European defence: about neighbours and distant friends

Increasingly, European countries are deepening cooperation between their armed forces in bilateral or regional clusters. In most cases the driving factor is a lack of money. Capitals are forced to cooperate in order to maintain capabilities which they would lose if they continued alone. It seems logical that decreased budgets would drive them to Evere or Schuman Square in Brussels to cooperate with the widest possible group of partners in the EU or NATO. However, while some progress is being made in the pooling and sharing projects of the European Defence Agency and in the smart defence programme of the Alliance, deeper defence cooperation at the level of the twenty-eight turns out to be cumbersome and painful, if not impossible. There are many reasons for the lack of substantial progress on capability development in the EU and NATO – beyond the often used logical argument that it is inherently more difficult to agree with a larger number of players than just with one or two partners.

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