opinion
CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN REFORM
Resolving the rows over ESDP By Charles Grant European defence has returned to the top of EU governments’ agendas this year, with the divisions provoked by the Iraq war making it a highly sensitive subject. It is possible to argue that the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) has proceeded according to plan in 2003. Early in the year the EU took over the UN police-training mission in Bosnia; in the spring the EU took responsibility for its first military mission, in Macedonia – a mission for which the EU depends on NATO support; and in the summer it embarked on its first ‘autonomous’ military operation, with the despatch of a few hundred peacekeepers to Bunia in the Congo. Meanwhile the EU’s defence ministries have continued to work on the ‘European Capabilities Action Plan’, which, like the parallel work going on in NATO, is intended to plug the principal deficiencies in Europe’s military capabilities. The EU’s draft constitution includes a reference to the establishment of a ‘European Armaments, Research and Military Capabilities Agency’, with the brief of defining Europe’s capability requirements and how to meet them, encouraging governments to fulfil their promises, promoting more common procurement policies, and boosting the European defence industrial base. The true picture, however, has been more fraught. A dangerous combination of circumstances has threatened the very existence of the ESDP: the impact of the Iraq conflict, which split the EU states into pro- and anti-US factions; the desire of the anti-US faction to push ahead with a core European defence grouping;
the adverse US reaction to plans for a core Europe in defence; and the reflection of these arguments in the constitutional convention. ESDP only makes sense as an instrument at the service of European foreign policy. The point of having an EU military capability is to reinforce EU foreign policy: declarations that are not backed by the threat of force carry little weight. When serious divisions disable European foreign policy, as was the case over Iraq, an EU military capability serves little purpose.
Tervuren Meeting in Brussels on April 29th, the prime ministers of Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg agreed to co-operate more closely on defence matters in seven ways. Six of these were not particularly controversial. But the seventh was the Belgian idea for the establishment of an EU operational planning staff at Tervuren. The argument for this initiative is that if, as the EU-15 have agreed, the EU should be able to conduct autonomous operations, it will need its own operational planners (it already has strategic planners, charged with advising EU ministers, inside the Council of Ministers). The argument against, put by those governments excluded from the Tervuren summit, is that the EU can rely on NATO planners at SHAPE, for a so-called Berlin-plus operation (like that in Macedonia), when it decides to work with NATO; or the EU can use a national headquarters, duly modified to reflect the nationalities of those taking part in the