Between Actor and Presence: The European Union and the Future for the Transatlantic Relationship

Chapter 6. Hurry Up and Wait?: Intergovernmentalism and an Integrated European Defence Market

6 Hurry Up and Wait?: Intergovernmentalism and an Integrated European Defence Market ALISTAIR D. EDGAR Introduction In a paper written for the Institute for SecurityStudies of the Western European Union some five months prior to the opening of the EU's Intergovernmental Conference in March 1996, Pierre De Vestel observed: The question that advocates of the integration and rationalisation of the defence industry and markets must ask themselves is whether the process of security and defence integration that is currently under way in Europe can hope to succeed where the Soviet threat and American hegemony failed.1 Four decades of the threat of massed armoured invasion from the east, and repeated urging from successive Administrations in the United States for their allies in NATO to move toward integrated defence production and standardized equipment, had been insufficient to persuade European governments that they should open their domestic defence industrial bases and defence markets to unimpeded alliance-wide competition. Calls to improve efficiency and reduce unit production costs, or to harmonize national defence equipment requirements and schedules with those of other allied governments in NATO,met with equallylimited results.2 If European defence procurement and defence production issues were taken as examples of progress toward an integrated European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), observers in 1996 and 1997 would have been justified in remaining deeply skeptical. Neither governments nor industries gave much sign of movement beyond cautious and ad hoc 124 BETWEEN ACTOR AND PRESENCE intergovernmental and interindustry agreements on specific and limited projects. Less than five years later, appearances, at least, suggest that the key major European governments have made considerable headway toward integration in security and defence, at the political and policy level as well as at the level of industrial structures. In roughly 14 months especially, between October 1998 and December 1999, important agreements were forged as the so-called "Blair initiative" on European defence cooperation wasfollowedby meetings and declarations at Saint-Malo; Vienna; Washington, DC; Cologne; and Helsinki. Each pushed the theme of European security integration further. Energized by their quite glaring military deficiencies exposed as a result of the NATO campaign in Kosovo, in which US forces conducted 80 percent of the air sorties, by early 2000 the European Union had built what seems to be the basis of a workable political and military framework for the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy and its Common Defence Policy.With this political movement as background, European industry also seemed to recover from the collapse of the proposed European Aerospace and Defence Company in early 1999. By early 2000 a new group—the European Aeronautic, Defence and Space Company (EADS)—had emerged, composed of leading French, German, and Spanish defence manufacturers. The key question, of course, is whether this apparent movement toward a coherent European "pillar" or "actor" in the security realm has substance, or if it is no more than a new surface laid over the same incompatibilities and weaknesses that have hampered European security and defence integration throughout the past four decades. Expressed in terms of the theme of the text, is the EU now emerging as a potentially capable and coherent actor in international securityaffairs, with a united voice and useful (and usable) defence assets? Or does it remain internally divided, limited to intergovernmental agreements designed to protect national interests as much as to promote the EU? Is the EU, in other words, an actor or merely a presence in European security and defence policy? It iswith this question , investigated using the European defence industry as a case study, that this chapter is concerned. The analysis begins with a review of past efforts to create a European defence equipment market and an integrated, rationalized INTERGOVERNMENTALISMAND AN INTEGRATED EUROPEAN DEFENCE MARKET 125 European defence industrial and technology base—the failed efforts that led De Vestel to express his doubts in 1995. Although the focus of the larger study of which this chapter is a part is on the EU and its institutional development, these first initiatives came mainly from other international groupings, principally NATO and the Independent European Programme Group (IEPG). The early discussion in this chapter thus involves mainly these intergovernmental organizations, as it highlights the consistent and stubbornly persistent obstacles that have faced previous proposals and programs, and which have resulted in their failure, cancellation, or very limited progress. The second section of analysisdeals with initiatives from within the EU, as well...