Still no compromise on military headquarters
01 August 2003
During an informal meeting of EU defence ministers in Rome on 4 October no broad agreement was reached on the idea of setting up an autonomous European headquarters. It was accepted that a solution for that question should be sought by November at the joint meeting of EU foreign and defence ministers in Brussels.
Last April "diplomatic warfare" broke out in Nato after a call by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg for the creation of a purely European headquarters and planning staff in the Belgian town of Tervuren. In September the situation calmed down at the Anglo-French-German mini-summit in Berlin when the UK Prime Minister agreed to a joint paper sketching out proposals for an autonomous European force. According to the Financial Times that document said: "The European Union should be endowed with a joint capacity to plan and conduct operations without recourse to Nato resources and capabilities. Our goal remains to achieve such a planning and implementation capacity either in consensus with the 25 [member states] but also in a circle of interested partners." The new operational headquarters would for the time being have a staff of 40 or 50 officers which is rather modest.
In Rome, Italy tried to broker a further deal by tabling plans to form a defence advance guard, operating similarly to the eurozone. A suggestion was that this "hard core" (including Britain) would have to pledge a specific portion of their budget for defence. This might very well become the course taken, but in Rome there was no consensus about where the new headquarters would be located. The Tervuren idea seems to be off the table for the moment, but neither could agreement be reached about the British proposal to create a European planning unit at NATO's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium (SHAPE) or an Italian compromise to entrust the planning to the national headquarters of a framework nation reinforced by officers from other member states in a so-called virtual planning cell. However a French proposal to create a 1,000 strong EU paramilitary gendarme force to enforce stability after military interventions was welcomed by the ministers as was the idea of the EU taking over the military mission in Bosnia which is now fulfilled by Nato's SFOR.
BBC News; Financial Times; Daily Telegraph, Defense News; The Independent; eurActiv.com