EU will be ‘irrelevant’ without an army, says new chief diplomat
THE EU must have more troops and be prepared to use them across the globe, the bloc’s incoming foreign affairs chief has told the European Parliament.
Josep Borrell, who is nominated to be the European Union’s next chief diplomat, said that Europe could not allow itself to become “irrelevant” on a world stage dominated by the United States and China.
“We have the instruments to play power politics,” he said at a European Parliament hearing into his candidacy to head up the EU foreign affairs service. “The EU has to learn to use the language of power.”
“We should reinforce the EU’S international role and further our military capacity to act,” the 72-year-old Spanish socialist added. “We should pool our national sovereignties together to multiply the power of individual member states,” Mr Borrell said. “I am convinced that if we don’t act together Europe will become irrelevant.”
Mr Borrell called for numbers of EU troops that could be deployed to be raised to at least 55,000 to 60,000. He said the 60,000 target was first set in 1999 by EU leaders after the Balkan war.
Brussels does have “battle groups” of 3,000 soldiers from across the EU on standby every six months but these have never been used and would require the unanimous support of every member state before they could be. Mr Borrell said the EU had to speak with a unified “truly integrated” foreign policy voice on the world stage.
He said the total defence spend in the EU was half the GDP of Belgium and more than in China and Russia, but he stressed that the spending did not translate into military capacity because it was fragmented among the EU member countries.
Mr Borrell has therefore backed EU plans for pooling defence research projects, but some critics have described those plans as a stepping stone towards a future EU army.
Although that idea has been publicly supported by Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming European Commission president, it is an extremely distant prospect at the moment.
“We have to spend together,” he said, “We have to be more operational on the ground, we have to deploy forces, starting in our neighbourhood.
“We should envisage a Europe that can defend itself while working for a multilateral, peaceful world order,” Mr Borrell said, before insisting that this would strengthen Nato rather than be a rival to it.
He earlier warned, in a thinly veiled swipe at the US and Donald Trump, that some of the EU’S allies were “disengaging” from the international rulesbased system.
He also told MEPS that the EU could not allow itself to be “squeezed” between the US and China in the trade war between the two superpowers.
If his candidacy is backed by the European Parliament, Mr Borrell will become the EU’S chief diplomat on Nov 1, succeeding Federica Mogherini.
‘We have the instruments to play power politics … the EU has to learn to use the language of power’