When Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel finally met after the German chancellor’s reelection, most EU leaders were relieved. Europe’s Franco-German engine was back.
Once Merkel settled in again—so the hope went—Berlin could finally offer answers to the proposals about the future of Europe that Macron had laid out since his own election in May 2017. Implementing these plans depended on German support and Franco-German agreement.
As it stands, Germany is hesitant about Macron’s ideas on eurozone reform. As for defense, things seem to be getting worse. Instead of providing the engine for EU defense, the Franco-German couple is struggling to find the necessary compromises that would allow them to move on and other Europeans to follow. This is a risk. European defense—in the EU and in other formats—will only take off if France and Germany agree on the next steps and push them forward.
Paris and Berlin are the indispensable leaders of, and the backbone for, European defense. Beyond political gravitas, they represent about 50 percent of military and industrial capabilities within the EU after Brexit and about 40 percent of those in wider Europe. This is not to be scoffed at.
Several projects agreed upon bilaterally last summer (including to jointly develop a (including to jointly develop a next-generation fighter jet) will—if they succeed—shape the face of European defense more significantly than PESCO, France’s European Intervention Initiative, or other currently resurfacing fancy initiatives, like the Northern Group.
Alternatively, if Berlin and Paris do not agree on the direction of European defense, 50 percent of Europe’s political, military, and industrial energy will go in different directions. Failing to find a compromise not only affects France and Germany, it endangers European defense as a whole. EU ambitions will be undermined. The EU will struggle to improve its military capacity to act. Fragmentation in European defense might increase.
There has been important momentum in European defense in recent months, with the first results being mainly the launch of PESCO, allowing participating EU states to cooperate more closely, and the European Defence Fund, to finance joint research and procurement.
What are needed now, after the enthusiastic rhetoric, are results.
Yet the interregnum between September 2017 and March 2018, when Germany was trying to form a government, has harmed the Franco-German axis. Voices critical of Franco-German cooperation from within—for example, the armed forces—gained influence. National preferences came to the forefront and fueled controversies in two main areas for European defense: capabilities and industries.
The big intellectual issue is that Germany’s normative preference for EU-based developments needs to be reconciled with Paris’s pragmatic approach, which sees the EU as just one framework for delivery among many.
Because of German lobbying, PESCO turned into an inclusive, political endeavor with the typical EU procedures and institutions that allowed as many EU states as possible to participate, rather than a defense-driven exercise that focuses on capabilities.
France preferred the opposite: an exclusive club of those really able and willing to contribute forces to operations. Such an ambitious and exclusive PESCO would have offered valuable support to the country’s overstretched forces and to European security in the south.
Disappointed with a Germanized PESCO, Paris is now shaping its European Intervention Initiative outside the EU—which, ironically, has the side effect of involving the UK.
The upshot is that the Europeans are faced with two competing options: cooperating within the EU or outside of it. If all goes well, all formats will be mutually reinforcing. If not, and the capable and the willing act outside of EU frameworks, they risk devaluing the union.
The choice of framework has wide political implications. It is about having security and politics within a single framework—the EU—or having security distinct from it. Whether this has to take place necessarily within the EU depends on whether you want to deliver institutional coherence or security.
And there’s another issue. It is about how to ensure Europe’s defense industrial future. France and Germany make up about 40 percent of the defense industry in Western and Central Europe.1 This is a great potential to drive Europe towards more strategic autonomy in the industrial realm: agreed Franco-German procurement projects could be the catalyst for European projects and for an innovative and competitive defense industry in Europe.
But this process is currently stalling. Berlin and Paris don’t agree on how to export jointly constructed products, be it tanks or aircrafts.
Exports outside Europe are crucial for the success of every envisaged project because the European market is too small. Current products from defense industrial cooperation—such as KANT, a merger between French and German land warfare equipment producers, or a future European fighter jet—need export regulations that both countries can accept.
France and Germany have similar export rules and procedures, but Germany is much more cautious than France and—even worse—has become very unpredictable in its practices. This has gone so far that even NATO allies, who Germany is politically obliged to support, get a “No” when procuring in Germany, without any proper explanation. This happened to Lithuania when it wanted to buy kit to support NATO deterrence in the Baltics.
This unpredictability also distracts French industrial and political partners to financially and politically invest in joint projects. They see no reason to embark on the development of joint fighters and tanks if they cannot be exported.
The point is that the Franco-German axis has not developed from common worldviews but it has generated compromises that the EU member states could buy into.
This is the particular dynamic of the Franco-German couple. Having opposite viewpoints is neither new nor need it be a problem. But it is the lack of willingness to find a compromise that might make Europe miss the momentum— a lose-lose-lose situation for both Berlin and Paris, and for Europe as a whole.
Claudia Major is a senior associate for international security at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and a member of Women in International Security (WIIS) Berlin. Christian Mölling is the research director at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).
1Authors’ calculation based on data from M.L Chagnaud, C. Mölling, T. Schütz, and A. von Voss’s article, “Arming Europe: the State of the European Defence Technololgical and industrial Base,” published in Strategic Autonomy and the Defence of Europe. On the Road to a European Army?, Dietz-Verlag, May 2017.
Comments(4)
That Lithuania was refused procurement of the Boxer IFVs they wanted us utter bollocks. The Lithuanian militaryvwanted them very quickly, directly from Bundeswehr stocks (to which the turret module would have to be added) to avoid the waiting time till ARTEC could deliver newly-produced vehicles, but the Bundeswehr declined as they have far too few of those themselves. Germany and France are looking at military force from very different POVs - in my opinion separate ventures are in this case much more likely to get anywhere than foul compromises which leave noone satisfied.
