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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 05/04
European armament cooperation Core documents
Burkard Schmitt
April 2003
Since it was relaunched at St-Malo- and, as from 1999, included among the European Union's legitimate areas of competence- European defense has followed two quite distinct routes forward. It has followed a high road of intergovernmental cooperation thanks to the quite spectacular rapprochement among the 15 on the Union's responsibility for crisis management and the need to give it a minimum of military capability to do this. The low road has followed a market logic as a result of equally spectacular industrial restructuring that has in particular transformed the aerospace sector in Europe. Yet between these two paths there has been a gaping chasm: the absence of a common European armaments policy. Not that member states have failed to take a certain number of initiatives: OCCAR and the LoI demonstrate the political determination of governments that are most concerned to preserve a truly competitive European industry. But when it has come to their national defense industries, the same states have always preferred to act outside the European Union, through ad hoc collaboration and different institutional frameworks, systematically excluding armaments questions from the Union's legitimate areas of competence.
