EU Referendum


European defence: a distant aspiration


10/03/2015



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Not since the year 2000 has a Commission President so openly committed to a European Army. That was the year of Romano Prodi's famous, "If you don't want to call it a European army, don't call it a European army. You can call it 'Margaret', you can call it 'Mary Ann', you can find any name …".

But now, almost exactly 15 years later, we have Mr Juncker telling us that the European Union needs its own army to help address the problem that it is not "taken entirely seriously" as an international force.

This came in an interview for Welt am Sonntag when the Commission President declared, "Such an army would help us to build a common foreign and security policy and jointly assume the responsibilities of Europe in the world".

With its own army, Juncker went on to say, Europe could react credibly to a threat to peace in a Member State or in a neighbouring EU country. And it could send a message to Russia, "that we are serious about upholding the values of the European Union".

Support for this came from a senior CDU MP, Norbert Röttgen, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag. But although he declares, "A joint Army is a European vision whose time has come", his argument is partly economic.

The Europeans are spending enormous sums of money for their military, he says, but their military capabilities remain inadequate compared to Russia. And that problem, he believes, will remain as long as we maintain small national small armies who duplicate the effort on a small scale.

Röttgen then goes on to say that the army "as an expression of nationhood" had survived as an idea and politically. In the interests of European security, which is violated by the hegemonic policy of Russia, he says, "this anachronism had to be overcome".

However, the question remains as to why Mr Juncker should bring up this subject of European defence at this particular point – although it has to be said that his comments were part of a wide-ranging interview which covered a great deal of ground.

In that context, what Juncker was doing was largely restating his political guidelines for his new Commission, delivered in July last year. But, in the wake of the recent appointment of Michel Barnier as Special Adviser on European Defence and Security Policy, and a report from Javier Solana, former EU High Representative and Nato Secretary General, recommending a new European security strategy, with a "political and military ability to conduct autonomous intervention operations outside the borders of Europe", the Commission President evidently felt it was time to make a public statement.

The reasoning is further elaborated by Hans-Peter Bartels (SPD), Chairman of the Defence Committee of the Bundestag, who worked on Solana's paper. "The past ten years have seen little added to Europe's defence [project]", he says. "It needs a boost".

And that focus on ten years is extremely interesting. That many years ago, in 2005, I wrote for the CPS a pamphlet called, "Wrong Side of the Hill", pointing out how a number of common defence procurement projects were all pointing to greater European defence integration.

Since then, reality has intruded, with the different armies having to meet the demands of their specific operations, to the extent now that the militaries of the main European nations are, if anything, more divergent than they were ten years ago.

The gap then widened at the end of last year, with the announcement of the French military re-equipment programme, which seems to owe nothing to European doctrines nor serves to equip the French Army for European theatre operations, as might be expected if, as Juncker wants, the European Army is to focus on Ukraine and Russia.

Interestingly, last year saw the sixtieth anniversary of an event on 30 August 1954, when the French national assembly voted to prevented the creation of the European Defence Union, which would have led then to the creation of a European Army.

Then as now, this highlighted the singular fact that, without direct French involvement, European military ambitions cannot be realised. And with no sign of any French enthusiasm for the project, it would seem that Juncker's rhetoric is no more substantial that that of his predecessor, Romano Prodi, and will deliver little if anything more.

As we see with the anticipated cuts in the British Army, there is little appetite for military adventures, and with the Germans also cutting their defence budget, the Europeans may still be waiting for their army in another sixty years