THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
CONFERENCE REPORT
Real progress hampered by national interests European Defence Agency (EDA) Annual Conference 2013 (Hb) This was a meeting of all those with any say in the debate about European security and defence policy. Never before had an EDA conference seen such a high density of top-ranking experts as this one, organised with a view to the Defence Council of Heads of State and Government in December of this year, and bringing together 500 participants. But speakers’ calls for some progress at last to be made in the area of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) were sobering. It soon became clear that ultimately everything depends on the Member States with their primary focus on national interests, and for which a common European defence takes a back seat. EDA Chief Executive Claude-France Arnould stressed the importance of innovation and cooperation in times of financial austerity. She called for attention to be paid to European industrial and technological potential, which needed to be steered in the right direction. She sketched a critical picture of the possibilities left open to the agency by the nations, but nonetheless noted the highly positive results in specific areas such as pooling and sharing. More realism and farsightedness European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton stressed that rather than bemoaning shrinking defence budgets we needed to make the most of existing resources. Capabilities needed to be pooled and shared and made available to the EU for a rapid political and military response. There were three aspects to the CSDP: • A political component, concerning the will to fulfil Europe’s ambitions on the world stage • An operational component: ensuring
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burial of the CSDP. It was time to set the course for common action; too much time had already been wasted.
Conference Reports that Europe has the right military capabilities to be able to project its power • An economic component, which was about jobs, innovation and growth Fulfilling common responsibilities EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy said he realised that for the nations, defence meant national defence as much as deploying abroad. What was really important was to define “under what conditions we can fulfil our separate and joint security responsibilities”. Everything depended on the nations, which were the ones “in the driver’s seat”. They were the ones with the capabilities, whereas the EU was there as a facilitator and to help build trust. Technological innovation – the basis for progress In many areas of defence cooperation the EU was still hardly at the beginning, he explained. This was true above all in the area of technological innovation for the European Technological and Industrial Base (ETIB) but also in that of procurement. If you leave things too late they will cost you more money: “reluctance becomes unaffordable”, he noted. Scant hope of progress The Chairman of the EP Subcommittee on Security and Defence, Arnaud Danjean MEP, was sceptical about the future development of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). If European governments did not show a real will to cooperate and continued to give priority to fine words and declarations of intent, he said, we might in a few years’ time witness the
Experience Leading political, military and industrial representatives gathered in panels to discuss the future of the CSDP. In the first panel, EADS President Dr Thomas Enders openly expressed his disappointment at the fact that there were no longer any flagship projects in Europe in the field of security and defence. Facing a decade of a further decline in defence budgets, “we need to provide EDA with ‘serious’ money and some ‘serious’ instruments to try to push forward decisions”, he said. EU Military Committee Chairman General Patrick de Rousier spoke in the second panel in a similar vein. To find future common projects that lived up to nations’ expectations was difficult enough, but for any long-term project it was also necessary from the outset to ensure that it was explained to the public. In the panel on defence cooperation with Dassault President Eric Trappier, the discussion focused on putting existing agreements within the EU into practice: the Code of Conduct or, in the field of procurement, pooling and sharing, were a case in point. In this respect industry too must play its part. Looking ahead Notwithstanding this critical assessment of the situation, this conference was clearly focused on the future. It was a timely event that should bring some influence to bear upon the December 2013 summit.
