Britain and France should not give up on EU defence co-operation By Clara Marina O’Donnell ★ Faced with the sustained reluctance of many European governments to improve their armed forces, Britain and France are becoming increasingly disillusioned with EU defence co-operation and the potential for working with their neighbours. ★ But although EU defence efforts have delivered less than had been hoped, they have spurred European countries into becoming somewhat more active in defence. And at a time when turmoil is engulfing the Arab world and Washington is increasingly reluctant to carry the burden for Europe’s security, limited improvements are better than none. ★ So Britain and France should stay committed to the various EU initiatives which have worked in the past. They should support Poland’s efforts to develop EU battlegroups. They should get their EU partners to use the European Defence Agency to its full potential. And they should implement the concept of permanent structured co-operation in order to strengthen military capabilities. The United Kingdom and France have spent the last 60 years encouraging their European neighbours to become more active players in defence.1 During the Cold War, there was a perception in London and Paris – as well as Washington – that NATO allies were not contributing sufficiently to transatlantic 1 Some arguments in this security. This belief became more prominent with the collapse of paper first appeared in the Soviet Union, as most ‘Britain’s coalition European governments cut their government and EU defence spending and many defence co-operation: chose not to equip their armed Undermining British interests’, International forces for potential post-Cold Affairs, March 2011. War conflicts. In the late 1990s, Britain and France turned to the EU in the hope that it could help strengthen European military commitments. Although France had long been a supporter of independent European defence efforts, until 1998 the UK had been keen to maintain all efforts to improve European armed forces within NATO – mostly out of concern that autonomous European military co-operation might undermine the US commitment to Europe. But the Balkan wars made the UK realise that – in the post-Cold War world – the US might not always be prepared to stabilise Europe's
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neighbourhood. In addition, American policy-makers were telling their British partners in private that unless Europeans became more active in defence, NATO was not going to last. So, in the hope that the EU might help galvanise the political will for reform, the UK agreed to launch the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Over the following years, although Britain and France did not agree on all aspects of EU defence cooperation, they supported a variety of initiatives designed to develop a global strategic culture amongst their European allies, improve their military capabilities and increase the number of European troops deployed abroad. In 1999, London and Paris worked closely with their partners to set up what was known as the ‘Helsinki Headline Goal’, which aimed to give the EU the ability to deploy up to 60,000 troops and sustain them for a year by 2003. In 2004, Britain and France played a central role in creating the European Defence Agency (EDA), which was designed to increase the level of co-operation between armed forces and national defence industries in Europe. Both countries supported the drafting of the 2003 European Security Strategy and its 2008 update, which set out global security ambitions for the EU.
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