European Defence Agency (EDA) Annual Conference 2013, Brussels

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 PolicyCatherine 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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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 burial of the CSDP. It was time to set the course for common action; too much time had already been wasted.

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.

News: Reconstruction and Democratisation in Mali European Parliament Motion for Resolution, 4 June 2013

(Excerpts) The Parliament 1. Stresses its commitment to the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Mali; welcomes the French intervention in support of these principles as a first step towards the reconstruction and democratisation of Mali; calls for strong EU involvement in this process; 2. Supports a Malian-led political process enabling the country to achieve long-term political stability and economic prosperity; underlines the importance of inclusive national dialogue, and of the reconciliation process, in the effort to reach a genuine and democratic political solution to the country’s recurrent crisis; welcomes, in this context, the establishment of a Commission for National Dialogue and Reconciliation, and expresses hope that it is rapidly made operational; welcomes the nomination of a woman and a Tuareg as vice-presidents of this Commission as a sign of a commitment to inclusiveness and plurality in the political process; (…) 4. Urges swift implementation of the roadmap, in order to sustain the transition until the constitutional order and the rule of law has been re-established throughout the country through the organisation of democratic, free, fair and transparent elections in 2013; welcomes the commitment on the part of the Malian authorities to move rapidly towards the elections, as well as the declarations by leaders of the transitional government not to stand for election; acknowledges the challenges that the organisation of the elections pose, including tasks such as ensuring security in the northern areas, issuing biometric voter cards and registering refugees on the electoral rolls, and calls on the EU and its international partners to step up their support for the upcoming electoral process; welcomes, in this respect, the intention of sending an EU electoral observation mission, as requested by the Malian government; (…) 7. Insists that any political solution to rebuild Mali needs to be accompanied by a clear and sustainable economic development strategy that addresses the problem of unemployment in order to improve the livelihood of the

population, and stresses that the provision of basic services such as health, education, water and sanitation must be resumed as they are essential to the stability of the country; believes that institutional reforms are necessary to ensure political stability and to allow the Malian community as a whole to be involved in building the country’s future; (…) 12. Stresses that security and development in the Sahel are mutually reinforcing; welcomes the initial intervention by France, reinforced by the AFISMA, to halt further destabilisation and to counter extremist forces; underlines the important complementary role of the EU Training Mission (EUTM Mali) in providing decisive assistance in building the longerterm capacity of the Malian army; recalls that longer-term stability, security and territorial integrity of the country requires not only that violent and radical extremists – and traffickers in arms, drugs and people – are defeated but that alternatives to the illegal activities of impoverished people and unemployed youth are promoted; (…) Source: European Parliament