Analysis. Memories, memories: at the Saint-Malo summit in 1998, Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair signed a joint text which would be endorsed a year later by the fifteen members of the European Union. It evokes, on the military level, “An autonomous capacity for action, supported by credible forces, with the means to use them and [la volonté de] do it “. Twenty-three years later, when the United Kingdom put an end to the allegedly irreversible character of membership of the European Union, questions of autonomy and sovereignty of European defense are still being asked. And a new question arises: will the departure of the British cripple, demonetize or liberate the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP)?
In any case, there is no question of finding an answer in the agreement reached in extremis between Brussels and London. At the request of the British negotiators, the subject was excluded from discussions which were already too arduous, too long, too tense. It is therefore ” later ” that we will have to consider this other “future relationship”, we confess in Brussels.
Minimum UK contribution
Brexit, beyond the obvious regrets of a few diplomats and the politely suppressed satisfaction of others, is, for the Union, first and foremost a reminder of some obvious facts about defense. First, the fact that the British have never subscribed to the idea of a strong CSDP. Except perhaps, underlines the lawyer Frédéric Mauro, specialist in defense issues and co-author, with Olivier Jehin, of Defend Europe (Nuvis, 2019), when it came to pleasing Americans when they wanted Europeans “Themselves take care of putting order in their garden”.
For the rest, London will have cleverly thwarted, to the chagrin of Paris, all armaments development projects. that could have been achieved. The British contribution to Union operations and missions will have been minimal, and the European Defense Agency has long lived on a reduced budget due to deliberate blockage.
Other evidence: with the exception of the brief interlude of Saint-Malo, the United Kingdom never imagined that its capacities – considerable since they are those of the Second European Army – could one day be put to use. available to its (ex-) partners. Because there was no political will for it to be so and because no decision could have been taken without the backing of the United States. “The construction of the British army is integrated with that of the American army”, was, in 2019, Me Mauro, in a study by the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS).
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