Year LXVI, 2024, Single Issue, Page 38
European defence*
VINCENZO CAMPORINI
The dream of building a European defence has long roots. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 18 April 1951), established between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, was the first concrete expression of the realisation that Europe needed a structural solution if it was to eliminate the risk of a resurgence of the tensions that had culminated in two catastrophic world wars. The ECSC was proposed by Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi as a means of ensuring joint management of coal and steel resources, key elements for the development of military capabilities. The aim was to create a common market for this industrial sector, eliminating all national measures that limited or artificially boosted production and trade, while also allowing the development of free competition within these six countries’ territories: a true supranational structure to which the participating countries transferred elements of national sovereignty within the sector.
The project actually reflected a vision of progressive integration in a federal direction whose immediate next step could only be the pooling of military capabilities, within a framework shaped by the debate on German rearmament, which had naturally arisen as an effect of the rapidly evolving strategic picture, characterised by the outbreak of the Korean War, the war in Indo-China, the presence of the Soviet threat in Europe following the start of the Cold War, and the blockade of Berlin. The European Defence Community (EDC) plan, devised by Monnet but presented by French prime minister Pleven, from whom it took its name, aimed to reconcile all the different political and strategic needs, within an institutional framework of progressive surrender of elements of national sovereignty. The resulting treaty, laboriously drafted, envisaged a military force made up of 40 ground divisions and all the air forces of the signatory countries, to be placed under an operational command created by NATO. The subsequent ratification process, started in the respective parliaments, was completed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg. In Italy, on the other hand, De Gasperi assumed a wait-and-see stance pending developments in France, where a strange alliance between Gaullists and Communists eventually led to rejection of the treaty, putting an end to the whole EDC project.[2]
The initiative was therefore shelved. But leaving aside the contingent political reasons for this, however decisive, it is worth underlining that the affair illustrated how illusory it is, in the total absence of a common foreign policy, to suggest the creation of community institutions and structures in the field of security and defence.
This is actually a very dangerous illusion and, as we will see, a recurring temptation. Even today, ideas are proposed that, while seemingly generous in outlook, in reality amount to efforts to build complex constructions on foundations set in sand, and as such are really only wishful thinking.
However, the need to keep alive, formally at least, the idea of a European initiative in the field of security was certainly not abandoned following the French National Assembly’s failure to ratify the European Defence Community treaty and the collapse of the EDC project. The very next month, in London, the signatory countries of the Brussels Pact (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) met in London with Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), Canada and the United States, and agreed to transform the Western Union into the Western European Union (WEU), inviting Italy and the FRG to sign a modified version of the Brussels Treaty and become members of it.
The real value of the WEU has always been political-formal, rather than military, and throughout its history it has played an important role as a link between the Euro-Atlantic institutions and those of the countries belonging to the European Common Market, which became the European Community.
The fertile soil laid down by the WEU proved ideal in 1992, a crucial period in which the world was metabolising the end of the Cold War and the dissolution first of the Warsaw Pact and then of the Soviet Union. The occasion of interest was the periodic meeting of Europe’s foreign affairs and defence ministers, that year held on June 19 in Petersberg. The meeting’s long and detailed concluding statement set out a precise course of action that was intended to turn the WEU into a political-military arm of the European Union (a huge challenge on a formal level, given the macroscopic differences between the countries belonging to the two organisations) with a view to strengthening the European pillar of NATO.[3]
The new factor present at this point, which, moreover, is what had allowed the abovementioned ideas to evolve, was the member states’ declared willingness to make some of their military resources available, under the WEU flag, for operations outside the traditional framework of the military support that had to be provided in the event of an armed attack from outside the union or alliance (Articles V and 5, respectively, of the WEU and NATO founding treaties).
This is the background to the definitions of the ‘Petersberg tasks’, as they have since been known and cited in all international forums. Rarely has a diplomatic statement been couched in terms that allowed it to enjoy such popularity and success, an outcome that can be attributed to the singular balance between the innovative spirit and deliberate ambiguity of the definitions it contains. Any careful analysis of it can only to lead to the conclusion that virtually all military operations (i.e., with the sole exception of open warfare between comparable powers in the event of degeneration of a cold war-type conflict) can be interpreted as falling within the scope of the Petersberg tasks. In this regard it is enlightening to note that some analysts, whose arguments are not without merit, also see the First Gulf War as falling within this scope, given that it involved the employment of combat forces in order to restore the conditions of peace that existed prior to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi troops.
The fact that this was, in any case, a period of reflection that saw NATO itself needing to re-establish its own raison d’être, through a necessary redefinition of the transatlantic relationship, somehow explains, but certainly does not justify, the caution with which Washington viewed the hypothesis of a European Union equipped with its own autonomous military capacity.
