THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
We need to strive for practical international cooperation between armed forces
On the way to a Europe of Defence
by Dr Hans-Peter Bartels, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, Berlin
O
rganising armed forces in line with how they are to be deployed, preferably from the very outset, makes perfect sense. Out-ofarea crisis resolution? Always multinationally! National and collective defence? Always multinationally! Only basic operations, training and daily military routine should still be organised on a strictly national basis – as if this constituted the very core of national sovereignty. So has the time now come to merge the many individual military parts in Europe into one complete set in the form of a European military? I do not think so.
Timing is important Timing is important. And currently, European negotiations as to creating a European military are likely to trigger adverse reaction, disharmony and they are likely to reinforce the battle lines. The UK has already made clear that it will not participate in this process, the East could block it, France itself, despite all the rhetoric, is not yet ready for it, and a European military built around Germany alone would not be sufficient. It is not that such an agreement is generally impossible. Indeed, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg had already negotiated a treaty concerning the European Defence Community (EDC) in 1952 that provided for establishing the ”European Defence Forces” that were to report directly to the NATO Commander-in-Chief. Bundestag and Bundesrat had already ratified the EDC Treaty in order to supply the Western Alliance with German soldiers without having to establish a German military again. But the French National Assembly,
Photo: Thomas Trutschel/ photothek.net/Deutscher Bundestag
Purely national capabilities must gradually become “multinational islands of cooperation.”
Dr Hans-Peter Bartels
Practical cooperation has to prevail
is the Parliamentary Commissioner for the German Armed
The way to a Europe of Defence is by no means lacking a founding treaty, but actual practice. I think a good formula that may be applied to such a practice would be ”islands of cooperation”. Purely national capabilities must gradually become multinational islands of cooperation. Not everyone has to work with everyone else, not everything needs to be connected to everything else in a planned way already. What matters is that it does work – better in a modest and efficient way rather than on a large scale but dysfunctionally. After all, the main task of the military is still to carry out real missions.
Forces since 2015. Born in 1961, he studied political science at the University of Kiel, where he earned his MA and received his PhD in 1988. He was an editor at the newspaper Kieler Rundschau and a civil servant in the office of the Prime Minister of Schleswig Holstein. Dr Bartels has been a member (SPD) of the German Bundestag since the 1998 federal elections, serving essentially at the Committee of Defence. Elected Military Commissioner in 2015, he gave up his mandate as a MP.
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having meanwhile faced a change of majorities, objected to these plans in 1954. Therefore, in 1955, the Bundeswehr was established. Europe is able to achieve a consensus and to pool previously national sovereign rights at a higher level. The introduction of the euro is one example. And so is the Schengen area without passport controls at internal borders. But like the euro project which was initiated in the 1970s and only became real money in 2002, developing towards a common European military is likely to be a project that will take generations. It started quite unimposingly sometime during the second decade of the 21st century. It has scarcely been noticed.
