The UK and European defence: leading or leaving? - Chatham House

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Sven Biscop Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, was pursuing a more voluntarist foreign and security policy, so the constellation was extremely positive. This strong dynamic resulted in the creation in 1999 of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) within the EU, as the civilian–military operational arm of the CFSP. The 2001 Treaty of Nice gave it a legal basis in the TEU and ended the ‘contract’ with the WEU, which would in 2011 lead to the end of the WEU as such, at the initiative of the UK. ESDP: too much or too little? The first years of the ESDP saw a flurry of activity, in which the ‘big three’ continued to play the leading roles. The internal division within the EU about the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not block this dynamic—indeed, it even contributed to it in respect of the adoption of the European Security Strategy (ESS) in 2003. The ESS resulted from the converging motivations of those in support of and those against the invasion, seeking to signal respectively that Europe cared about the same threats as the US, but did not necessarily address them in the same way. The same year of 2003 also saw the first autonomous ESDP operation, without the use of NATO assets, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Operation Artemis. Its format inspired the Battlegroup concept, a Franco-British initiative, to which Germany adhered, to provide the EU with two battalion-sized rapid response forces on standby. In 2004 the European Defence Agency (EDA) was set up to stimulate joint capability development, procurement, research and market integration. An intricate capability development mechanism was created to achieve the 1999 Helsinki Headline Goal of 60,000 troops deployable within 60 days and sustainable for at least one year. At the strategic level, starting from the ESS and how the EU sees its role in the world, the European Council decides what the EU wants to be capable of doing, and what military capabilities are required to that end. At the planning level, it is established through a dynamic process, and on the basis of advice from the EU Military Committee (EUMC) supported by the EU Military Staff (EUMS), what capabilities members have made available to the EU (the Force Catalogue), what the detailed capability requirements are (the Requirements Catalogue), and, comparing the two, what the capability shortfalls are (the Progress Catalogue). Just as in the FAWEU, forces are made available strictly on a case-by-case basis. At the level of implementation, the EDA identifies the most promising solutions for the shortfalls. Finally, it is up to each member state in its national defence planning to make specific capability choices, to be implemented through national or multinational projects. Ten years later, however, at the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 November 2009, the Progress Catalogue still listed more than 50 qualitative and quantitative shortfalls, mainly in the areas of survivability and force protection, deployability and transport, and information superiority. The operational consequences include a high to a very high risk of the objectives of an operation not 1302 International Affairs 88: 6, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2012 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.
The UK and European defence being met, of delay in launching an operation, and of incurring casualties and loss of equipment. True, ten years is a short time to judge, because capability development is an inherently long-term process. But the question must be asked whether the mechanism will ever make the huge strides necessary to reach the goal. 7 The main obstacle is the almost exclusively bottom-up nature of the process. Although the EDA is a key EU-level actor, national capitals are the drivers. During the European Convention (2001–2003) the intention, including in London, was to complement this indispensable bottom-up dynamic with top-down guidance and coordination. To this end a new mechanism, sponsored by the UK and France, was included in the draft Constitutional Treaty adopted by the Convention: Permanent Structured Cooperation. That is also why the EDA, which was included in the draft treaty, was set up in 2004, before its ratification. When the Constitutional Treaty and afterwards the Lisbon Treaty ran into difficulties, however, several member states swallowed their ambitions. The EDA was among the main casualties, as the UK in particular (consistently, given its resistance to common funding, but paradoxically, in view of its focus on capabilities) refused to countenance more than minimal budgetary and personnel provision. This made it very difficult for the EDA to perform its ambitious tasks. The EDA has made a valiant effort, proposing multinational solutions to address the priority shortfalls and attempting to persuade member states to abandon or merge national projects. When members are willing to pool their efforts, in varying clusters according to the project, this approach yields important results. But in most cases capitals, including London, have not been willing to answer the call. Member states are not motivated to invest in a capability area simply because it has been identified as a priority shortfall at EU level. Each looks to the others to make the first move, fearing to contribute too much of its own limited defence budget to a collective programme as compared to the extent that it expects to have to draw on it. Meanwhile defence planning decisions continue to be taken in isolation, as a function of national requirements, without coordination with fellow member states. As a result, redundant capabilities (representing overcapacity or being non-deployable) are maintained while the strategic enablers are lacking. The conclusion is that coordination at tactical level, that is, on a project-by-project basis, is insufficient to achieve the ambitions of the ESDP. The UK was rightly disappointed with the lack of effort on the part of many other member states. Yet the British-fed perception of useless ESDP structures that duplicate NATO must be taken with a pinch of salt. Thanks to its broad scope and its proximity to its ‘customers’, the EDA has achieved more results than Allied Command Transformation, its US-based NATO counterpart, with barely a tenth of the staff. The problem is not so much too many structures as a lack of willingness to use or fund them as intended, in the case of the EDA notably by the UK itself. 8 Through such delaying tactics, London has created the perception that it prevents 7 Sven Biscop and Jo Coelmont, Europe, strategy and armed forces (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 68–71. 8 Clara Marina O’Donnell, ‘Britain’s coalition government and EU defence cooperation: undermining British interests’, International Affairs 87: 2, March 2011, pp. 419–33 at p. 424. International Affairs 88: 6, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2012 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. 1303
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The UK and European defence: leading or leaving? - Chatham House

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