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A MAJOR NEW COMMITMENT BY MEMBER STATES IN DEFENCE AND SECURITY: PERMANENT STRUCTURED COOPERATION (PESCO)
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EU’s 27 Member States, only Denmark and
Malta decided not to participate in PESCO. Nor,
of course, will the United Kingdom be a mem-
ber. The European Council of December 2017
then took the final decisions for immediate im-
plementation.
Some observers consider that the version of
PESCO that has been adopted does not fully
match the provisions of Articles 42.6 and 46
and the content of Article 1 of Protocol 10, as
these establish that cooperation is for those
states that wish to participate and have the req-
uisite military capacities (in a manner similar to
the convergence criteria for Economic and
Monetary Union).
This solution was a consequence of the
German proposal to include all members in
PESCO, with the aim of strengthening unity and
a sense of belonging. This contrasted with the
French position that membership should be re-
stricted to those states which possessed both
sufficient military capacity and the willingness
to deploy against potential aggression: in other
words, those states that satisfied the criteria set
out in the Protocol.
The solution adopted seeks a formula which
reconciles these two positions. On the one
hand, almost all Member States (25 out of 27)
will be included; on the other, France, Germany,
Italy and Spain will form a hard core of countries
that are prepared to make a deeper commit-
ment and implement the genuine mandate of
the Second Paragraph of the Protocol. This
means that, in practice, defence issues will be
decided by the four members with the neces-
sary military capacities. As a result, implementa-
tion of PESCO is proceeding rapidly.
Compatibility with NATO
As noted earlier, there is some overlap between
the functions of NATO and the EU, with the lat-
ter taking on some of the defensive capacities
that were previously the exclusive domain of the
former.
This raises the question of the relationship
between these two organizations. The generally
accepted view is that they are compatible, and
that the relationship is one of reciprocal auton-
omy rather than hierarchy. However, NATO has
a deterrent capacity which the EU lacks and will
thus remain, at least for the time being, the ba-
sis of collective defence for its members.
In this respect, the Principle of Compatibility
is set out in Protocol 10, which states “the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation … remains the
foundation of the collective defence of its mem-
bers, and is compatible with the common secu-
rity and defence policy established within that
framework”.
The current situation of increasing threats on
the eastern border of the EU means that some
states which do not belong to NATO – such as
Sweden and Finland – are particularly interested
in the need to make this defensive alliance cred-
ible and are therefore pushing to strengthen the
EU’s capacities, something they hope to achieve
through PESCO.
While the relationship between the two or-
ganizations has always been somewhat uneasy,
the Warsaw Declaration and the Bratislava
Declaration on Cooperation by the EU and
NATO in September 2016 went some way to-
wards solving this problem. However, while the
Warsaw Cooperation agreements certainly
strengthened the relationship, it is also true that
the creation of PESCO has aroused some suspi-
cions on the other side of the Atlantic.