Brexit: Foreign and Security Policy Co-operation

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I want to follow up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, but unfortunately—based on the Government’s track record—I suspect that we will not get any answers at all today. I hope I will be proved wrong, because the two mantras we have already heard are that there will be no running commentary and the Government do not want Parliament to micromanage this process of Brexit. Parliament has no intention of micromanaging it; Parliament wants to “macro-check” the policy to ensure there is accountability. I would like to say a couple of things in that area, and then come on to defence.

The Government will not get through this process if they do not properly consult Parliament. They will not get through to the end. They have a relatively small majority in the other House, but even among their own party and among Brexiteers, if they do not actually lay out what they are trying to achieve and give some information, they will fail in this process. There will be a crisis at some point and it will not work, and that will not be in the national interest.

As for the ongoing commentary, we seem to have forgotten that there is another side in this negotiation. There are 27 other member states as well as the European Parliament and the European Commission. The Commission will keep the European Parliament in touch, and the European Parliament will be fully involved in the process. If there is no comment from the Government, there will certainly be comment from the other side of the argument. If there is a vacuum of information here in the UK, the press will make up information and everyone else will pile in with opinions. It is not a strategy that will work and it is not in the national interest.

Perhaps I may briefly return to the referendum campaign. On the whole, the campaign was about trade, economics and migration. However, one bit of the defence argument came in—it was mentioned particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford—namely setting up an EU army. Outside of the migration and trade areas, an EU army was the one threat being made. I have looked at all aspects of the issue and, as far as I can see, it is a myth, and I described it as such in the campaign. President Juncker rightly focused on defence in his annual address to the European Parliament after the Brexit vote, but his speech was about strengthening the co-ordination of defence in Europe; it was not about setting up a European army. Any of us who have had any involvement whatever in Europe—as I have, to a degree, had as a chair of Select Committees here and as a Member of the European Parliament—will know that there is no way that a European army could happen within the EU. I suspect that the German constitution would make it impossible for such a thing to happen. Furthermore, the French—who, like us, are very proud of their operational capability, and who are our only equivalent in the European Union in terms of not only defence expenditure but the ability to operate outside their own territory—would never seek the outcome of a European army. So we do not have to worry about that in terms of us leaving the EU.

The common security and defence policy is very important and I would like us to remain a key part of it. It is possible to participate in those operations from outside the EU. As has been said, the CSDP and EU defence strategies are absolutely complementary to NATO. NATO makes that very clear and the European Union does as well. They do not conflict. Long ago, the Petersberg tasks clearly laid out the defence objectives for what was then the Western European Union but is now, under the Lisbon treaty, the European Union. The objectives do not cover hard territorial defence as that is clearly a NATO and not an EU mandate. The Petersberg tasks cover peacemaking, peacekeeping, and joint civilian-military operations—perhaps going into areas, particularly in Africa, where NATO involvement would not be appropriate. It is pretty clear that one is not a substitute for the other. They are complementary organisations.

What has struck me even more strongly is that of the 27—currently 28—EU member states, 21 have joint EU and NATO membership. The challenge is not that there will be a waste of resources if one organisation is stronger than another. The real challenge, as we all know, is to get the other countries—countries other than the United States, France and the UK; Greece is an outlier because of its problems with Turkey—to provide sufficient resources to make Europe resilient in its own defence. We know—not just because of Trump but even under Obama—that there has been a pivot to Asia, with issues in the South China Sea and East China Sea. America is focusing now on Russia because of Syria and Ukraine, but that is not the future. It is absolutely clear that Europe has to take far more responsibility for its own defence. I am convinced that Britain within the European Union, with our NATO membership as well, would have a much stronger influence in maintaining the pressure to increase capability to contribute to European defence. We still have that influence to a degree in NATO but we should remember that some important military states, particularly Sweden, are outside NATO and are therefore important within the European defence context.

One of the other things that impressed me about the CSDP and the External Action Service was that most of the EAS delegations were European Commission officers anyway and not a new burgeoning. In fact, where European citizens need help in countries where their country does not have an embassy, they can use another European Union embassy to get help. I suspect that that is another feature that will disappear when we stop being a member. CSDP announcements on foreign policy often led to a perception that Europe was divided. However, although some of its opinions may have been weak, the EU was united on many of the statements on foreign affairs internationally. The great thing has been that it has not been just the 28 member states, as 10 other countries—including Ukraine, countries in the Balkans, Iceland and Norway—usually came along as well. We were there as a European bloc. I very much hope that as we move to Brexit we will remain a part of that wider bloc. But what a humiliation to us that we will be there as an addendum to that list rather than there in the core, having an influence and changing policies.