It has been a decade since Moscow launched its war against Ukraine and two years since the latest invasion of its western neighbor, and now, with Russia’s future ambitions uncertain, the European Union thinks of coordinating efforts for strengthening Europe’s military capacity. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed that the EU subsidize weapons procurement by member states and create a new special commissioner to oversee this effort.
That is a reflection of the reality that most EU states have done very little in the past two years to shore up their own defenses, while consistently being generous with munitions and money for Ukraine. As von der Leyen put it, “Europeans enjoyed a long ‘peace dividend’ after the end of the Cold War and allowed not only their force structures but also their military industries to atrophy.”
It also reflects her ambition to obtain a second mandate as president of the Commission. She can underline her experience as German Minister of Defense from 2013 to 2019, even if what she did in that role was close to nil. The initiative is also conceived as a response to the recent focus on Europe’s negligence towards defense spending coming from American electoral politics.
However, the proposal received mostly hostile reactions from European governments and defense industries. There, while they might agree to more significant defense spending, they are not interested in a greater role for Brussels or another EU commissioner. Defense is a highly fragmented sector in Europe, with national governments fiercely protecting respective companies and employment structures.
Incompatible weapons systems were a nightmare during the Cold War. It took the United States years to get even its European allies to agree on basic standards in communications technology and weapons calibers. Moscow could assign its own standards to Warsaw Pact members.
These differences are still with us today. The American defense industry has shrunk massively since the Cold War, but every major European defense company is still considered a “national champion” that should be protected from competition elsewhere in Europe. Company executives are fearful that von der Leyen’s initiative may introduce a logical procedure into European defense purchasing, with the risk of lost jobs and lost companies.
Money, not security, remains the basic question of European defense procurement. Even if Russian President Vladimir Putin went on television to promise he would send his tanks to the Atlantic as soon as he was done overrunning Ukraine, not all European governments would scramble to ready their defenses. A few, like Finland, Turkey, the Netherlands, and France probably would. But most would carry on as usual, counting on the United States to protect them and paralyzed by the expense of serious weapons.
It may make Europeans willing to contribute to Kyiv’s needs recoil at restoring their own force structures to Cold War levels. The immediate response to von der Leyen’s proposal has been that it would divert funds from other EU programs, like healthcare.
More to the point, few if any in the defense business want to be forced to answer to another bureaucracy in Brussels. There is already a European Defense Agency within the EU mechanism, and another inside NATO to coordinate weapons programs. All the industry bosses are already dealing enough with their own governments, and most definitely would not appreciate another layer in Brussels, another decision-making layer in Brussels, which they would not welcome at all.
Whereas many European countries desperately need to restore their force structures and defense industries, they are having to do it in a shorter time frame than it would take to set up an EU-wide procurement system and czar, let alone change the funding priorities of the bloc. It makes von der Leyen’s grand plan more of a wish list than doable in reality.