Toward the end of 2015, a few defense experts raised their eyebrows at a Credit Suisse report on the future of globalization. This wide-ranging assessment contained a short analysis of global military power, ranking the top 20 countries in the world. Weighing six elements of conventional warfare, the Credit Suisse analysts considered Poland a stronger military power than Germany, and Italy came ahead of the United Kingdom.
Notwithstanding those conclusions, much of the current discussion about European defense—whether through NATO, the EU, or other formats—revolves around the positions of the three leading European military spenders: France, Germany, and the UK. However, those other two major European powers, Italy and Poland, deserve more attention. They are both frontline states for EU and NATO security, and they both personify the two main operational priorities for European military cooperation: defending NATO territory in Eastern Europe, and intervening to stabilize conflict-racked countries to the EU’s South.
Italy has received 75 percent of migrant and refugee flows across the Mediterranean into the EU this year—over 110,000 people, according to the International Organization for Migration. Elisabeth Braw from the Atlantic Council notes that “between January and June of this year, Italy’s coast guard rescued 21,540 migrants from 188 vessels, while the Italian navy brought 3,344 migrants to safety and its financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, saved nearly 400.”
Poland, meanwhile, worries greatly about the military threat from Russia following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and subsequent warfighting in eastern Ukraine. A year ago, Russia deployed Iskander-M ballistic missiles (nuclear-capable rockets with a range up to 500 kilometers) to Kaliningrad, its Baltic exclave situated between Poland and Lithuania. Part of the joint Russia-Belarussian Zapad military exercise in September took place in Kaliningrad.
Understandably, a focus on either defense or intervention drives Polish and Italian defense policies—in part because with relatively limited resources, they must prioritize. To compare, NATO estimates that the UK will spend $55 billion, France $44 billion, and Germany $43 billion on defense this year. In contrast, Italy will spend $22.5 billion and Poland $10 billion.
Even though Italian defense spending is equivalent to only 1.1 per cent of its GDP, just over half of NATO’s much-trumpeted headline goal, Italy is one of Europe’s biggest contributors to international operations. The Italian Institute of International Affairs says that Italy sent over 6,000 armed forces personnel to international missions during 2016. This is almost double Germany’s number, which deployed roughly 3,300 during 2016, according to the German defense ombudsman.
The bulk of those Italian soldiers operated in Africa and the Middle East. This reflects the priorities set out in Italy’s 2015 defense white paper, which highlighted the Euro-Mediterranean region as Italy’s primary geostrategic focus. Turmoil in Libya, for example, has greatly contributed to the large numbers of migrants being smuggled across Mediterranean waters into Italy. Interestingly, the white paper said that Italy not only intended to contribute to international coalitions (whether NATO, UN, or EU) in the Euro-Mediterranean space, but would also be prepared to lead military interventions across the region.
As a percentage of GDP, Poland spends almost double that of Italy on defense. Moreover, President Andrzej Duda signed a law on October 23 committing Poland to spend an impressive 2.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2030. The same bill also includes a plan to increase Polish armed forces from the current 100,000 personnel to 200,000. Some 50,000 of those will belong to a new voluntary “Territorial Defense Force.”
The 2017 Polish Defense Concept, a strategic review published in May, explains the reason for these impressive budgetary and personnel increases: “The number one priority was the necessity of adequately preparing Poland to defend its own territory.” Referring to the new defense law, Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz rather ambitiously stated, “The Polish army will within ten years gain the capability of stopping every opponent.”
Both Poland and Italy have set out robust military intentions, whether to defend national territory or to contribute to international interventions. Even so, both want help from their allies, whether to counter Russian missiles or to cope with cross-Mediterranean migration.
On top of current EU efforts, such as naval operations, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni asked other EU governments to help more with stemming migrant flows at a summit in Brussels on October 19-20, including sending a mission to police Niger’s border with Libya. The Polish government has long called for stronger NATO defenses; after U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the alliance’s mutual defense commitment in Warsaw on July 6, they were “in seventh heaven.”
