FRANCE:FRENCH DEFENCE minister Hervé Morin announced an ambitious strategy to increase the EU's military capabilities yesterday during his country's presidency of the union, writes Jamie Smythin Paris.
He also said France had no hidden agenda to undermine Nato and pledged that it would rejoin the organisation's military command structure.
"Any hesitation expressed by some states in the past that there was a hidden agenda to undermine Nato [by developing EU defence] is gone . . . that contradiction has been overcome," said Mr Morin in a speech to members of the European People's Party and European Democrats group in Paris.
Mr Morin said he had toured EU capitals and had found a real consensus emerging and a will to relaunch EU defence. He said states in central and eastern Europe, which had joined the western military alliance, were now viewing EU defence as a priority issue.
Under its presidency France will push to update the European security strategy - the key policy document that sets out the goals and limitations for European security and defence policy. Mr Morin said this should move from being a mere intellectual exchange to a rigorous analysis of security and also demonstrate the need to build EU military capabilities.
He said EU states should be invited to develop a network of surveillance satellites and build a common fleet of aircraft carriers that the EU could draw on to transport aircraft as support for troops deployed on missions.
The US spends six times as much as the EU on research of military technologies, he said, and there was a need to redress this balance so Europe would not fall further behind. The EU also needs to develop further joint training exercises to enable troops to communicate and work together more efficiently. One idea that France will push during its presidency is for a military Erasmus-type scheme where troops can train in other EU states.
German secretary of state for defence Christian Schmidt acknowledged that the Irish vote against the Lisbon treaty had caused the defence agenda to slip somewhat.
But he said the principle should still remain that some EU member states could choose to move ahead with policies while others wouldn't have to. President of the European Parliament Hans Gert Pöttering told delegates it was important that neutral states would not be forced to move ahead on EU defence unless they chose to do so.