Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-17-Speech-3-052"
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"en.19991117.2.3-052"2
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"First of all let me thank Mr Solana and Mr Patten for their statements. It seems to me that in all this discussion of European security, two elements – defence capabilities and institutional arrangements – have been confused and one seems hostage to the other. Of course we welcome any commitments by European states to modernise their armed forces in order to redress the present well-known deficiencies. As Mr Solana knows from his previous appointment, many Allied states do not even fulfil their force commitments to NATO. These issues are already being addressed by the Alliance as part of the defence capabilities initiative. The British armed forces are world class but they have been desperately over-stretched over the past year. I am not sure from where, therefore, the UK Government intends to find and sustain its contribution to some new European rapid deployment force that it has proposed, unless this is just smoke and mirrors, or at the expense of commitments to NATO.
I have to say that legitimate concerns about military capabilities are not resolved by the Europeanisation of defence, which responds to an essentially political agenda and is an aspect of the process of European political integration. The danger is that there will be pressure for the EU to become the organisation of first resort when next there is a crisis to be dealt with and that NATO would increasingly be relegated to a purely residual role as a collective defence organisation. NATO’s vitality and transatlantic solidarity will only be maintained if NATO remains closely and constantly engaged in current crisis management.
Of course, as the Europeans are not proposing any additional forces, the capacity for EU autonomous action refers primarily to the political decision-making process. The key issue will be the interaction between the two centres of decision making, NATO and the EU, and the impact of this on the transatlantic relationship. Can we really afford strategically or financially duplicated staffs and committees, the proliferation of Euro forces and the wastefulness and confusion of subjecting our armed forces to two separate operational doctrines and planning regimes? Encumbering the European Union with defence responsibilities will do little to encourage it to make more effective use of its valuable non-military crisis-management instruments, which could genuinely complement the military forces of NATO. This is where the EU’s emphasis should be as Mr Patten has indicated. Improved military capabilities within the well-tried structures of NATO, not institutional geometry in Euro headquarters, are what is needed. The requirement, the objective is for greater security effectiveness with the Europeans and North Americans each contributing more proportionately. Our armies should not be recruited to the process of political integration, dressed up in other clothes."@en1
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