Europe should by now be moving away from fragmentation towards a unified defence capability, yet decades after the idea was first raised it remains trapped by national sensitivities and strategic self-doubt.
Some of us remember the discussions more than sixty years ago over the UK's entry into the European Economic Community. The French President de Gaulle was concerned about the UK's Atlanticist outlook and unwillingness to support a European foreign policy that was prepared to play an independent role in the world, standing up to the Soviet Union but also unwilling to be subordinate to the United States.
De Gaulle's beliefs were similar to those of Conservative politician Edward Heath, who became Prime Minister a year after de Gaulle died. Heath was the only really Europhile Prime Minister the UK has ever had and was the one who eventually took the UK into the Community in 1973. Later Prime Ministers were largely unwilling to support a common foreign and defence policy that would effectively bind together the different members of what became the European Union.
The constant refrain in the UK was that nothing must be done to jeopardise NATO. It implied that the USA was bound to see any deeper collaboration at EU level, for instance in the direction of an EU army, as liable to be a challenge to NATO rather than a way of supporting it.
That debate hasn't gone away and has only intensified in recent weeks. Is Europe now being squeezed between two autocratic and expansive powers, one seeking an excuse to gnaw away part of Europe's Eastern flank in Ukraine and the other trying to gnaw away at its Western flank in Greenland? Or is there still some hope that the sort of "Europe plus North America" commitment enshrined in NATO as a Western alliance can be rescued in a post-Trump era?
There is, after all, still an important member of NATO in North America committed to Western values, namely Canada, which has not yet been turned into the fifty-first state of the USA.
It seems to me that however much one believes that the USA may be different in a post-Trump era, Europe needs to move further towards a common defence and foreign policy that is effective.
Europe's defence fragmentation problem
For some time the problem of defence expenditure in Europe has been seen as a problem of spending too little when in fact the main problem is that it doesn't spend in a coordinated manner. It wasn't that Europe's military capabilities are less than those of Russia – the EU and UK were and are far wealthier than Russia and spend far more on defence in real terms even if Russia spends a much higher percentage of its GDP.
The problem was — and remains — that European spending is simply too fragmented. Member states maintain their own weapons systems, reward their own firms with defence orders and end up producing a mishmash of systems without interoperability, as this report from the European Commission (now nearly nine years old) shows very clearly.
You can argue that this is a matter of putting national interests above common security – and to an extent it is. But there is also a deep-seated unwillingness to accept that Europe has to take its common security seriously simply because it will have to act on its own in preserving it. That is what has got to change.
So far, there is little evidence that it will change. The UK's withdrawal from the EU hasn't helped, though it's noteworthy that a majority in the UK now recognise that the vote ten years ago was a mistake. Even the UK now recognises that it cannot look to the USA for protection. If it has been guilty (as de Gaulle recognised only too well) of fantasies about a special relationship with the USA, recent events have forced it to reconsider.
Yet it still finds it difficult to think in terms of common European security. Recently, the UK did a deal with Norway over joint naval patrols, but it couldn't agree with the EU on access to the European Defence Fund. Meanwhile articles are produced in the UK on the need to be "ready for war" and the possibility of a Russian attack "within five years" which seems to say very little about the need to co-ordinate the UK's defences with those of other European countries.
A psychological blockage
Where, for instance, is the recognition of President Macron's call in 2018 (eight years ago) for a true European army? Now the Brussels Times reports that Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has made the same point eight years later. But is it going to happen, or is Europe too weighed down by a kind of Stockholm syndrome which insists that those who are trying to undermine its values are really its friends? If so, it should take note of the forces that are trying to undermine it from within.
Yes, Europe has to wake up to the fact that it may end up on its own facing threats from both West and East. But it also needs to wake up to the fact that it has the resources to do so. The problem is that it doesn't know how to pool those resources. Adding new military hardware becomes a substitute for working out how to use it effectively within the framework of a single military force.
What Europe has not managed to overcome are the national sensitivities and the overall psychological blockage which have worked together to make the continent feel powerless when what it most needs to do is to recognise its own strength.
