and the world" (European Union, The EU Actions in support to the Stabilization and Association Process, undated).
Democracy and respect for minorities constituted, together with economic criteria and adherence to European political, monetary and administrative standards, the Union benchmarks set for Croatia's admission into Europe.
As the European Commission noted in a 2004 update, Specifically, these [yardstick] criteria are: Stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities; the existence of a functioning market economy, as well as the ability to cope with competitive pressures and market forces within the Union; the ability to take on the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union (Commission of the European Communities, 2004).
In expressing its positive view concerning Croatia's proposed accession to EU candidacy, the Commission emphasized that the nation's democratic institutions were "stable," that they "function(ed) properly" and that the 2002 and 2003 elections were "free and fair."While acknowledging that fundamental rights were by and large respected, the Commission also observed that more must be done to ensure Serb minority rights, to implement judicial reforms and laws improving the performance of governmental institutions.With regard to its evaluative economic criteria, the Commission indicated that Croatia had developed a functioning market economy.However, it recommended reforms aimed at standardizing the nation's responses to an array of issues still characterized by legal and administrative confusion.These included as key priorities, establishing a comprehensive property record system, clarifying administrative functions, unifying systems for taxation and improving judicial performance.As the Commission noted, the extension of consistent, clear and continuous mechanisms of government is not only the main foundation for the "good governance" of each single state seeking membership, but also a pre-condition for accession to other supra-national structures.Normalized states need stable legal processes and unified administrative mechanisms in order to become legible, visible and governable internally, as well as the subjects of international institutions' scrutiny.The Commission therefore considered governability through standardized administrative processes and unified systems a key element in Croatia's capacity to fulfill EU requirements successfully.
To monitor Croatia's efforts to address these imperatives, which its members saw as critical to normalization, the Commission intensified its use of surveillance mechanisms, emphasizing as it did so that: To assist Croatia in the preparation of accession negotiations, a comprehensive screening exercise would need to be undertaken…This Opinion is accompanied by a draft European Partnership for Croatia which identifies the priorities which it needs to address in preparing for accession.The Commission will report regularly to the Council on the progress made by Croatia on its preparation for EU membership (Commission of the European Communities, 2004, 20).
The process by which Croatia sought association with NATO was quite similar to that adopted by the European Union, including the Trans-Atlantic organization's insistence on mandated performance benchmarks and intensive and ongoing monitoring of the nation's change efforts.The specific tools NATO employed are by now familiar: standardization and individualization, advice and counseling, periodic examination of implementation progress, and the invocation of specific mechanisms of reward and punishment.The NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), "is a NATO program of advice, assistance and practical support tailored to the individual needs of countries wishing to join the Alliance" (NATO, undated).For Croatia, as for all nations seeking membership, the MAP included a broad range of actions and activities to which the nation had voluntarily to subject itself: The MAP's main features are the submission by aspiring members of individual annual national programmes on their preparations for possible future membership, covering political, economic, defence, resource, security and legal aspects; a focused and candid feedback mechanism on aspirant countries' progress on their programmes that includes both political and technical advice, as well as annual meetings between all NATO members and individual aspirants at the level of the North Atlantic Council to assess progress; and a defence planning approach for aspirants which includes elaboration and review of agreed planning targets.(NATO, undated.) NATO members formally assess progress toward established MAP benchmarks for individual aspirants in the annual meetings of the group's North Atlantic Council, but counseling and training toward goal attainment is continuous: "Throughout the year, meetings and workshops with NATO civilian and military experts in various fields allow for discussion of the progress report on activities under the MAP" (NATO, undated).

Conclusions
The reconceptualization of insecurity as risk, the refocusing of the rationale for international intervention from the preservation of state's borders to protecting people and the identification of major sources of threats in weak, rather than mainly in strong, states, has led international organizations and Western bi-lateral actors alike to reconsider the instruments and tools to carry out peacekeeping and peace building operations.This article has argued that international security discourses now frame taming risk and vulnerability as the result of processes aimed at reforming potential sources of threat by means of disciplinary techniques, carried out by "security clusters."In particular, I have suggested that the case of Croatia demonstrates that state building through disciplinary processes aimed at transforming potentially "dangerous" and unpredictable actors is key to the concepts of security underpinning European Union, UN, and NATO guidelines for peacekeeping and peace building operations.
International control of potentially disorderly actors relies increasingly on knowledge intensive processes to monitor, steer and reform "rogue" states to a new status of civilized members of international organizations and supra national institutions.Creation of unified and standardized systems for data collection concerning compliance, proliferation of supra-national reporting and auditing mechanisms, the inclusion/exclusion of such nations from international organizations, direct international organization engagement with reform of administrative systems and state institutions as well as increasing UN and other international organization concern with population protection, testify to this marked shift in the political rationality for international intervention.
Croatia signed the European Union's Stabilization and Association Agreement on 29 October 2001 and the nation submitted its formal application for membership to the European Union on 21 February 2003.The European Commission issued a positive opinion on Croatia's application in April 2004 (Commission of the European Communities, 2004).In December 2004 the European Council endorsed that view and Croatia became a full candidate for EU membership in October 2005.Croatia is scheduled to attain full membership in July 2013.The conditions for Croatia's association with the European Union stipulated in the Stabilization and Association Process (Commission of the European Communities, 2002) continued and intensified the processes of normalization set in place by UNTAES.The SAP included multiple benchmarks tied to progress concerning respect for human rights and democracy and continued liberalization of the Croatian economy.The Association process also emphasized the continuity between procedures of pacification and normalization: "[The SAP] underpin[s] the implementation of the Dayton/Paris and Erdut agreements and bring[s] basic stability and prosperity to the region" (Commission of the European Communities, 2002).