Europeans acting together on the ground in Bosnia and Congo have made the EU’s security and defence ambitions “real and tangible, and it provides tremendous encouragement for people to think that it does make sense” to reorganise European defence procurement on a more collective basis, says Nick Witney, chief executive of the newly established European Defence Agency (EDA) to EurActiv.
He refused to join in the debate on whether Europe should spend more on defence: “A lot is made of the differences in the levels of expenditure on the two sides of the Atlantic. I generally regard that as a bit of an irrelevance. The US is a global hyper-power, and as far as I know, the EU does not aspire to that role. So why is it worrying with the Americans spending twice as much on defence?”
However, Witney does think that the low level of European spending on research and technology is problematic if Europe wants to maintain important defence industries of strategic value: “We should be worried that the Americans spend five times as much on defence research and technology than Europeans do.”
Witney also highlights a lack of European access to US defence markets: “The terms of transatlantic trade at the moment are not satisfactory, they are unequal. The very protectionist mood that you see running around particularly in the US congress, can’t be good for the Americans in the long run. Ultimately protectionism is self-defeating.“
While there is a broad European consensus that national defense procurement programs are no longer sustainable, Witney does not expect it will be “at all quick or easy to arrive at a position where a new EU regulation of defence is adopted”.
EDA is therefore in the process of considering parallel options such as an intergovernmental voluntary code of conduct that would speed up the effort towards greater liberalisation of defence procurement.
See the full interview.
