The Balkan wars of the 1990s showed how weak European governments were when they tried to act alone. That experience encouraged governments to forge a common EU foreign policy, so that they would act together in future crises. In 1999 governments agreed to set up an EU defence policy to support their common foreign policy. Since then, EU governments have made rapid progress in developing the defence policy. After a series of modest military missions the EU has taken over the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia from NATO, its most ambitious operation to date. It also successfully deployed in volatile Congo, and in Sudan in support of African Union’s mission.

In December 2003, EU leaders agreed on a ‘European security strategy’, which was updated in 2009. This document spells out the main threats facing European security: terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, failed states and organised crime. None of these challenges are purely military; nor can they be addressed by purely military means. But there is a real need for Europeans to think more creatively about what kind of defence capability they want. What sorts of missions do they envisage undertaking - and how do they expect their forces to operate in future? European governments need to make a searching assessment of the kinds of additional tasks they want their armies to perform, alongside traditional peacekeeping.

The EU also began to look into ways to introduce more efficiency in arms procurement and production across the continent. The European Defence Agency was set up to break down barriers to cross-border trade in military goods, and to harmonise the process of research, development and production of new weapons among EU member states. The European Commission passed several laws in 2009 meant to encourage more competition in European defence procurement, thus lowering the cost of new equipment.

The EU’s defence policy has not been an unqualified success. It has failed to unify the strategic cultures on the continent: while some EU governments like the British or French ones, have a proud tradition of deploying military force, many other capitals prefer to lie low. They have been reluctant to allow the EU to take on robust military missions or to send troops to danger areas. As a result, most of the EU’s missions have been non-military, and the rest of the world thinks Europe too divided to become an effective military actor.

Another reason for creating the EU’s defence policy was to encourage Europeans to take defence spending and capabilities more seriously. But defence budgets have shrunk and are shrinking across the continent. Only a few member-states – Britain, France, Poland,Greece and Bulgaria – spend more than 2 per cent of GDP on defence (and the latter two contribute very little to EU missions). The economic crisis will further depress defence budgets in many EU member-states.

The CER has been hard at work covering EU defence policies. Our analysts have written about the European Commission’s efforts to open the defence market to more competition, and about the EU’s difficulties in forging a common strategic culture. Future works include studies on the impact of the economic crisis on European defence, and on the UK-US arms trade treaty.