Polish enthusiasm for military cooperation through NATO does not currently translate into strong support for complementary efforts through the EU. This appears to be a binary choice for some in Warsaw. Andrzej Talaga from the Warsaw Enterprise Institute, for example, described French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent proposals for a stronger EU military intervention capacity as “suicidal” for Poland because they would weaken NATO’s collective defenses.
Italy is also firmly committed to NATO but, in contrast to Poland, sees no contradiction with wholeheartedly supporting deeper EU military cooperation. For example, Rome proposed that Europeans create a multinational military force a year before Macron suggested the same in his Sorbonne speech on September 26.
Italy and Poland represent the two sides of Europe’s defense coin. However, European military cooperation, whether through NATO or the EU, cannot fully contribute to European security until EU governments realize that they need to be collectively able to both defend their territories and intervene abroad.
Galileo (an Italian) proved the revolutionary theory of Copernicus (a Pole) that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe. If Italy and Poland developed a shared strategic consensus and jointly acted accordingly, it would be a revolution for European defense.
Daniel Keohane is a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich.
Comments(3)
"Everything is about perception" (Dr Christopher Cocker). Perception of threat varies accross the EU group. The Visegrad states look east; the Mediterranean south and south-east; the Atlantic powers (USA-UK) try to revive an already dead ghost of expansionist Russia though the USA crossed the line of Gorbachev-Bush agreement (Reykjavik, 1989) back in the early 1990s. Since perception of threat varies so widely, it is impossible to reach a shared strategic consensus among NATO's European members. Key to such a prospect, solidarity among EU member-states in tackling the refugee crisis where bankrupt Greece and Italy have been left to cope with alone.
The article contains a fundamental systemic misunderstanding: “…cannot fully contribute to European security until EU governments realize that they need to be collectively able to both defend their territories and intervene abroad.” Where are the 500 million people of Europe in this discussion? The answer is easily found in analyzing the many elections and referendums: it is political suicide to try running on a platform promising the peoples of Europe that they finally will have a war. President Obama, in his EU goodbye tour never told the crowds gathered to salute him to go right away and join the army; he talked about these being the best time to be born, which implies they will not die in a war. This while he expanded ERI and nuclear forces, including the dreaded variable yield tactical weapons, programs continued by the Trump administration. Macron, Merkel, May never promised their people that if elected they will increase the military forces and budgets as well as increase their participation in NATO’s war in Afghanistan (which theoretically they should, it is an Article 5 test) or in Obama’s new deployments in NATO’s Eastern flank. The reality is simple: politics, including defense, is local; local includes hundreds of years of history. How can Poland trust anybody in Europe when the country was abandoned twice: 1939 phoney war and Stalin-Churchill napkin treaty. Poland actually never made it to the napkin, after fighting valiantly throughout the war. Worse, Brexit was not exactly a lovefest about free movement of people, a core EU principle never really understood in the UK. Moreover, how exactly would any Polish politician explain a 20 year old the need to fight in Libya, a former Italian colonial playground, while Russia is conducting mock nuclear attacks on Warsaw from fortress Kaliningrad? How can an Italian politician explain to a 20 year old that they he or she has to follow in the footsteps of their grandfathers and fight again in the Don bend? The simple, logical solution is stick to NATO while developing a massive EU nuclear triad, to be used as the last resort, insurance policy mandated by India and China’s increasing ones. There is no doubt that the planet has reached the Malthusian Club of Rome limits, with explosive population growth outside the Western realms while global warming is unstoppable. If we’ll collectively avoid a nuclear war triggered by “some damned foolish thing” in the Eastern flank (Bismarck adapted), si vis pace para bellum.
Newer ways of protecting post Brexit need ro be located. Daniel Keohane's ' Two Sides of Europe's Defense Coin' is an admirable effort in that direction. In this event if Italy and Poland were to develop a strategic consensus for a European defense, much of Eorope's defense issue would be addressed. During my visit to Warsaw in 2001 I noted that Polish researchers were conducting independent research in areas inside and outside Europe(including Afghanistan).They were not accepting the German data, foe example. Given this background, the statement made by Polish Defense Minister is perhaps not ambitious at all.
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