This week, the IHEDN is hosting a module in Paris on the 19th.e High-level course on the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), organised by the European Security and Defence College. This is an opportunity to take a closer look at the CSDP, an important but little-known tool for the general public, which is part of a long-standing desire to build a European defence.
1948, 1949: these two years were fundamental to European defence as it exists today. On 17 April 1948, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France signed the Treaty of Brussels, founding Western Union (UO), which aimed to establish military, economic, social and cultural cooperation between these states. It also included a mutual defence clause. Less than a year later, on 4 April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was born. Three quarters of a century later, the European Union's CSDP, a distant descendant of the UO, is still closely linked to NATO.
These two entities were born in a tense context: the end of the Second World War, the start of the Cold War, and soon the Korean War... After the failure of the project to create a European army under NATO command within the framework of the European Defence Community (EDC) in 1954, the Atlantic Alliance appeared to be the preferred solution of the EU Member States for their common defence. This has not prevented them from developing common tools.
A CAPABILITIES, OPERATIONAL AND INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s led the EU to significantly strengthen its defence capability. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union on the basis of three "pillars", including the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Within this framework, the Treaty of Nice in 2001 launched the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), which was succeeded by the CSDP following the Treaty of Lisbon, signed in 2007.
Placed under the authority of the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, currently the Spaniard Josep Borrell, the CSDP represents a major step forward in the construction of a European defence. From 2016 onwards, it will be further consolidated when the European Council validates the Union's overall strategy. Three areas have been identified for further development:
- Capabilities: a coordinated annual defence review has been introduced: by examining Member States' defence plans, it aims to improve coordination between them. Above all, permanent structured cooperation (PSC) now enables members who so wish to develop joint projects;
- Operational: creation of a military capability to operate and lead and, for those members who wish to do so, a European intervention initiative; the EU Battlegroups, created in 2007, could be the instrument for this;
- Industrial and financial: adoption of the european defence action planaimed at strengthening the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB).
24 OPERATIONS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY
Since 2021, the EU has also been working on setting up a strategic compass. The CSDP now has a military committee (EUMC), a military staff (EUMS) and a number of other bodies, including the European Defence Agency (EDA), the European Defence Fund (attached to the Commission), an Institute for Security Studies (ISS), an intelligence agency (the European Union Situation and Intelligence Centre) and even a satellite agency (the European Union Satellite Centre). At present, no fewer than 24 CSDP operations are underwayincluding 10 strictly military and one civil-military, in Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Libya, the Red Sea, Somalia, Mozambique...
The fact remains that of the 27 members of the EU (all of whom have been involved in CSDP since Denmark joined in 2022), 23 are also members of NATO. However, "in a context of war in Europe, a war of Russian aggression waged "under a nuclear umbrella", the intuition of the vast majority of Member States is to become more involved within NATO", notes Johanna Möhring, associate researcher at the Centre Thucydide at the University of Paris II-Panthéon Assas and at the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies (CASSIS) at the University of Bonn (Germany). They therefore intend to "strengthen its military capabilities, despite the potential fragility of the United States' nuclear and conventional security guarantee at the heart of the Alliance".
This trend is also reflected at the EDTIB, according to the researcher: "Despite new initiatives and financial incentives to encourage arms procurement and investment in European defence, there has been a decline in joint procurement between Europeans, and a spectacular increase in acquisitions of non-European armaments, particularly American, in recent years".
JOHANNA MÖHRING: "THE KEY ISSUE AT THE MOMENT IS THE DEFENCE INDUSTRY".
While some experts predict that a Donald Trump election in November would push EU members to strengthen CSDP, Johanna Möhring disagrees: "A Trump 2 presidency will further increase European efforts to invest in NATO."
For her, the most crucial issue remains the industrial dimension: "The central issue at the moment is the defence industry, which will determine our ability to act autonomously in the future. A lot therefore depends on a dynamic that seizes existing and future EU tools and on support from key capitals for a European defence industrial policy, which is far from a certainty.
In the meantime, notes the researcher, the EU's "deterrence and conventional defence" are "exclusively conceived within the NATO framework".
