Ester Sabatino & Tim Lawrenson
In December 2013 – just months before Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014 – the European Council’s conclusions on defence clearly stated that ‘defence matters’ and called on European Union countries to increase capability-development cooperation, invest in the defence supply chain and reinforce the market in view of the changing international environment. Following this, the EU began to put forward initiatives aimed at strengthening the defence capabilities and industries of its members.
The fact that the EU still faces the same challenges today raises questions about the effectiveness of the initiatives that were proposed by the European Council and related efforts to deliver change.
Tentative steps: 2014–21The first moves aimed at strengthening EU defence capabilities involved both political initiatives and the launch of small EU-funded instruments dedicated to defence-industrial activities. Political action began with a series of European Commission policy papers and plans, the publication of the EU Global Strategy in 2016 and the activation of the long-dormant Permanent Structured Cooperation in 2017. Meanwhile, the European Defence Agency (EDA) attempted to coordinate national defence capability planning cycles through the Capability Development Plan and launched the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence to try to identify avenues for capability cooperation.
No comments:
Post a Comment