The EU’s Defense Ambitions: Understanding the Emergence of a European Defense Technological and Industrial Complex – Carnegie Europe

Summary

Is the European Union (EU) about to rise as a defense technological actor on the world stage? According to conventional wisdom, attempts at greater European integration in security and defense were not likely to amount to much, given that such policy fields have long been considered the reserved domain of the EU member states or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This working paper goes beyond this traditional state-centered approach by looking at past and recent institutional efforts to consolidate European security and cooperation on defense industry and technology. Such efforts have continued despite the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, owing to the bloc’s willingness to become a stronger security and defense actor on the global stage.

The timing of this shift was facilitated by a set of circumstances that triggered a new European defense momentum. Contributing factors include the geopolitical pressures of Brexit, an unreliable transatlantic partner in the United States, concerns within European defense industries regarding dwindling national defense budgets and fierce global technological competition in high technology areas, and the European Commission’s growing supranational role in security and defense. This impetus was also facilitated by the privileged relationship between various EU institutions, European defense industrial actors, transnational interest and lobby groups, and organized expert bodies. In this respect, the defense industry and high-level expert and interest groups have occupied a central position in shaping EU policy processes, funding priorities, and security and defense research programs.

Such a rapprochement between EU institutional structures and the European defense industry has allowed for the emergence of a so-called European defense technological and industrial complex (EDTIC). This European defense industrial ecosystem encompasses a wider variety of transnational actors beyond the political, military, and industrial groups typically present in national military-industrial complexes. It presents a dense, multilevel network of EU institutions and agencies; security and industrial stakeholders; national public authorities; and interest and expert groups, all of which both compete and cooperate to shape and set policy agendas. However, this rapprochement is also characterized by the absence of strong democratic control mechanisms and little political and public accountability concerning the surge in and direction of the European defense technological and industrial integration process.

These transformations have the potential to make the union a more capable and strategically autonomous global defense technological actor. At the same time, they challenge existing EU democratic governance structures and processes. The EU’s security and defense policies remain tough areas for parliamentary scrutiny and democratic oversight. The EU’s policymaking institutional machinery has been finely tuned to mediate power, keep things as technical and bureaucratic as possible, and to create package deals for certain defense industrial interests and member states’ political agendas.

Yet, for real European integration in the field of security and defense, more political and democratic trust is needed across the continent.

This working paper asks several guiding questions about these issues:

1. Why and how did this EU-level and industrial activism in European security and defense research and innovation come about, and what historical, institutional, and strategic dynamics made it possible?
2. Who is setting the agenda in these processes, and what are the governance and democratic oversight implications for an emerging EDTIC?
3. What research and capability development projects have been prioritized under successive European security and defense research programs? What do they reflect in terms of defense industrial interests’ representation and the emergence of an EDTIC?
4. Given an increased EU role in security and defense industrial and technological matters, in which direction is the EU headed as a strategically autonomous and global defense actor?

An Alignment of Planets

The past decade has seen a renewed momentum in European security and defense. The December 2013 European Defence Summit ushered in a new era of increased European defense cooperation. Against the backdrop of rising geopolitical turbulence and growing challenges facing Europe on many fronts, the 2016 publication of the European Union’s (EU) Global Strategy and a flurry of post-2016 initiatives indicate that the EU’s security and defense policy field is undergoing a sea change.

Examples of the EU’s expanded ambitions in security and defense policy include the establishment of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) in 2017, the initiation of the European Defence Fund (EDF) in 2019, and the creation of the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space (DG DEFIS) in 2021, to name a few.¹ All of these initiatives will have undeniable consequences for the EU’s institutional identity and its political transformation from a purely civilian international actor to a potential military and technological power on the international stage.