This brings us up to the Franco-British summit held in Saint-Malo on 3 and 4 December 1998. Looking back, the development, between autumn 1998 and June 2000, of a common European security and defence policy can rightly be considered revolutionary, especially given the very slow progress, not to say immobility, that had characterised the preceding decades. And if this advance is indeed to be framed in revolutionary terms, it seems important to look for an event that might be said to have set the whole process in motion.
With regard to the issues of security and defence, the Saint-Malo summit was the culmination of conceptual and political developments that had unfolded during the preceding months, which had seen the British government literally reversing its traditional stance on the EU’s role in the field of defence.
The CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) was one of three topics explicitly addressed at the summit, where Tony Blair set out the new stance of the British government, which, for the first time, appeared eager to inject fresh and strong impetus into efforts to develop the then non-existent military capabilities of the Union as such.
This reversal of traditional British policy has to be set within the historical context in which it came about. It coincided with the crucial phase of the Kosovo crisis, which had followed in the wake of the other great Balkan tragedy of recent times, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Together, these events had laid bare the fundamental inability of the United Nations to end civil wars fuelled by ethnic and religious hatred. The greatest humiliation, however, was reserved for Europe per se, which had shown itself to be militarily impotent. Milosevic, as well as being certain of the lack of political cohesion within the Union, was also reassured by the technical-military impossibility, due to the lack of the minimum necessary resources, of the European countries launching an operation with any reasonable chance of success. Added to that was the weakness of any support for such a move within European public opinion.
As the EU’s impotence was thus dramatically and completely exposed, Washington remained firmly reluctant to be drawn into what was seen as yet another internal European conflict. For many months, the European powers did everything they could to prevent the explosion of a crisis that had been a full decade in the making, while the US deliberately ignored all attempts to involve it, directly or indirectly. In this situation, the only operationally valid military instrument, capable of exerting sufficient political pressure and credible deterrence, was NATO, and its involvement would in itself have automatically led to US engagement.
Support for the idea of a creating an EU military capacity for interventions that might be deemed necessary, but for which involvement of the Atlantic Alliance as such was not considered appropriate, thus grew in London. The importance and the significance of the Franco-British joint declaration in Saint-Malo stem from these two countries’ traditional political stances: the United Kingdom, a defender and guarantor of Atlantic orthodoxy, and France always a champion of efforts to secure substantial autonomy and independence of Europe from any conditioning linked to its relationship with the USA. The political convergence between London and Paris on the subject of European military capabilities therefore paved the way for concrete and radical developments.
Three days after Saint-Malo, the Financial Times published an article by Madeleine Albright[4] in which the then US secretary of state welcomed the idea of European countries playing a more decisive and effective role in crisis management, especially ‘in Europe’s backyard’, even though this obviously had to be in strict compliance with the Atlantic framework and orthodoxy.
The importance of the article lies in her clear and explicit setting out of the three principles that the United States wanted to see respected in any new developments in European military capabilities, in other words now famous ‘Three Ds’ to be avoided.
First of all, it was necessary to avoid any risk of ‘decoupling’: the EU’s capabilities should not lead to a loosening of the Atlantic bond, of which NATO was both the concrete and symbolic expression.
The second ‘D’ to be avoided was ‘duplication’: energy should not be wasted in conducting planning processes also at EU level and in the creation of autonomous command structures.
The third principle was to avoid ‘discrimination’ against non-EU members of NATO (she was likely thinking of Turkey in particular).
At this point, then, the machine had been set in motion and on 28 May, 1999, an informal meeting of EU defence ministers was held in Bonn, at the initiative of the German presidency.
During a break in the proceedings, a member of the German delegation, undersecretary Walther Stützle, approached the representatives of France, Italy and the United Kingdom, and proposed a four-way meeting to be held, again in Bonn, at the beginning of July, with the aim of examining the CESDP issue in a narrower and more technical context, and arriving at the formulation of concrete proposals.
In Rome the idea was welcomed, even though this reaction went against the principle (often supported for purely theoretical reasons or for the sake of appearances) that any form of directorate should be opposed. Thus, on 12 July, 1999, Marc Perrin de Brichambaut (France), Walther Stützle (Germany), Richard Hatfield (the UK) and I (Italy) met in Bonn. Our aim, as the Informal Initiative Group, was to prepare, by the end of the Finnish presidency, a document that would clearly and unequivocally outline the steps to be taken in order to give the EU a true operational capacity, according to and within the limits of the politically defined criteria then in place.
A plan was quickly agreed to prepare a document, which would then be informally presented to the Finnish presidency to be — it was hoped — endorsed and submitted to the European Council for approval.
Italy meanwhile prepared a document that, starting from convergence criteria for military capabilities, along the lines of what was done ahead of the creation of the single currency, defined more strictly operational aspects.
