Defence increases ‘will not reduce’ Union’s dependence on the US

Date: 13/09/01

By David Cronin

MODEST increases in the defence budgets of EU states will not be adequate to reduce the Union's dependence on US military resources, a Washington-based security expert declared this week, shortly before the news broke of Tuesday's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Kori Schake, a professor with the National Defence University in Washington, said that member states' spending on equipping their armed forces will not allow "the luxury of replicating in the EU the same patterns of military organisation and operations that exist in NATO". Her comments were delivered to a Brussels conference on the EU's Rapid Reaction Force (RRF).

According to NATO estimates, European members of the alliance increased their military expenditure from €201 billion to almost €208 billion between 1995 and 2000.

Schake predicted that preparations for the 60,000-strong RRF would benefit Washington because it could fill the gap between US-led military operations and traditional United Nations peacekeeping activities. However she predicted that Turkey would continue to block EU access to NATO assets and that Washington would remain more sympathetic towards Ankara's concerns than the EU had been because of its common interests with Turkey in 'managing' neighbouring states such as Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Charles Grant, director of London-based think-tank, the Centre for European Reform, argued that the biggest problem for the EU's emerging security and defence policy is that "very few senior politicians are giving it much time or energy".

While the Anglo-French St Malo declaration of 1998 provided an impetus for the policy's development, neither of the country's leaders has shown much interest in it since last December's Nice summit, he added.

Grant described plans by several EU countries, including Germany, Italy, France and Germany, to develop the state-of-the-art A-400M military plane as the 'litmus test' of whether Europe was serious about its defence.

Unless a contract for this system was signed soon, the project could unravel and EU defence policy would lose credibility, he said.

A researcher with Moscow's Institute of Europe, Dmitry Danilov, told the conference that Russia's interest in the RRF is "primarily confined to academic circles".

Modest increases in the defence budgets of EU states will not be adequate to reduce the Union's dependence on US military resources, a Washington-based security expert declared, shortly before the news broke of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.