Guy Verhofstadt is a former MEP and president of European Movement International. Domènec Ruiz Devesa is a former MEP and president of the Union of European Federalists.
Every cloud has a silver lining. And as Europe is finally faced with the opportunity to build a real European Defence Union amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s disruptive return, this could not be more true.
Despite several achievements in the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy throughout the years — including the deployment of no less than 40 missions and operations for crisis management and peacekeeping around the world — the bloc has continued to rely on the security umbrella provided by NATO and the U.S. for its territorial defense.
There were good reasons for this. After all, NATO’s mission is the collective security of the Euro-Atlantic area and most of the bloc’s member countries are also part of the alliance. Therefore, many considered the EU becoming a major security provider to be an unnecessary duplication, if not a possible cause of dangerous confusion in the line of command in the event of an attack.
However, it’s also true that the Treaty of the EU provides for the establishment of common defense (however undefined) and for mutual assistance among member countries in the event of aggression. Moreover, for Europe, NATO has, to a large extent, meant a political and defense-industrial dependence on Washington.
Be that as it may, it’s clear that current circumstances — including what happened in the run-up to and during the Munich Security Conference — are forcing Europe to “grow up” when it comes to its own security and defense. But what should the EU be doing to build its own defense union?
The U.S. had already shifted its focus away from Europe and toward the Indo-Pacific under former U.S. President Barack Obama. The Washington establishment, both Democrat and Republican, is united in seeing China, not Russia, as its direct strategic rival — even after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine. Arguably, even Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden’s support for the country could have been stronger, faster and more consistent.
Now add to that a president who is possibly willing to force a bad cease-fire, which would have terrible consequences for Europe’s security, and is also a NATO-skeptic, going so far as to threaten abandoning allies who “do not pay” — not to mention his expansionist aims over other NATO members like Canada and Denmark.
For Europe’s part, there is, of course, the temptation to only focus on things like joint weapons production or on exempting defense expenditures from the Stability and Growth Pact — as was the case with the latest informal EUCO. This makes sense. Surely, the EU must get its capabilities and defense-industrial base right, and as defense expenditures rise to unprecedented levels, we need to be spending better, together and European.
As it stands, EU member countries spend about one-third of what the U.S. does on defense, but Europe has about 10 percent of America’s capabilities. Moreover, the bloc’s defense capabilities planning and products are still largely fragmented along national lines, which means gaps in some capacities, duplication of others, interoperability problems, foreign dependencies and inefficient spending. According to the European Defence Agency, this lack of cooperation constitutes an annual loss of no less than €25 billion.
We need a pooling-and-sharing approach across the board, including for joint research, development and the procurement of weapons systems. For this to happen, the European Defence Industry Programme must be rapidly approved by its co-legislators. The coordinated investment could be catalyzed by the EU budget, along with joint borrowing and the creation of a defense bank. And an exemption to the fiscal rules should be limited to joint EU investments only.
Having said that, this is only one part of the equation — the supply side. Equally important — if not more so, in view of Trump’s disruption of the transatlantic bond — is defining and building up our common defense as foreseen in the Treaty of the EU.
The EU’s Rapid Deployment Capacity of 5,000 soldiers is a step in the right direction here, but it’s not enough. This capacity was conceived as an entry force for crisis management operations — not territorial defense. Thus, we must go further. We must develop EU common defense planning and command-and-control structures, thereby including the 27 national armies in a “European Security System” in coordination with NATO, acting as its “European Pillar.”
This is necessary due to Trump’s unpredictability, as well as the EU mutual assistance clause’s lack of operationalization. Currently, in the event of a withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Europe, a paralyzed NATO and a Russian attack on, say, the Baltics, EU member countries would have to rush to improvise an ad hoc military structure to deal with the aggression — a very unappealing prospect, to say the least.
German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote: “Wherein lies the danger, grows also the saving power.” It’s high time Europe got its armies together in a true European Defence Union.
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