On Wednesday 21 October, the European Parliament adopted a report by Radosław Sikorski (EPP, Poland) on the Implementation and governance of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) (464 votes in favour, 90 against, 137 abstentions), calling on the Member States participating in this PESCO to move from a strictly national vision of defence to a stronger European approach.
Stressing that no single Member State is capable of remedying the capability shortfalls identified, MEPs claim that PESCO should be “effectively used as an instrument to achieve sustainable and effective EU defence cooperation, improving the defence capabilities of participating Member States and interoperability as a common goal (...) in line with the ambition to increase the Union’s strategic autonomy”.
According to the Parliament, PESCO must be geared towards structuring projects with a real strategic European dimension, so as to strengthen the European defence industrial and technological base. MEPs also advocate grouping PESCO projects according to capacity and assessing their strategic importance.
While an agreement is still awaited within the EU Council, the European Parliament calls for the rules governing the participation of third parties in PESCO to be clarified “taking into account the importance of the Union’s decision-making autonomy and full reciprocity and bearing in mind that a case-by-case approach is more advantageous for the Union”.
By a margin of two votes (292 in favour, 290 against and 107 abstentions), MEPs also state that PESCO is a “ positive step” towards the realisation of a common EU defence strategy “to react in the event of an attack at the Union's borders and on its territory”.
The European Parliament considers that it is also necessary to ensure synergy and coherence between the different Union defence initiatives and operations and to increase the Union’s budgetary ambition for defence capability enhancement.
See the report: https://bit.ly/2TeRWxm (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)