Year LXVI, 2024, Single Issue, Page 68
THE TECHNICAL IMPLICATIONS OF A EUROPEAN DEFENCE*
Introduction: Parallels With the 1950s.
Recent international tensions, and the spiral of anarchy now shaping relations between states, have made it necessary to resume the debate on a common European defence. The historical window of opportunity that opened a decade ago with the Russian Federation’s occupation of Crimea and Donbas (a window we are already at risk of missing) has thrown us into a situation similar to that which arose in the 1950s, the decade that saw a serious attempt to create a community defence system. Although drawing analogies between two historical periods often leads to de-contextualisation and temporal bias, there can nevertheless be no denying the simultaneous presence of three factors common to both of the periods mentioned here.
First, the presence of a leader on the other side of the curtain whom we cannot trust: first Stalin, now Putin.
Second, the unfolding of a conflict (then the Korean War, now the Russo-Ukrainian War) that is showing us just how dangerous the other side is, and generating fears that it may spread endemically to the continent.
Finally, a chronic sense of insecurity among the European political class over America’s commitment to defending the continent and the key issue of burden-sharing within NATO, something that US presidencies have always used as a political lever.
Together, Stalin’s death in the so-called Nearer Dacha in March 1953, the stalemate end to the Korean War in the July of that year, and the 1954 start of the Algerian War involving the French brought the project to build a European defence community to an abrupt end.
I outline this historical framework not as some futile stylistic exercise, an end in itself, but rather to make the point that the historical process of building a European defence community (and federation as a whole) cannot be set in a framework of historical inevitability, but must be likened, rather, to a functional phenomenon in constant evolution that, as such, needs us to act at the right time to ensure that it comes to fruition.
It is therefore essential that we do not allow the current opportunity, too, to escape us.
Historical contextualisation and recognition of the present juncture as a crucial opportunity to leverage are perhaps the easy part, because once we get down to the actual application of political choices made, other issues still needing to be resolved will come to the fore, presenting us with an extremely complex series of options.
In trying to bring order to the many ideas that revolve around the question of defence, it becomes clear that there are numerous fundamentally important political issues for which solutions still need to be found, or rather implemented, and just as many unsolved technical and practical problems. It is in fact possible to identify, at first glance, at least five key points needing to be addressed in this field.
The Construction of a Systemic Industrial Coordination Structure.
First of all, it must be clearly understood that building, and moreover implementing, a common European defence will be a long and complicated process. This is because, unlike states such as the Russian Federation and the United States of America, where the war industry was born and grew within an already interconnected system, and therefore had, from the very outset, a structure already rooted in cooperation between companies, with the central state regulating competition within public procurement, Europe has only recently seen the start of cooperation arrangements between companies in the various countries. Indeed, one of the first cooperation projects between European countries in the field of military production was the development of the Panavia Tornado in the second half of the 1970s. However, since such collaborations often follow market rules, it is not unusual to see the economic choices of companies (guided primarily by profit margins and not political visions) leading to mutual exclusions from research projects or unilateral withdrawals from development activities. Joint ventures between European suppliers of defence technology are to be welcomed, and they are initiatives that, in the absence of anything else, should be encouraged, but they are also severely limited in scope. An example of this is the recent collaboration signed between Italy’s Leonardo and Germany’s Rheinmetall, aimed at updating the Italian army’s armoured fleet: if a vehicle is developed following only Italian strategic and doctrinal lines, the effectiveness of this machine, however perfect it may be, will be limited to the specific objectives set by the Italian high command, and it therefore may not be suitable for use in other theatres or under different doctrines of war.
Certification and Rationalisation: the Need to Integrate.
