"The EU's relationship with power is being turned upside down".

Could the tragedy in Ukraine have more than just disastrous effects? Pierre Haroche assures us: "The European Union's relationship with power is being turned upside down". According to this expert on EU defence policy, this upheaval goes back further than the war raging on our continent: it has its origins in the changing balance of power. "The economy is now central to the competition between the world's powers, particularly the US and China. So it is not the EU - whose main strength is its market - that has become powerful, but the other way round, because economic instruments have become central to international competition".

The war would appear to be one of the first signs of this change: "Economic and financial sanctions can be seen as the first affirmation of this power; they are typically geo-economic instruments".explains Pierre Haroche. The turning point, "One of the most memorable moments of the war was when the President of the United States, Joe Biden, declared (even before the Russian offensive began) that there would be no involvement of American troops in the conflict. With these military options ruled out from the outset, the United States, like all NATO members, had to find other options to help the Ukrainians. Initially, this support came in the form of initiatives by individual countries (notably the United States and the United Kingdom) to deliver equipment and train Ukrainian soldiers.says Pierre Haroche. And to help provide this support, the European Union has decided to use a new instrument at its disposal: the European Peace Facility (EPF)".

The EFF, a European extra-budgetary fund, was created last year by the EU to improve its ability to "prevent conflicts, consolidate peace and strengthen international security". "It was conceived as a means of supplementing the military training offered by the European Union (through the delivery of equipment, for example). In particular, it was a response to the need not to hand over to the Russians the soldiers trained in the Sahel or Somalia. The creation of this fund gave rise to a great deal of debate within the Member States - many of them wanted the European Union to confine itself to the civilian sphere in these conflicts, and not to supply arms to sulphurous actors". After Russia invaded Ukraine, "In the eyes of Europeans, the EFF has become an appropriate instrument, particularly for retroactively reimbursing contributing Member States". Pierre Haroche assures us: " A review is currently underway to make this mechanism even more effective".

"What is noteworthy is that the European Union has managed to play an interesting role in a crisis that seemed to have been made for NATO (a territorial crisis involving Russia). ". For Pierre Haroche, the second key point is "is the strengthening of European defence. He was referring to the decision taken by NATO leaders at the Madrid summit in June to transform the Alliance's Response Force, increasing the number of high-readiness troops to more than 300,000. "Implementing this objective, in terms of conventional deterrence and NATO's defence posture, necessarily involves a major effort on the part of Europeans. But there is also an industrial and capability aspect, by strengthening Member States' arsenals: the European Union can complement national policies".says Pierre Haroche.

 The previous Ukrainian crisis led to the creation of the European Defence Fund, which enabled the development of military prototypes to be financed from the EU budget.. "This was a major institutional and financial innovation at the time. The current debate is about how to use these instruments (or even create new ones) to acquire weapons more directly. A conceptual step was taken during this crisis: the European Union has set itself the ambition of being able to support, including financially, the armament of Member States. In the long term, this move could have far-reaching implications for cooperation, interoperability and European integration in general. Finally, this high-intensity crisis, because it is equipment-intensive, can also give the European Union an interesting role as an industrial player".

La strategic compassCan the first White Paper on European defence set the framework for these ambitions? "The strategic compass is the culmination of a process of reflection that began well before the Russian offensive in Ukraine.says Pierre Haroche. Its creation was prompted by NATO's departure from Kabul in the summer of 2021. Europeans had been marked by the hasty departure of the Americans from Afghanistan. They had (once again) realised how little room for manoeuvre they had when they were backed into a corner by the United States". The idea was to create tools enabling the EU to conduct similar operations autonomously (rescue missions, extradition of European nationals to a foreign theatre). "This ambition may have made sense in 2021, but the war in Ukraine has changed the order of priorities".says Pierre Haroche.

The European Union needs to focus less on its operational complementarity and more on the role it can play in the industrial and financial spheres. " It can use its economic and financial clout to serve Europe's strategic interests. It needs to strengthen the instruments at its disposal, to go further than the EFF (which allows a cheque for 500 million euros to be sent to Member States from time to time to reimburse arms deliveries), which is reaching its limits. The EU needs tools that give it medium-term visibility on the financing of its defence - remember the 40 billion euro envelope allocated to the Ukrainians voted by the US Congress in May. This budget could enable Member States to make joint purchases, which would be beneficial in terms of economies of scale and interoperability. Other types of pooling are also conceivable, such as equipment maintenance, training and force training. In Pierre Haroche's view, the EU would then have a role to play. "decisive".