CIAO DATE: 12/2013
November 2013
EGMONT – The Royal Institute for International Relations
When a doctor calls for a thorough examination of the state of a patient’s health, he hopes that everything will turn out to be alright, but it really means that he fears there is a serious problem. Likewise, when Herman Van Rompuy called for the European Council of which he is the President to examine “the state of defence in Europe”, he was asking for more than a routine check-up. In this joint Egmont Paper, the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Egmont Institute offer their diagnosis. In the opening essay, Claudia Major and Christian Mölling cannot but conclude that “the state of defence in Europe” is nearing the state of emergency. The “bonsai armies” that they fear we will end up with are nice to look at – on the national day parade for example – but not of much use. In addition to the diagnosis though, we also want to propose a treatment. The method of examination proposed by Van Rompuy already hints at an important part of the cure. The fact is that we never examine “the state of defence in Europe”. We assess the state of the EU’s CSDP, of NATO’s military posture, and of course of each of our national armed forces. But we never assess Europe’s military effort in it s entirety. In fact, we are unable to, simply because there is no forum where we set capability targets for “defence in Europe”.
Resource link: The state of defence in europe: state of emergency? [PDF] - 390K