The European Commission announced, in a press release issued after the weekly meeting of the College of Commissioners on Wednesday 30 November, a proposal following on from Jean-Claude Juncker’s suggestion of setting up a European defence fund. This initiative, first raised in the State of the Union speech in Strasbourg on 14 September, becomes then the centrepiece of the defence action plan that has been more than a year in the making.
The communication sets out an architecture comprising a coordination mechanism which will bring together the member states, the high representative for foreign affairs and defence policy, the European Defence Agency and the European Commission, with industry possibly being associated. This “Coordination Board” will be responsible for identifying priorities in the areas of research and common defence capabilities.
The research “window” will involve promoting collaborative activities in response to needs identified by, for example, work carried out by the European Defence Agency. The first step will be the launch in 2017 of a Preparatory Action on Defence Research, with a budget of €90 million. The Commission also says it will propose a specific defence research programme in the post-2020 research framework programme. Accepting the recommendation of the high-level group which worked on this issue in 2015, it says it will propose annual funding of €500 million, or a total of €3.5 billion if the framework programme runs for seven years.
The capability window will depend fully on the goodwill of member states. The Commission speaks of a target of €5 billion per year in funding but this will be made up of voluntary contributions from member states, targeted at procurement projects that are financially independent of one another. Funding from the EU budget could, however, be used to pay for the secretariat of the fund and for possible projects on dual capabilities. No figure has been suggested but the Commission pledges to explore the potential of contributions from the general budget. In order to encourage the idea among the member states, the Commission says that capability financing through the European Defence Fund will be discounted from the structural fiscal effort imposed by the stability and growth pact.
The action plan, which also speaks of unlocking new opportunities for SMEs through extension of EIB lending facilities, use of structural funds and of the structural investment fund in the defence sector and of measures in the areas of satellite communications and maritime surveillance, will be discussed by the European Council at its meeting in mid-December. More detailed information can be found in our sister publication Europe Diplomacy and Defence. (Original version in French by Olivier Jehin)