On Thursday 5 March, Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said that Europeans needed a common strategic culture.
“We Europeans need a common strategic culture”, he explained at the end of the informal Defence Council meeting in Zagreb. “We come from different historical backgrounds and perceive threats in different ways, but we need to understand that the threat is indivisible. This requires a deep understanding of the dangerous world we live in”, he added.
For that reason, the EU is working on creating a “strategic compass”. The document will “cover crisis management, capability instruments and tools, partners, and protection and resilience”, according to Borrell. “It will take a couple of years to develop this new initiative, which will focus on identifying the main challenges and threats we will face, and how we might use our capabilities to address them”, the High Representative explained.
To achieve its goals, the EU will also need to have the necessary resources. “We must have the resources to match our ambitions. We cannot say we want to create a defence policy and have a presence in the Sahel and elsewhere without having the budgetary resources to develop our capabilities”, stressed Borrell. He said that the defence ministers had expressed concern about the proposed budget cuts for defence in the next multiannual financial framework. For example, the latest proposal from the European Commission proposal, which was rejected by the Member States, suggested abolishing all of the funds used for military mobility, despite the €6 billion originally proposed, and the proposed funding of the European Peace Facility was restricted to €4.5 billion, down from €10 billion in the original proposal. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)