– Abstract
Western powers, known as high income countries by the OECD, have been led to diversify their commitments in peace operations, a better expression than peacekeeping operations, since peacekeeping operations today don’t correspond to all the operations related to peace in a collective security prospect. Western countries are thus in the front line in multinational operations and remain strongly present in the UN environment. But they don’t play anymore directly such a great part in UN peacekeeping as they used to do during several periods of 20th century. Lebanon and UNIFIL II gave an opportunity to some of them, especially European countries, to come back to UN operations, but according to their own terms. This “comeback” does not seem to be the case in Darfur any longer and Europeans, except the United Kingdom, seem to prefer participating to United Nations operations trough the European Union: by proxy, in a way.