The Informal Initiative Group’s eventual document, known as the Helsinki Headline Goal (HHG), described in qualitative and quantitative terms the proposed military capability, divided into air, land and sea segments, and set the necessary deadlines for its creation. It was approved at the Helsinki European Council meeting of 10 and 11 December, 1999. In a nutshell, the Union pledged to be capable, by the end of 2003, of deploying, and then sustaining for at least a year, a corps-level military force (60,000 troops) capable of conducting even the most demanding ‘Petersberg tasks’ in areas close to the borders of its member states; and to establish, initially on an interim basis, a series of political and strategic management bodies, namely, the Political and Security Committee (PSC), similar to NATO’s Atlantic Council, the European Union Military Committee (EUMC) and the European Union Military Staff (EUMS).
The CFSP/CESDP’s journey had begun.
After initial enthusiasm — at the October 2000 pledging conference in Brussels, the participating countries made available three times the resources requested — there began to emerge difficulties that would gradually void the initiative of its potential. Without going into details, all the limits of the intergovernmental method made themselves felt. Indeed, even though a rational and potentially effective military instrument had been designed, there was no basis for a truly common foreign policy (shared by all member states) whose implementation might require the use of military force. It was the same unsolved problem that Spinelli had already highlighted in a 1951 memorandum in which he clearly showed that only an evolution in a federal direction would allow the project to be concretely realised — an evolution that did not come, and today still seems to be a distant objective.[5]
So, what are we left with now? The current institutional framework sees the political level represented by the PSC (composed of ambassadorial-level representatives from all the EU member states) whose members report to the respective members of COREPER (Committee of the Permanent Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to the European Union); COREPER in turn reports to the Council, in its various expressions. From this alone, it is easy to see that we are faced with a slow decision-making chain, hampered by the inevitable constraint of unanimity.
From an operational point of view, with the HHG shelved and the EU Battlegroups on the back burner (since reaching operational capacity in 2007, the Battlegroups have remained in standby mode), High Representative Borrell’s Strategic Compass currently envisages a rapid intervention force of 5000 (five thousand!!) military personnel, which is 20 per cent smaller than the city of Rome’s traffic police force!
Once the essential need for more than just occasional political convergence is acknowledged, there arises the technical issue of identifying a planning and command structure able to manage the military resources made available by the individual member states: a pragmatic and politically sound effort to solve this problem was the introduction of the so-called Berlin Plus arrangements, under which, in the event of military operations by the Union, NATO agrees to make available its Supreme Command in Mons, known by the acronym SHAPE, something that has occurred on several occasions in the Balkans. Another option is to assign the task to the national operational command of one of the member states involved (a framework nation): this approach, too, has been used in various circumstances.
The creation of a European SHAPE, on the other hand, quite apart from violating the principle of ‘non-duplication’, would incur excessively high costs, especially staffing ones: the only development in this direction has been the establishment of the MPCC[6] (Military Planning and Conduct Capability) for the management of ‘non-executive’ missions, i.e., non-combat ones tasked with training the armed forces and providing consultancy.
Having looked briefly at two unavoidable problems, namely the need for a convergence of foreign policies and thus a single political direction, and the need for an operational headquarters, to be given responsibility for planning and command roles, we must also consider a third formidable obstacle to the creation of an effective military capacity for the Union as such, i.e., the heterogeneity of the equipment at the disposal of the individual national units required to co-operate with each other.
The roots of this question, which has different aspects and consequences, go right to the heart of the concept of sovereignty: when the rules of the European common market were defined, an exception was envisaged, relating to supplies deemed necessary for national security. Invoking it allowed countries to procure resources individually. This exception is still in force under Art. 346 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union;[7] intended to safeguard a principle of technological sovereignty, it has had the effect of allowing, indeed encouraging, the fragmentation of industrial capabilities in the defence sector, resulting in the proliferation of different, sometimes incompatible, types of weapons systems and equipment. Thus, in Europe today there are at least six different types of MBT (main battle tank), 18 types of armoured vehicle, and three types of 4th generation combat aircraft: this multiplies the relative development and production costs and excludes economies of scale; in short, the return on the military investment expenditure of European countries is a fraction of what it could be, were they to implement integrated development and procurement programmes. And there are other, perhaps even more serious, negative aspects to consider: in terms of logistical support, each country has to service its own specific equipment, a situation that, in the event of international operations, multiplies the necessary logistical chains and therefore dramatically increases the organisational complexity and associated costs. But more serious still are the strictly operational consequences, with contingents of different nationalities working side by side (as we saw in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Lebanon) yet unable to support each other, except for providing fuel and sometimes (but not always) ammunition.
All this stems from the governments’ strenuous efforts to defend the so-called national champions, which they engage in with the aims of protecting their supposed technological sovereignty and safeguarding jobs in the defence sector.
