Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and his sub-committee on this excellent and extraordinarily timely report. Let us face it: as others have said before me, the report paints a pretty gloomy picture. The financial crisis that we have been living through since 2008 and which has, alas, a long way to run, is wreaking havoc with the defence budgets of all our member states. Many of the early hopes of European defence co-operation have tended to wither on the vine.

The divisions over Libya are fresh in the mind, although I tend to feel that they are exaggerated. The German vote in the Security Council was a gross error: that is clear. Had the Germans merely voted with those authorising the operation but made it clear that they would not participate themselves, we would now be talking about a great European success in Libya. Perhaps we should not dwell on that too much.

You can add to that rather gloomy picture the point that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made—and I entirely agree with him—that whoever wins the American election, the Americans will not be back in Europe in force in the way that they were. The pivot towards Asia is there to stay. Romney or Obama will expect the Europeans to do more for themselves in their immediate region. We will see the Americans involved heavily in Asia and in the Middle East, although probably against their will, and involved heavily in the area around Pakistan. However, we will not see them coming and picking up the chestnuts for us in Europe if something goes wrong in our periphery.

Is Europe facing fewer security challenges? I do not really think so. If anything, there are a few more. It is always a bit difficult to read the mind of whoever is in the Kremlin—whether before the end of the Cold War or after it—but I do not believe that President Putin wishes us very well. I am quite sure that he will continue to probe the Europeans for weakness; that he will divide and rule between the Europeans if he can.

We know that the Middle East is going to present us with some pretty horrendous challenges. Syria is in a terrible mess and our performance is not brilliant, frankly—although I am not a supporter of military intervention there—and it is going to carry on giving a lot of problems, but other countries in the Middle East may well join it. We cannot be sure. We are probably living through a period of 20 years at least of great instability in the Middle East. In Mali, we are already seeing a kind of spillover from the totally desirable overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, which led to a lot of weapons getting out into the Sahara area and a lot of bad things happening there now.

Of course, the Balkans are still not absolutely stabilised. A lot will depend on the way the European Union handles the requests for accession of all the Balkan countries and its own role in stabilising that area.

Confronted with this rather gloomy picture, there are two broad alternative policies. One is to turn in on ourselves—to accept, in a plaintive way, that the budget cuts are there, they are irreversible and we just have to do less. If we do that, and if other Europeans do that, we will become increasingly marginalised and discounted when the major security challenges are thrown up around the world; that will be to our detriment and Britain and other countries in Europe will be the losers.

The alternative is to draw some really quite difficult conclusions, one of which is that increased co-operation between the Europeans—and I do not want to get into the EU versus NATO versus whoever it may be—is no longer, in present and probable circumstances, a luxury; it is a necessity. I agree with the previous speaker that we ought to breathe life again into the European Defence Agency. We should be thinking about how we can broaden our co-operation with the French and perhaps see it as a way of including other European countries. That, undoubtedly, would be very welcome to the present French Government, who want to give a wider European cover to the whole thing, but I fear we will be held back by some kibitzing by people at the other end of the Corridor who probably do not know much of what they are talking about.

It is all the more important that we should take this second option—the constructive, positive option—because, I am afraid to say, our position in Europe is slipping, much though the Government deny this. The whole series of events surrounding the fiscal and banking union make this inevitable. It is going to be a hard struggle to achieve the safeguards we need for the single market. I am not suggesting that we should become a party to all these arrangements, but if we are to avoid the worst of all outcomes—which in my view would be the fossilisation of a two-tier Europe, with us on the lower tier, and not having much say in the shaping of policies—we must pursue the alternative, which is how to update and make more effective a variable-speed, variable-geometry Europe.

However, we cannot always be on the outside of every inner circle. That is where defence comes in as more European defence co-operation can be achieved only with this country being part of it; otherwise, it has no credibility whatever. Would it be good news for us if we were part of that? I believe it would be very good news because it would show that we were not permanently in a second tier and that there were some things such as defence and foreign policy where we were very much in the first tier. There are other things where we are in a second tier. That is inevitable and cannot be helped. I may bewail it but it cannot be helped. However, if we do not do this and we are always in the second tier, it will not be good. If we are always just reacting defensively, that will not be good either.

Therefore, I suggest that for defence policy and procurement considerations and for wider European considerations, we should have a more proactive, positive policy. However, following the exchange in the House yesterday, if we withdraw from the European Defence Agency, we can forget about that.