The military spending of European countries is increasing, but these increasing budgets do not benefit the common defense. This is what emerges from the annual report of the European Defense Agency (EDA), which brings together the twenty-seven States of the Union, minus Denmark. The twenty-six member countries of this Brussels-based institution globally spent 198 billion euros on their defense in 2020, including 46 billion for France. This is a notable increase (+ 5%), the strongest since the agency’s first survey, created in 2004 to promote cooperation between states.
Since 2017, the incessant plea by Donald Trump, then President of the United States, so that the Europeans assume their “Share of the burden” to ensure their own safety and invest more therefore ended up being understood. NATO, where this message was hammered out during Mr. Trump’s four-year tenure, will rejoice. The European Union much less.
Because if military budgets have swelled, common spending has collapsed: collaboration between member countries to make joint purchases in order to avoid unnecessary expenditure, duplication and interoperability problems has diminished. With a total amount of 4.1 billion, European “cooperative defense” fell by 13% and reached its lowest level. In 2008, while the theme of Defense Europe was not, as it is now, constantly raised, this amount was around 6.3 billion. “Spending better is spending together, underlines Jiri Sedivy, Czech President of ACN, and the decline we are seeing is particularly worrying ”.
Maintenance of strong national sovereignties
Today, joint purchases of equipment by member countries represent 11% of European defense budgets. This is their lowest level, far removed from the 35% initially mentioned by the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), which intended to strengthen the cohesion of a continent which spends at least three times as much as Russia. The Russian defense budget was 54.3 billion euros in 2020.
And while Europeans collectively spend some 30% of what the United States spends on defense, they are estimated to fall short of 10% of the operational capacity of the US military. Long prisoners of budgetary considerations, EU countries have, despite the pandemic, invested more but they still neglect the fact that better coordination of their actions, sharing of expenses and pooling of projects are guarantees of efficiency. . These considerations are erased by the maintenance of strong national sovereignties.
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