For years, the EU’s security environment has continued to deteriorate. To Europe’s South, European efforts to project stability in Mali and the wider Sahel region have not met with the hoped-for successes. The crises in Syria and Libya have gone into their second decade, but Europeans have barely been relevant actors in the efforts to settle them. The Afghanistan mission has failed, and the chaotic withdrawal has painfully illustrated Europe’s total military dependence on the United States. Simultaneously, great power competition between the US and China has emerged as the dominant factor of international politics. Faced with all these developments, the gap between the EU's global ambitions and its actual influence has grown. It has long been clear that the EU and its Member States need to adapt their security and defence policy to new realities to shape international developments rather than being shaped by them.
Right time
Putin’s war has now put an end to all effort to integrate Russia into the European security order. For the foreseeable future Europe’s task will be to deter Moscow’s aggression and to manage a long-term confrontational relationship with the Kremlin in close alliance with the United States. In response to Putin’s war, many states across Europe have decided to turn their security and defence policies upside down. Many will significantly increase their defence spending. Denmark just held a successful referendum on ending the CSDP opt-out, Sweden and Finland want to join NATO.
To react to these developments, the EU’s Strategic Compass comes at just the right time. Although it cannot provide a full answer to the war in Ukraine, which it was never intended to do, it offers a concrete roadmap for developing the tools that the EU needs to finally become a more forceful actor in European defence and security. With its deliverables, it sets the direction that European Member States must now take.
No alternative to NATO
The biggest obstacle on the way to a stronger EU has always been that there is little consensus on what the overall ambition of the EU should be – especially in relation to NATO. Member States differ in their judgement of which organisation should form the central framework for European sovereignty. This became particularly evident during the Trump years when Europeans engaged in a divisive debate about the need for more “strategic autonomy”. Luckily, the Strategic Compass is in no way trying to position the EU as an alternative to NATO. On the contrary, the emphasis on the need for constructive cooperation between the two organisations is a recurring theme throughout the document.
Two aspects are particularly important. First, the division of labour between the EU and NATO and both organisations' own aspirations have become more distinct. The Compass takes a clear position and attributes the role of Europe's collective defence clearly to NATO while the EU’s focus is on crisis management. At the same time, however, the Compass also states that the EU can and should play a role as crucial enabler of a stronger European defence.
Invest more and better
The biggest contribution to this is the commitment by EU Member States to invest more and better in defence capabilities and innovative technologies. In view of the large sums that the individual Member States will invest in defence in the coming years, the incentives which the Compass suggests (Commission / EDA report on collective investment gaps, VAT waiver, more money for the European Defence Fund…) to spend the money better and in a more coordinated manner are urgently needed. Given that European citizens are already very burdened by inflation and increased energy and food prices, Member States will have to work even harder to achieve more efficiency at less cost if they want to ensure that societies sustain high defence spending in the long run.
The main aim must be to jointly procure and develop military capabilities in the EU framework that can also bolster NATO's deterrence and defence capacity. Increased efforts in the field of military mobility will also benefit European defence, just like the planned measures to increase European resilience.