Finland has been supporting EU defence cooperation for a long time. A lot has been achieved over the years, including the creation of the European Defence Agency (EDA) 15 years ago.
EDA was established to support Member States in their efforts to improve European crisis management capabilities and to sustain the European Security and Defence Policy as it stands now and develops in the future. The Agency’s agenda has grown rapidly ever since. The Agency is now the main intergovernmental platform for European level capability planning. For us in Finland, EDA is also the main European forum for defence materiel cooperation.
What is important for us is that EDA combines different working areas: the development of defence capabilities and defence materiel cooperation, the strengthening of defence technology and industry foundations, and the promotion of research and technology cooperation in the defence sector. This is a quite unique combination.
Many new EU defence initiatives have been launched recently. We see EDA’s biggest value in concrete capability projects and activities such as cyber defence and military mobility.
For a relatively small country such as Finland, cooperation with other Member States is crucial.
Looking at EDA’s work in the Research and Technology (R&T) domain, we can say that it has definitely been of added value for us. We have saved resources through cooperation and have also learned valuable lessons from other Member States. Participation in the European defence research and development serves the defence research needs of Finland. Cooperation between Finland and EDA has offered benefits such as broader and more in-depth views on research problems and support networking with other European cooperation partners.
Another good example is the cooperation under the Agency’s helicopter training programme where EDA has done excellent work. Our NH-90 pilots are very satisfied and now perform major parts of their basic training at these EDA courses.
We in Finland are also happy with EDA’s role as a coordinator of military views in wider EU policies, as the combined voice of many is more effective than the voice of every single one.
The European Commission has taken new initiatives in defence matters. While welcoming and strongly supporting the actions taken by the Commission, we also very much value the intergovernmental nature of EDA. In our view, there is a need for such cooperation format amongst EU Defence Ministers.
As regards EDA’s current activities, I would like to highlight three of them in particular. EDA’s roles in the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (CARD) as well as in the EU Capability Development Plan (CDP).