The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019 Europe 51T
wenty yearsago George Robertson, then the head of nato,
mocked the European Union. Noting the eu’s lack of guns and
fondness for complex organisational charts, he quipped: “You
cannot send a wiring diagram to a crisis.” In an interview with The
Economist published on November 7th, Emmanuel Macron,
France’s president, flipped the charge. natowas experiencing
“brain-death”, he said, and America might not show up to defend it
in a crisis. But Europe “has the capacity to defend itself”, he insist-
ed. Since then, the debate about what Europe ought to do for itself,
and how that might affect nato, has raged in public and private.
Mr Macron has some support for his crusade to beef up Eu-
rope’s powers. “Both the willingness and ability to do more than its
fair share are dwindling in the United States,” warned Annegret
Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister and Angela Mer-
kel’s successor as leader of the governing cduparty, in a speech
that day. Europe could be strong “if we want it to be, and if we re-
move the obstacles in our way”. There has been no shortage of wir-
ing diagrams, and even some action. Ursula von der Leyen, presi-
dent-elect of the European Commission and previously German
defence minister, wants “bold steps in the next five years towards a
genuine European Defence Union”. To that end, Thierry Breton,
France’s new commissioner for the single market, will be double-
hatted as director-general for the defence industry and space. He
will preside over a European Defence Fund which will devote
€13bn ($14.4bn) over seven years to boosting research and stitching
together the continent’s fragmented defence industry.
That follows an alphabet soup of initiatives, cooked up over the
past few years. A scheme known as Permanent Structured Co-op-
eration (pesco) was initiated in 2017 and now includes almost
four-dozen projects that span the prosaic (a Eurodrone), the cos-
mic (a space-surveillance network) and the cloak-and-dagger (a
school for spooks, run by Greece and Cyprus). In 2018 Mr Macron
spearheaded the creation of a European Intervention Initiative
(e 2 i), a more exclusive club of 14 countries—including some from
outside natoand the eu—that will jointly plan for future crises,
with the aim of producing a “common strategic culture”.
Europeans are even pooling sovereignty in areas once guarded
jealously by states. On November 8th the eudecided to put the
European Border and Coast Guard (also known as Frontex) on ste-
roids. It will grow from 1,300 secondees to a standing corps of
10,000, with a 26% jump in funding next year, to €421m. For the
first time, the euwill be able to dispatch gun-toting men and wom-
en clad in euuniforms to patrol its fringes, without asking mem-
ber-states to cough up guards.
Yet for all this activity, there is a provisional quality to the rising
edifice of European defence. Europeans see the storms coming
and know they must build. But what the final structure should
look like, and what its purpose ought to be, is left to another day.
Mr Macron’s intervention was intended to inject a sense of urgen-
cy into these questions, but its effect has been to widen the cracks.
In her speech on November 7th, Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer re-
peated the customary pieties of Franco-German comity. But on No-
vember 17th she spoke with more candour. Whereas her own aim
was to strengthen Europe’s “ability to act” in support of nato, “the
French are seeking strong European co-operation to replace
nato,” she said. Whether that is true or not, it reflects mistrust of
French intentions. Germany wants a stronger Europe to work
through euinstitutions. Mr Macron finds these plodding and inef-
fective; hence his resort to extra-natocoalitions like e 2 i, a project
to which Germany signed up with gritted teeth.
A more serious disagreement concerns the severity of Europe’s
predicament. Mr Macron cast doubt on whether President Donald
Trump would honour Article 5, the promise that an attack on one
natomember will be treated as an attack on all. That fear is com-
monplace in think-tanks and chancelleries across Europe. But in
most countries doubt has not yet slipped into fatalism. In a poll in
2018 majorities in all nine European countries surveyed said that
America would come to the aid of Europeans if they were at-
tacked—including 60% in France. Mr Macron believes there is lit-
tle to lose; Germans, and those in uneasy proximity to Russia, like
Poland, realise how much further damage Mr Trump could do to
natoif Europeans provoke him.Steady on
To talk down natowithout a safety-net in place is negligent. Yet
for all the talk of a European army, the continent’s current schemes
and spending will not—and are not intended to—plug an America-
sized hole. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer’s speech was full of exhorta-
tion for Germany to do more. But her answer to when Germany
would meet nato’s target of spending 2% of gdpon defence was
dismaying: in 12 years’ time, and that is not settled policy. The
cdu’s Social Democrat partners object to a budget boost that would
turn Germany into the third-biggest military spender in the world.
Even beyond Germany, the share of European defence spend-
ing devoted to science and technology has dropped by over a third
since 2016. And while new defence schemes may eventually build
habits of co-operation, it will take time. Chasing pirates and train-
ing Malian soldiers is one thing. Fighting Russia is completely dif-
ferent. Even Mr Macron’s pet project, e 2 i, was last year cruelly
dubbed “Erasmus for soldiers” by Nick Witney, a former head of
the European Defence Agency, after a student-exchange pro-
gramme. Mr Macron’s willingness to move fast and break things is
predicated on the fear that natomight collapse sooner rather than
later. His fellow leaders worry that pressing the panic button may
hasten that collapse, by deepening Europe’s own fissures and anta-
gonising Mr Trump. “The Plan B Macron is now actively pushing is
being rejected by at least half of Europe,” says Ulrich Speck of the
German Marshall Fund. “The hedge is becoming the wedge.” 7Charlemagne Hedges and wedges
European defence is picking up speed, without agreeing on a destination