Ten years since the eruption of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014, with Moscow’s future ambitions far from clear, the European Union debates whether to coordinate efforts to reinforce military capacity on the continent of Europe. In 2024, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, proposed that the EU should finance weapons procurement by its member states and establish a new special commissioner to oversee it.
It’s rooted in reality: most EU states have done very little in the last two years to build up their defenses, even while being generous with aid to Ukraine. Europeans have had a long “peace dividend” since the end of the Cold War, which has let their military forces and industries wither. Von der Leyen’s initiative might also be a response to the way that Europe’s lazy defense spending has become a talking point in recent American electoral politics.
The proposal has run into opposition from European governments and defense industries, which are wary of seeing a greater role for Brussels or another EU commissioner. The European defense sector is starkly fragmented, with national governments fighting tooth and nail for their national companies and employment structures. The fragmentation goes back to the Cold War when, in contrast to the Warsaw Pact allies doing Moscow’s bidding, NATO allies could not agree even on the most basic standards.
The American defense industry has downsized and consolidated since the Cold War, while European firms have remained national champions cosseted from competition on their continent. Many therefore fear that von der Leyen’s initiative might introduce rationality into European defence procurement, at the cost of job losses and company closures.
The bottom line in most cases on European defense procurement is one of money, not security. Even if Putin threatened to send tanks to the Atlantic, most European governments would still fall back upon the United States and remain paralyzed by the high cost of serious weapons. While most of those, Finland, Turkey, the Netherlands, and France, would likely increase their defense spending, others may now recoil at the idea of restoring force structures to former levels, citing concerns over diverting funds from other EU programs like healthcare.
Moreover, the defense industry is suspicious of just another bureaucracy in Brussels when the European Defence Agency and NATO mechanisms are already in place for weapons programs. Industry leaders have enough to negotiate with within their governments and would not stomach another level of decision-making in Brussels’ bureaucratic quagmire.