On Monday 30 June, Benedetta Berti, Director of Policy Planning in NATO’s Office of the Secretary General, highlighted areas in which cooperation between the EU and NATO could be strengthened.
“It is clear that it would be foolish not to work together, because we are really working towards the same goal and we are distinct tools, but complementary in many ways”, she stressed at a seminar on the EU strategic defence and security partnerships, organised by Michal Szczerba (EPP, Polish).
Benedetta Berti said that obstacles to industrial cooperation should be removed, “because we have a transatlantic defence base and we want to remain interoperable and operationally effective”. “We also have our own demand aggregation process, but the EU has the financial tools to increase and accelerate (the development of) the defence industrial base”, she explained. And she added that “continuing and strengthening cooperation in the defence industry is an absolute priority”.
Ms Berti also considered that cooperation on critical infrastructures - transport, energy, digital and civil satellites - was very important and that there was already “a real synergy” between the two organisations.
The NATO representative said she hoped as well that information sharing between the EU and the Alliance would continue to progress. “Of course, we have our own rules of engagement. (...) but I think that at the level of exchanges between the staff of the organisations, incredible progress has been made in trying to share systematically what we can share and to make cooperation and information sharing the norm rather than the exception”, she emphasised.
In addition to cooperation with NATO, the EU is developing partnerships with third countries. It has signed eight strategic defence and security partnerships in the space of a year, and a ninth, with Australia, is in the pipeline. Others will follow, said Guillem Riutord Sampol, Head of Division for ‘Peace, Security and Defence Partnerships’ at the European External Action Service, who announced that there could be some with African and Latin American countries. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)