Europe trudges ahead with beefing up its security and defence order

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Welcome back. Next month, it will be 25 years since Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac signed the St Malo declaration, a groundbreaking accord between Britain and France, Europe’s two pre-eminent military powers. The deal struck by the French and British leaders in the spectacular walled city in Brittany laid the groundwork for the EU’s embryonic security and defence policy. It reconciled France’s emphasis on Europe’s ability to act autonomously with Britain’s faith in Nato as the bedrock of European defence, while spurring other European governments to boost their military capabilities to the collective benefit of the alliance.

To say the results of this breakthrough were a disappointment would be an understatement. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine starkly demonstrated Europe’s depleted capabilities and stocks and its continued dependence on a US security blanket that is increasingly questioned in Washington.

I’m standing in for Tony Barber this week. You can reach me at [email protected]. But first, here are the results of last week’s poll. We asked you whether Georgia should join the EU if it met the entry criteria. About 60 per cent of you who voted said that it should, 30 per cent were against, while 10 per cent were on the fence.

The continent’s awakening on security and defence

St Malo was probably the high point of Britain’s ambitions to shape an agenda for a stronger EU — and a high point in bilateral relations with its most important neighbour. It spawned a score of EU anti-piracy and peacekeeping missions and EU members theoretically met the so-called headline goal of being able to deploy 60,0000 troops at 60 days’ notice.

Political impetus behind defence co-operation dissipated amid the rancour and division of the Iraq war and Britain’s Eurosceptic turn that culminated in Brexit. While there is a professed desire on both sides of the Channel to intensify defence collaboration — as envisaged in the 2010 Lancaster House treaty, a follow-on agreement to St Malo — London’s vision of the bilateral relationship is dispiritingly shaped by its fixation on stopping migrant boats from leaving French shores.

But the St Malo vision of an EU able to act on its own militarily while Nato remains the bedrock of collective defence has been revalidated, first by Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine and now by growing concerns about faltering US support for Kyiv.

“Most people would say they are quite disappointed with what St Malo produced,” said Professor Michael Clarke at a conference organised by the Royal United Services Institute and Centre for European Reform in London this week. “But if it produced less than what we hoped in the late 1990s, it is more important than ever.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a watershed moment for Europe’s security and a wake-up call for its governments. Many have responded with impressive increases in defence spending — see this helpful infographic by Thierry Tardy and Sylvie Matelly for the Institut Jacques Delors. The EU has proved nimble too, providing more than €5bn to help buy weaponry for Ukraine or to compensate member states who send arms from their own stocks.

The European Commission has also put in place funding schemes to promote joint procurement by national governments. It also has an €8bn defence fund to finance common defence research programmes.

But these efforts do not rise to the scale of the challenge Europe faces, fears Luigi Scazzeri of the Centre for European Reform. He argues that it will be difficult for governments to sustain the kind of increase in defence spending seen in recent years, given competing spending pressures and the rising cost of raw materials needed for weapons systems.

Europe continues to be held back by a lack of co-ordination in defence industrial production, epitomised by its two rival programmes for next-generation fighter jets and by a Franco-German dispute over air-defence technologies.

Capitals have been slow to sign firm orders with defence companies or to consider subsidising them to expand production capacity. A flagship EU scheme to deliver a million 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine by March is reportedly way behind schedule.

Some governments are also struggling to spend the extra money they have earmarked.

As Claudia Major and Christian Mölling explain in this piece for Internationale Politik Quarterly, Germany’s coalition government is being held back by “old habits and routines” as it seeks to follow through on its Zeitenwende, or historic turning point, in defence policy, which is backed up by a special investment of €100bn and a defence spending target of 2 per cent of gross domestic product.

Germany has made “revolutionary” decisions with its three objectives of beefing up the Bundeswehr, reinforcing European defence co-operation and arming Ukraine. But set against the situation in Ukraine and the state of the German army, the progress is not enough, say Major and Mölling.

The one objective where Berlin more recently seems to have outperformed expectations is arming Ukraine. To be sure, it is still reticent about sending long-range precision armaments, such as the Taurus cruise missile requested by Kyiv. But Germany is now second only to the US in terms of military support and it has become a mainstay of Ukraine’s air defences.

The promise this week by defence minister Boris Pistorius to double military aid to Ukraine to €8bn next year is a welcome step that should set the pace for other allies.

Biden administration officials have been telling European officials they are still confident of finding a way past Republican opposition in Congress to fund Ukraine. But, as one EU official noted, it could be the last time, given the real possibility that Donald Trump returns to the White House and even if Joe Biden wins a second term.

Ukraine’s survival is the defining issue for European security, notwithstanding the many other crises that could emerge from the arc of instability along its borders. Europeans are going to have to prepare to step up to the plate and keep Kyiv going with less fulsome US support as Washington’s attention turns, inevitably, to China.

Russian aggression has revalidated Nato as the bedrock of collective defence in Europe — a point now made repeatedly by France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who in 2019 had declared the alliance “brain-dead”. But the EU will have to play a bigger role and it may need to draw on Nato assets. It will also have to work more closely with the UK, ideally through a more strategic security partnership and Britain’s involvement in EU defence industrial collaboration. Ukraine has revived Nato but also the spirit Chirac and Blair demonstrated in St Malo a quarter of a century ago.

More on this topic

Brace yourself: How the 2024 US presidential election could affect Europe — Célia Belin, Majda Ruge, Jeremy Shapiro. European Council on Foreign Relations.

Ben’s picks of the week

• Chris Cook in London and Max Seddon in Riga reveal how a covert Russian smuggling network moved western technology from European countries for the war effort, as well as how the architect in the middle pulled together the network.

• “The best-selling items in today’s Dutch political supermarket offer a preview of a new European right: quieter, saner, big-state, resigned to membership of the EU, but still anti-migration” writes Simon Kuper in FT magazine, less than a week before Netherlands goes to the polls