THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
Photo: Guilhem Vellut CC BY 2.0, flickr.com
Europe’s strategic autonomy A pillar of a renewed NATO and a precondition for European security
by Christian Cambon, Member of the French Senate and Chair of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Paris
W
ith the issue of the European Defence Fund (EDF) budget, discussions on the European Union’s multiannual financial perspectives have highlighted the question of Europe’s strategic autonomy. On this subject, it should first of all be borne in mind that strategic autonomy is based not only on defence and the existence of a European defence technological and industrial base (DTIB); it also involves a broad range of sectors of the civilian economy.
Defence issues have changed in our history Defence issues, however, cast a particularly clear light on the challenges and choices Europeans are facing. Today, we might say that the 20th century has, in a way, brought Europe back to its position before the modern era. Until the end of the Middle Ages, Europe was just a reasonably well-populated and developed region, with an influence that did not extend greatly beyond its geographical area. The considerable technological and economic advance that Europe gained over the rest of the world from the 16th century onwards has been levelled out in the last century by two world wars, economic crises, and the partition of the continent in the context of the Cold War. However, there are three important differences between the situation in which Europeans find themselves today and the one that prevailed at the end of the Middle Ages: Firstly, conflicts between European nations are now at a historical low, and this situation seems likely to last. This exceptional
outcome is mainly due to the process of European integration, though the people in Europe tend not to give much credit for this to the European Union. Rather, they blame it for failing to solve their everyday difficulties, even though that was not what EU was originally designed for. Secondly, and this is partly related to the previous point, Europeans have largely given up on providing for their own security, a situation not seen since the fall of the Roman empire. The primary cause of this historically extraordinary situation was the rivalry between the United States and Russia during the Cold War. It led the United States to assume most of the continent’s defence up to now. But as the current US President and his Democratic predecessor have made clear, the United States now considers its main rival to be China, which has led it to divert part of its efforts from Europe and the Middle East to the Pacific region. From this perspective, the American president’s statements questioning the security guarantee promised by
initiatives show that European defence is in “Recent fact already a reality.”
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Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty tend to suggest that the United States considers the original grounds for the creation of NATO, i.e. the threat from Russia, to no longer be so relevant. Thirdly, today Europe is fully integrated into a global economic, social and political context from which it cannot extricate itself and which is developing in a way that Europe influences less and less. Migration flows, about which Europeans have struggled to agree upon a common management, are generated by crises on other continents, whether in the Middle East or in Africa. Likewise, terrorist networks are now globalised, and attacks