The world would be different if France and Germany would have found a way to coexist peacefully in the 1800’s; Napoleon, 1870, 1914, 1939 would be part of an alternate history, billions would be alive and wealthier in Europe and beyond (the hegemon of yore, the British Empire, is also part of this equation). Defense is a euphemism in today’s geopolitics, which is soon to become far more complicated because of seismic demographic changes as well as their effects on the biosphere. The article assumes that the wars of the late Anthropocene will be fought with antediluvian means such as fighter planes and steel tanks; for that Europe already has Obama’s ERI, which continues apace paid by the US taxpayer. First and foremost, it makes no sense that what we are used to call Western civilization is actually diluting resources in many directions, rather than focus on a coherent, collective geopolitical vision; a high impact kinetic military operations policy (there is no such thing as defense) would flow naturally in a complex world. It is very unfortunate, but the brutal reality is that without a nuclear triad there is no defense; this is exactly India’s approach, for example. The EU members have one right now (plus a limited French “force de frappe”, not negligible) provided by the US taxpayer under NATO, soon to be updated by the trillion-program launched by the Obama and Trump administrations. Neither Oberth nor Von Braun had in mind Vergeltungswaffe when they started their quest to the stars, but the weapons of the future will be hypersonic or underwater drones, nuclear tipped (worse, with C60); this could be combined with swarms of AI powered drones, not the peaceful ones at the Seoul Olympics opening. Second, it is strange that almost no electoral campaign, democratic or not, anywhere, talks about war; it is only after elections that the newly installed leaders call it defense; Obama’s speeches in Germany never mentioned Deveselu, just always best time to be alive, and a bright future. The notable exception is Russia, where the 2002 withdrawal of the ABM treaty by the Bush administration is always present in the public discussion, including the March 2018 long list of “end of life” weaponry. Even stranger, even after the Hawaii scare, no mentioning of any civil defense. European ingenuity has produced the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the jet engine, the atom bomb and antiprotons (CERN Antiproton Decelerator facility). It is time to produce peace.
Interesting article, but I think that the "big intellectual issue" the authors mention is not Germany's normative preference vs. France's pragmatic approach. It is what President Macron calls in his Sorbonne speach a "common strategic culture" for Europe, which he says is lacking. And he is right. This question has been discussed many times, but never made it into some sort of manageable concept. Macron proposes a "Refoundation of the European Union", which means his idea for a "European Intervention Initiative" is not meant to be outside the EU, but part of a renovated EU. Here is the challenge: Is Germany --and others-- ready and willing to include "strategic culture" into a renovated union? If so, debates about PESCO and EII, about strategic autonomy and European sovereignty need to be part of a more comprehensive debate abot the future of the EU - now; if not, we still need to discuss what shape the EU shall take in the future, if strategic thinking is to be left outside, but also, how we want to organize European capability to act, which is what our governments declare they want to achieve, absent an institutional framework. Both, normative and pragmatic elements need to be taken into account, if Europe --or shouldn't we insist on saying the European Union?-- is to achieve some kind of strategic autonomy. The authors are right calling upon France and Germany to find a compromise on these fundamental issues. But stating a "lack of willingness" doesn't help, and there might not even be a lack of willingness, at least when one listens to and reads official declarations. The challenge for both nations is how to create a political dynamic, both within each nation and among them, but also eventually at the EU level, which enable them ot overcome the differences in their strategic and political cultures. This will be crucial and it won't happen over night, but it needs strong political leadership. For now, Macron offers such leadership, but it still needs to be complemented by German counterparts.
If there is something the peoples of Europe always had is a common strategic culture: internecine war for millennia, including many failed peace conferences; the war started in 1914 still rages around us, the old empires rise and fall and rise back. After gifting humanity with so many means of destruction, culminating with the jet and rocket engines, as well as fusion bombs, it was time for Europe to lead in peace. The pictures of Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Coventry, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz in 1945 should have been the warning to preclude Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut in our time. France and Germany have a combined military budget close to $100 billion/year, while Russia’s is close to $70 billion. It is inconceivable that just the two of them would have any difficulty in fighting and winning any war in Europe, with additional aerial and naval support from the US, MAD included (the UK might also participate), with or without ERI. Everything gets far more complicated in the future. Whichever way the EU NATO members would like to put it, NATO is not just for the US to protect Europe against Russia. Obama’s pivot to Asia, combined with the developments in the South China Sea have now crystalized China in the 2017 NSS as a new strategic competitor. It has also defined a new region, Indo-Pacific, where India, super hyper power in waiting, is carefully calibrating policies and alliances; Pakistan complicates the dynamics of the system. All this is superimposed on economics, SCO, and yuan denominated oil futures challenging Bretton-Woods, and BRI/AIIB, as well as gas pipelines from Nord Stream II to the Russia-India and China ones. Moreover, the population growth combined with climate change in Africa could create additional waves of refugees; Middle East doesn’t appear will stabilize soon. It is actually hard to believe that just one million refugees affected the EU at the present level. These are geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges which could trigger unexpected escalations of the already tense interactions. The next question is of course when the political dialogue in Europe will include military matters, in a comprehensive way. Hungary and Poland will complicate an EU trying to recover after the Brexit blow. Common culture or not, the EU will need to move beyond nice acronyms like PESCO and new bureaucratic endeavor, and not just in military matters.
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