The next step would be to actually set this new agency in motion. Nick Witney, who would become the first EDA Chief Executive in 2004, played a central role in that process. He shares his recollections of the period
: “During the second half of 2003, under the Italian presidency of the EU, a working group was convened in Brussels to make a reality of this and I was the British representative. As the deputy head of the UK
MoD’s strategic affairs directorate, I travelled to Brussels regularly in the second half of 2003 to meet with my counterparts.”
The consensus around the Agency was clearly still there, notably between Paris and London. “This may sound surprising now, considering that relations between the two countries really became tense after the strong
French opposition to the Iraq campaign in 2003. However, there was a clear agreement between London and Paris that an Agency would be a good thing and that we would make it happen, even if there was no clear
understanding at the time of what the exact role of the Agency should be, or its position on the institutional grid”, Nick Witney recalls. “The only thing we had was a half sentence from the Thessaloniki Council,
which served as a blank screen onto which different people projected different aspirations. The only way out was to establish a special project team, and this was decided in November 2003.”
The Agency Establishment Team (AET), was to finalise its report by April 2004 in order to submit it for approval by the Council during the summer. “The question then arose - who would head the team? London and Paris
each put forward their candidate, initiating a standoff that lasted two and a half months from November to late January - a period during which I sat on a packed suitcase in London. But meanwhile, time was running
out because the team was supposed to deliver its report at the end of April, and almost half the time was consumed doing nothing”, Witney points out. “I am not sure how the choice was finally made in my favour
but at the end of January the call came, and I moved immediately to Brussels. There I found waiting for me in the Kortenberg building a small office with a computer, a malfunctioning telephone, and a pile of
CVs.”
“From the CVs I quickly selected a team of about a dozen people”, Witney recalls. Accommodation was another issue and the AET finally found some open-plan space on the top floor of the Kortenberg building, home
of the EU CSDP structures. Working from there, the team had a constant relation with an ad hoc representative group of all EU Member States, which they met with every two weeks. “It was a useful interaction”,
Witney explains, “because it allowed us to reassure them but also to get their fingerprints on what we were doing to make sure they couldn’t repudiate it at the end”. The previous autumn’s efforts to progress
the Agency had focused on trying to draft its legal basis. The team’s approach was to concentrate instead on substance, working to develop a consensus on what exactly the Agency would do, and how it would do
it. While the British argued the Agency should mainly focus on capability development, the French pushed for a predominant armaments role. “Our job in a way was to demonstrate that the Agency was able to do
both, and moreover by doing both it could succeed better in each”, Nick Witney explains.
Reflecting this debate, the European Defence Agency name was finally adopted because “it was short, accurate, and unconstraining”, Witney says, and also because anything more specific could have been seen as trying
to push the Agency one way or another. By the end of April the team was able to submit its blue-print for the new institution, clearing the way for member state diplomats, skillfully guided by the Irish presidency,
to finalise the legal documentation.