To overcome the above-outlined negative consequences, it was decided the go down the route of multinational cooperation on specific weapon systems: an emblematic case was the MRCA (multirole combat aircraft) programme launched by Germany, Great Britain and Italy, which led to the development and production of Tornado aircraft. While there could be no faulting the intentions behind this choice, the reality is that over the years each country has made specific modifications, for questionable national needs, but often simply to favour local producers of subsystems and equipment, and as a result the necessary logistical commonality and interoperability have been lost along the way.
Another telling case, this time in the naval field, is the collaboration between France and Italy for the development and production of common European multipurpose frigates. Indeed, the FREMM programme has resulted in French vessels with a displacement of 6000 tonnes compared with the 6900 of the Italian frigates, which are also 2.60 metres longer. Not even the hulls are the same!
And yet this is the only possible way forward — ever closer collaboration between national companies, with rigorous controls on deviations. It is an approach that the Commission should adequately incentivise, authoritatively underlining that this approach does not put jobs at risk, but simply amounts to a radical reorganisation of production processes, making it possible to move from a system in which everyone expects to be able to do everything, to one characterised by increasingly advanced forms of specialisation, where the specific technological excellence of each member state is exalted for the benefit of all. It is a process that must be consciously guided and also supported by EU funding that has more than just symbolic value, which unfortunately is all that can be said of the European Defence Fund (EDF).
The EDF was created in 2017 to stimulate industrial cooperation in the field of defence, through co-financing mechanisms. In short, if three or more countries agree to develop a common system, the Union contributes to the costs. Unfortunately, such a mechanism, to be effective, must be sufficiently attractive and have adequate funds. Instead, the amount finally allocated to the EDF in the 2021–2027 budget, starting from an initial proposal of 13 billion euros, was 8 billion, or just over 1 billion per year, against total defence expenditure (the sum of the national defence budgets) of around 280 billion per year.
Another case in point is the EUROMALE programme, for a European medium altitude long-endurance drone, the first example of which, developed and produced in cooperation between France, Germany, Italy and Spain, is due to take to the skies in 2027. The programme is expected to cost 7 billion euros and has received a contribution from the Commission of around 100 million!
Clearly, here too there is a lack of political will on the part of the governments, whose short-sighted selfishness makes it impossible to achieve adequate technological developments at sustainable costs. Perversely, this only favours the competitiveness of non-EU products, which member states are thus induced to buy, as Poland, for example, is doing on a considerable scale.
In conclusion, here, in a few brief sentences, are the points I am trying to get across.
— It makes no sense to talk about European defence without first having in place a political agreement that, if not federal in outlook, at least represents a formal sharing of key aspects of foreign policy.
— Shared military capabilities require a planning and command structure which can be vested with operational authority: the Berlin Plus solution is a valid option, alongside others, all of which are nevertheless very costly.
— The concept of interoperability must be pursued without hesitation, aiming for the greatest possible standardisation of equipment.
— The progressive integration of the national defence industries must be a strategic objective, if we are to achieve an adequate level of technology and the necessary economies of scale.
All this demands the political will of a visionary leadership. The question is, will we see this emerge?
[*] Translation of a speech given at the 43rd Federalist Training Seminar and the 40th International Seminar on Federalism organised in Ventotene, from 1 to 6 September 2024, by the Istituto Spinelli in collaboration with the Municipality of Ventotene, the Province of Latina, the European Federalist Movement (MFE), the European Union of Federalists (UEF), the youth groups Gioventù federalista europea (GFE) and Jeunesse Fédéraliste Européene (JEF), and the World Federalist Movement (WFM).
[2] For a detailed account of this complex story, see the entry Comunità europea di Difesa, in Dizionario dell’integrazione europea, https://www.dizie.eu/dizionario/comunita-europea-di-difesa/.
[3] https://www.cvce.eu/obj/petersberg_dechttps://www.cvce.eu/obj/petersberg_declaration_made_by_the_weu_council_of_ministers_bonn_19_june_1992-en-16938094-bb79-41ff-951c-f6c7aae8a97a.htmllaration_made_by_the_weu_council_of_ministers_bonn_19_june_1992-en-16938094-bb79-41ff-951c-f6c7aae8a97a.html.
[4] The Right Balance Will Secure NATO’s Future, Financial Times, 7 December, 1998, https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep06989.8?seq=1.
[5] M. Marchesiello, Per una politica di difesa europea. La CED: un’occasione mancata, Corriere della Sera, 6 June 2022, https://www.micromega.net/comunita-europea-di-difesa, G. Salpietro, L’attualità della CED, Il Federalista, 56 n.3 (2014), https://www.thefederalist.eu/site/index.php/it/note/1506-lattualita-della-ced.
[6] The Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC), https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/military-planning-and-conduct-capability-mpcc_en.
[7] ‘Any Member State may take such measures as it considers necessary for the protection of the essential interests of its security which are connected with the production of or trade in arms, munitions and war material’.
