It has become quite obvious that European governments need to cooperate more seriously on defense matters .
European nations face an
unprecedented confluence of security crises, ranging from unpredictable US and to a lesser extend also Russian military involvements across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, which are
generating internal security dangers, including terrorist attacks and a large influx of refugees .
Since it is obvious that no EU country can cope in putting this together it has to be a defense force which includes all the military forces of the EU nations, with a central command.
One new but key dimension of the security
challenges facing the EU is that the EU now has to simultaneously defend not only the territories of the EU, but also manage external crises. Another important aspect in this picture is that
the lines between internal and external security have become increasingly
blurred.
Against this backdrop, at a summit in June 2016 the EU is expected to adopt a new
global strategy,
which will set out priorities and guidelines for EU foreign, security,
and defense policies.
This summit and other institutional processes are important, even though right now European defense
cooperation is being pushed more by the amalgamation of national
priorities than just by the efforts of the EU.
European defense
cooperation will continue, but it is mainly bottom up—driven by national
governments—not top down, meaning directed and organized by the
institutions in Brussels.
For example, although the previous
decline in European defense spending
has stopped, national budgets have fallen by around 15 percent since
2008. Institutional orthodoxy holds that reduced national budgets,
especially for military equipment, should spur more cross-border
collaboration. In fact, the opposite has been true.
Between 2006 and
2011, EU governments spent around 20 percent of their equipment budgets
on
pan-European collaboration each year. By 2013, this figure had fallen below 16 percent, according to the European Defense Agency.
Similarly, European governments have become less willing to send
soldiers abroad for peacekeeping operations and more selective about
which missions they participate in. All the European members of NATO
contributed to the alliance’s operations in Afghanistan during the
2000s, but less than half took part in NATO’s 2011 military intervention
in Libya. The EU has deployed over 30 peace operations since 2003, but
24 of these were initiated before 2009, and the pace and size of new missions has dropped considerably since then.
European funding of NATO’s central role in European territorial defense
has been reinvigorated since 2014, mainly as result of the Ukraine tribulations between the US and Russia.
Conventional deterrence is back in Europe as a core task for European
governments. But so far, even these efforts have remained relatively
modest.
With a strength of only 5,000, the multinational
Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, under the flag of NATO prompts questions about the unit’s usefulness in an event of a military confrontation with Russian forces.ccording to one recent
war-gaming study,
the longest it would take Russian military forces to reach the Estonian
and Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga is sixty hours.
However, even if the EU is struggling to encourage much
deeper collaboration among their members, it would be wrong to think
that there is no progress on European defense cooperation. There are
now nearly
400 ongoing military cooperation projects in Europe. These include initiatives such the
European Air Transport Command in the Netherlands, which manages the missions of almost 200 tanker and transport aircraft from seven countries, and the
Heavy Airlift Wing based in Hungary, which has helped eleven European countries procure and operate a fleet of C-17 transport planes.
Some countries are also working more closely in regional formats,
such as Baltic, Nordic, and Visegrád (Central European) cooperation. And
a number of European governments are pursuing deeper bilateral
cooperation, including the integration of parts of their armed forces in
some cases. Examples include
Franco-British, German-Dutch, and Finnish-Swedish initiatives.
European governments are increasingly picking and choosing which
forms of military cooperation they wish to pursue, depending on the
capability project or military operation at hand. Sometimes they act
through NATO or the EU, but almost all European governments are using
other formats as well, whether regional, bilateral, or ad hoc
coalitions. The combination of more complex security crises and reduced
resources has meant that European governments are more focused on their
core national interests than before, and both more targeted and flexible
about how they wish to cooperate with the US or even among themselves.
The success of European defense cooperation will depend on the
convergence or divergence of national policies, in particular the
abilities of France, Germany, and the UK ( who collectively account for almost
two-thirds of EU defense spendin) to not only agree among
themselves but to also convince other European governments to support a common
approach.
It is high time for the EU to get their act together in the area of military cooperation, so it won't continue to be at the mercy of NATO and dragged into military adventures based on US foreign policy objectives.
The expansion and improvement of an independent EU Defense force must also become an integral part of well defined Global EU foreign policy objectives, in order to become truly effective.