This leads us directly on to the second critical point to be resolved, the certification of defence systems and the rationalisation of defence spending. It has become urgent to certify and completely overhaul the military infrastructures (weapons and means) of the European member states, in order to standardise equipment and procedures; here, too, there exist cooperation initiatives that are commendable, but limited in scope. European regulations exist, or are drawn up, even at micro-administrative level, with the aim of giving all members of the armed forces common guidelines on how to act during ground patrols, for example, or on the procedures to follow in emergency situations. But these instructions end up being hierarchically subordinate to the individual directives and regulations drawn up by the nation states, with the result that the European ones become a mere product of bureaucratic inflexibility, multiplying the rules unnecessarily and leading to considerable differences in the methods and behaviours adopted by the personnel on the ground.
Costs, Waste, Public Opinion.
Instead, when we examine the topic of how to rationalise defence spending, we come up against two interesting points, one a paradox and the other an instance of social reluctance.
The latter is the quickest to explain. It is, after all, no secret that European civil society, and therefore European politics, shows a strong and commendable resistance to the idea of military spending. Indeed, the antimilitarist sentiments still strong on the continent make defence, and the funding of it, a thorny topic.
The paradox, on the other hand, lies in the fact that despite this ideological aversion to spending on war, the budgets of the various EU member states’ defence ministries are not only enviably large (amounting to 200 billion euros in 2020), but have not stopped growing.
This suggests that objections raised over the cost of defence stem not so much from an ethical assessment of the issue, as from the pragmatic question of how well the money is spent. In short, are we talking about valid investments? Today, there can be no doubt that we need to invest in defence, but also that the costs could be greatly rationalised, given that, in this case too, many of the problems are linked to bureaucratic inflexibility and the need for standardisation of regulations.
To have an idea of the waste that exists and persists, one need only think of the considerable differences in terms of vehicle fleets between the various European armed forces: each of the continent’s ‘major’ players insists on researching and producing its own MBT (main battle tank) model; France, for example, has the Leclerc, Germany the Leopard series, and Italy the Ariete, and each of these needs specific logistical support, a crew trained to operate that particular machine, and an industrial sector able to build it. If we consider that this problem also applies to practically all the European countries and all micro and macro areas of defence, it is easy to see how there is ample room for improvement in cost management. Here, too, there have been positive developments from which to draw inspiration, for example NATO’s approval of a standardised calibre (5.56 mm) for the rifles supplied to the Alliance’s armed forces, but, as we have said, they amount to far too little.
Die Kaiserliche und Königliche Armee.[2]
The third point to be touched upon also concerns harmonisation, but in this case of a cultural nature.
The armed forces in Europe have often been, and are once again becoming, the last bastion of national identities in crisis, receptacles of nationalist views capable of strongly undermining cooperation between different units, and possibly of generating an ‘Austro-Hungarian’ effect within defence forces, liable in turn to undermine their cohesion and operational capabilities. For this reason, achieving cultural affiliation among the national components of a single European defence is one of the challenges that will have to be overcome.
The Federalists’ Possible Role.
Having attempted to highlight the key criticalities in the process of creating a European defence, we must now clarify what the European Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo, MFE) can do in this setting. We can effectively carry out our vanguard role by acting as a link between politics and industry. Being free of party ambitions, we cannot be politically held to ransom. This means that we can be the first to engage with the defence industry’s different sectors, involving them in a discussion aimed at helping politics understand the needs of a major economic sector, and companies the political need for a defence community, striving in this diplomatic endeavour to bring these two worlds together.
Should we shortsightedly focus on just one of these two aspects while neglecting the other, we would risk creating either nothing at all (which would be a political failure), or a giant with feet of clay (which would be a failure to implement the project).
* * *
There remain two further points to consider before drawing our conclusions.
NATO.
Let us start with the elephant in the room in any discussion on community defence, namely Europe’s relationship with NATO, and therefore with the United States.
The Atlantic Alliance must be a central pillar in the creation of a common defence system; it must serve as a guide for the construction of an integrated force, and can subsequently be an important support structure, by which point the specific weight, or importance, of the US would have to be greatly reduced and Europe, having regained its strategic and military autonomy, would need to be working to end America’s dominance of the European war industry, preferring locally produced systems, and to become more capable of acting freely even in strategically complex settings.
Structuring the Military.
