Riga, 19/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - The six-monthly informal meeting of EU defence ministers, which took place in Riga on 18-19 February, allowed an observation: no further developments have been made in Europe's common security and defence policy (CSDP), despite a European Council (in December 2013) that was supposed to breathe new life into this policy and the ever-increasing crises - in Ukraine and Libya, for example - at the very gates of the EU.
In Riga, in the three issues discussed by the ministers - preparation of the European Council of June 2015 that will be devoted to the CSDP, strategic communication and hybrid warfare, and engagement of EU battlegroups - no significant progress was made.
Summing up the meeting, French defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian highlighted one positive point: “Defence issues are now part of the regular roadmap for European Councils and that is a great step forward”. This step forward was confirmed by the ministers in Riga.
Why, however, choose to stress such a “step forward” when it seemed to have been achieved since the summit at the end of 2013 which, itself, set the date of June 2015 for taking stock of the CSDP? According to a diplomatic source, the reason is simple: some were calling for defence to be removed from the agenda of the June summit, deeming that there were not enough issues to discuss at that level. This possibility was ruled out and the European Council will, indeed, once again discuss defence but the failure to make progress on initiatives agreed in late 2013 was laid bare for all to see.
Ministers, then, got down to the task of looking for issues that will be put to the heads of state and/or government in four months' time. The one highlighted most in Riga was developing a new EU security strategy, the current version dating from 2003. There is consensus on both the need to launch the preparation process in June of this year and the inclusion of a foreign policy strand, as suggested by High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini. The timetable for a process such as this remains to be determined, however. Six months or more, a high-ranking European External Action Service (EEAS) official told EUROPE.
The debate held by ministers on strategic communication and hybrid warfare has direct links to the events currently taking place in Ukraine. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg took part in this debate because the NATO discussion on these two points is far ahead of the EU's, a diplomat said. It came as no surprise that ministers stressed the need for closer cooperation between the EU and NATO. Some member states, including Poland and the Baltic States, continue to argue for EU financial backing for an international television channel that would broadcast the news in Russian.
The final point discussed at the meeting was battlegroups, a sort of rapid reaction military force, which the EU could use in response to crises but that have not yet been deployed. The reason for this is political deadlock: the UK is opposed in principle to the use of battlegroups and the sharing of deployment costs has attracted only about 10% of what is required, according to France. How can this stalemate be broken? As Le Drian remarked, there has long been talk and, usually, “the more talk there is, the less is done”. The Riga meeting, once again, confirmed this rule: the debate was long on ideas but short on solutions. (Jan Kordys)