THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
Renationalisation is the wrong answer
The irrelevance of defence in the CSDP by Gerd Kaldrack, International Project Consulting - KIP, Bonn In his speech of 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi, Head of the European Central Bank, emphasised that everything must be done to save the euro. The Monetary Union needs to be fundamentally changed. The only way out of the crisis is to take a chance on more Europe, i.e. to shift more national responsibility to the European level.
No European Security Union on the horizon Little progress has been made on the necessary development of a Financial and Monetary Union. Only the idea of a Banking Union has been seriously pursued, with the collectivisation of debt placed at the centre of the debate. A Transfer Union is on the horizon, but not a Security Union, despite the new global security situation. Russia, China and India are upgrading their armaments. The coast opposite the south of Europe is in turmoil, Egypt is reeling, the Levant is burning, the Balkans and the Caucasus remain trouble spots, piracy threatens global trade routes and, on top of all this, security-relevant climate change is progressing. At the same time, the balance of the global security architecture is shifting. The United States is switching its main focus to the Asia-Pacific region. Its role in NATO will be reduced. Europe must take responsibility for its own security. As a global economic player it must be able to conduct an active Security and Defence Policy for peace and security at its borders and in its areas of interest. This consensus was documented in the Treaty of Lisbon (2009). Global challenges can only be met by Europe as a whole. No EU Member State can do this alone.
Europe needs its own military strength Decisions and concepts abound. In 2011 the EU counted some 1.7 million soldiers in its armed forces. Yet the 1999 project for an EU rapid reaction force composed of 50 to 60 thousand troops failed. It was replaced by the concept of 1 500 to 2 000strong EU Battlegroups, which offer little operational value and have never been deployed. France and Britain have cut their intervention force quotas, while Germany has maintained its quota at about 10 000 professionals. The 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) enshrines the concept of comprehensive security based on both civil and military means as a fundamental principle. However, the establishment of an EU civil-military headquarters failed, as did the provision of an EU budget for military crisis-management missions. Instead, each state has to bear its own mission costs. The “Athena Mechanism for common costs” (e.g. reconnaissance) amounted to just € 38 million in 2010. For civilian crisis management the EU as a global player has a budget of € 9.2 billion at its disposal,
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Gerd F. Kaldrack, Dipl. pol.sc is Chief of KIP Kaldrack International Project Consulting, which was founded in 1993. KIP is specialised in environmental protection, renewable energies and security and defence matters. Important phases in Gerd Kaldrack’s military career were positions as a helicopter pilot in the Army Aviation, General Staff Course 1973-75, Photo: private Army Long-Term Planning and Head of the Environmental Protection Division in the German MoD. In 1993 he retired as a colonel from the military and began a civilian career as a consultant and publisher of numerous contributions to the debate on CSDP, most recently of the reader on “An operational Army for Europe”, co-authored with Dr Hans-Gert Pöttering.
but only € 0.4 billion were budgeted for the CSDP in 2013. Civil and military emergency operations are conducted side-by-side but remain unconnected. The problem lies in the insistence on the outdated notion of national sovereignty, with each nation having its own army solely at its command.
Sovereignty versus solidarity The result is a reduction of national defence budgets and a restructuring of the armed forces, leading to a loss of skills and shrinkage of the European security and defence industrial base. What the EU needs is sustainable coordination of the armed forces planning and defence budgets of the 28 Member States. It should apply the Lisbon Treaty tools of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PSC) and Pooling and Sharing. The irrelevance of EU security policy is an aggravating factor; however, the civilian sector recently made progress with the inauguration of the EU’s highly modern Emergency Response Centre (ERC) through which all 28 Member States plus five other countries coordinate their disaster response. The Centre cooperates closely with national points of contact, which will have rapidly deployable, international and voluntary “mission pools” at their disposal. The only robust solution would be to remove the CSDP from the intergovernmental process and to turn it into a genuine civil-military common task. Next it is necessary to define the respective tasks of the EU and the Member States and to establish a security budget for civil-military crisis management. With rapidly available forces and predictable financing the EU should be able to assume a level of global responsibility in keeping with its political and economic weight. Sovereignty can only be maintained together.