The next question is: how should this common military be structured? On this point there is basic agreement in the federalist world and beyond, but with critical issues to beware of. I think the answer depends on the role the community defence system is designed to fulfil.
If the aim is to be able to use our force outside our continent, a prospect that Europe abandoned at the time of the Cold War, when it subcontracted the use of force to the Americans, at least for large-scale operations, then we will necessarily need a military force comparable, in terms of number of active personnel, to that of the US. That would mean adopting twentieth-century methods of structuring the military, with all the attendant costs, not only purely economic.
This is not a particularly convincing option, given that, alternatively, external use of force could be implemented through a reform of NATO’s operating mechanisms, without running the risk of improper use of military strength by European political forces — a risk that exists because the attitudes and choices of political forces are liable to vary greatly over time, which in turn means there is always the risk of a neo-colonial drift, or in any case of offensive (by definition improper) use of military force. Moreover, the advantages of transferring this role to NATO level could later be increased, if the future European constitution were to give rise to a military structure not designed for, and therefore incapable of, implementing power policies.
The second option (favoured by federalists and also the most practicable) is to create a relatively small, highly specialised task force capable, if supported by a massive force of reservists, of defending the continental territories; in agreement with the United Nations, this task force could also be deployed outside the continent, thus giving real weight to UN and resolving the long-standing issue of its ineffectiveness. However, this arrangement, which, as mentioned, enjoys broad consensus, nevertheless raises some questions.
The first, less critical one, similar to the issue of standardisation of the equipment used by Europe’s various armed forces, is: how would the reservists be equipped? There would need to be an upstream system for approving equipment and doctrines via a hierarchical process, starting from the tip of the pyramid and then moving down to the reservists. There is no reason why the weapon systems that would fall into disuse following a Europe-wide standardisation of equipment should not initially remain at the disposal of the various countries’ national guards. Subsequently, though, the equipment of the national guards would also need to be rationalised, which would effectively eliminate the national demand for weapon systems other than the common European ones. And this brings us back to the need to engage, in advance, with national suppliers of defence technology, who need to be made aware of the risk of losing this huge slice of the market.
The second question is linked to my earlier description of the armed forces as receptacles of European nationalisms, and it is this: should a country’s national guard be composed solely of citizens of that country? Or would it be more useful to mix the nationalities, along the lines of the old idea of building national identity through military service performed in places far from one’s native land?
Because while it may seem obvious that the national guard of a given country, Poland say, should be made up exclusively of, in this case, Polish citizens, such an arrangement creates the risk of nationalist drifts developing within the national guards, undermining the entire system.
Another possible solution, beyond mixing the various nationalities (which harks back to historical periods from which we Europeans can hardly draw inspiration), might be to place the national guards under the direct control of a centralised ministry rather than the individual states, although this would have the effect of increasing the rigidity of a system that by its very nature needs to be highly flexible and reactive.
Conclusions.
In conclusion, there remain other problematic aspects worth mentioning, such as the role of the United Kingdom, which still today develops and produces vehicles in collaboration with European companies (as in the case of the Tempest project, born of the collaboration between Leonardo and BAE Systems), which has a nuclear arsenal, and which sits on the UN Security Council, or the question of France’s nuclear strength. However, to avoid being inadvertently guilty of Eurocentrism, the aspect we should really focus on is the way the rest of the world will react to the creation of a European defence. Because, while it may seem to us a natural step on the road to federation, we have to realise that not everyone will see developments in this direction in the same light. Others may interpret the rearmament of the European continent, theatre and creator of two world wars and inevitably stained by its colonial history, as a new threat against which to defend themselves.
This fear could refuel the ‘security paradox’ that gripped the world during the Cold War and has been ominously re-emerging in recent times.
Edoardo Pecene
[*] Reworking of the speech at the national meeting of the Debate Bureau of the European Federalist Movement held in Cagliari on 19-20 October 2024 on the theme European Union: a laboratory for achieving Unity in diversity.
[2] This was the name given to the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
