EU must shake up defence policy, warns Sarkozy aide

French Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s EU affairs guru has called for a 'European agenda' on security and defence which would carry out a common analysis of the threats to EU member states, building on the European security strategy drawn up by foreign policy chief Javier Solana in December 2003.

Centre-right MEP Alain Lamassoure said he wanted a new drive on European defence co-operation with governments agreeing common security threats and pledging to pool resources for major equipment purchases. Lamassoure said that the analysis was needed because, although the EU had 'no enemy or external state which was threatening it', there were countries and regions bordering Europe, such as the Balkans and the Middle East, where instability could pose a threat. He also highlighted nuclear proliferation as a danger. The EU should do more than simply react to crises like those in Darfur and Somalia, he said.

Having identified and agreed common threats, EU governments should then pledge part of their national budgets to spend on common defence goals, the MEP argued. Lamassoure said that this was necessary because EU countries had cut their defence budget not only since the end of the Cold War but also after the 9/11 attacks in the US. Spending on defence research and buying equipment was continuing to fall, he said, while there was a problem with duplication of equipment and procurement programmes among member states.

Lamassoure said that this pooling of defence resources should apply across the entire range of military tasks EU governments identified and not just for peacekeeping missions, which is the limit on the ambition of current EU common defence co-operation efforts. He cited the example of an aircraft- carrier being designed and built jointly by the UK and France as the type of big budget project on which countries should co-operate.

The MEP said that the end of France’s current defence procurement programme in 2008 was an opportunity for such a debate in France.

Daniel Keohane, researcher at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris, welcomed Lamassoure’s blueprint, saying that the situation in Afghanistan showed the need to think about security in a very broad sense, especially how civilian and military missions work together.

Keohane also welcomed Lamassoure’s call for greater efforts at pooling scarce defence funds as 'the Europeans don’t get bang for their buck'. He cited recent figures which showed that the EU27 spent €26.4 billion on 89 defence equipment procurement programmes compared to the US which, in the same period, spent $100bn (€76.bn) on 27 programmes. The EU was launching more and more missions, at a rate of around four a year, Keohane said, but the resources and the personnel available were not rising commensurately.

A source at the European Defence Agency (EDA), which is co-ordinating joint efforts on defence research and procurement, said: 'The overall thrust of Lamassoure’s ideas appears to be broadly speaking in line with the EDA’s agenda'.

Guillaume Parmentier, director of the Centre on America and Transatlantic Relations in Paris, said that Lamassoure was right to identify the need for a common threat-assessment because there were such divergences among member states’ evaluations. He highlighted the view of Russia held by Poland and the Baltic states compared to that of the western EU states which do not believe Russia is a genuine security threat. Parmentier agreed with the need for greater defence co-operation, saying that more countries should follow the example of the Netherlands which had 'got rid of capabilities where they were not capable of doing anything useful'. But, he said, the biggest problem was that two large member states, Germany and Italy, were not doing even the minimum.French Presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s EU affairs guru has called for a 'European agenda' on security and defence which would carry out a common analysis of the threats to EU member states, building on the European security strategy drawn up by foreign policy chief Javier Solana in December 2003.