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Big three win EU over to military planning wing: Belgium
Khaleej Times, (AFP)
29 November 2003
NAPLES - Plans by Britain, France and Germany to give the European Union its own military planning facility independent of NATO have been well received by the rest of the EU, Belgium’s government said.
Foreign Minister Louis Michel, whose country has been at the forefront of plans for a separate EU military headquarters, said the proposal by the “big three” won general backing at dinner talks among foreign ministers late Friday.
“We can say that the embryo of a European defence is underway and that it’s an irreversible process,” he told reporters after the dinner.
At talks in Naples on the EU’s first constitution, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin announced “the basis for a proposal” by the trio for an indepenent planning cell to boost the EU’s military capabilities.
A British Foreign Office spokesman said: “I can confirm we have a set of several ideas in draft.
“We will be discussing it with our key allies and partners,” he said on condition of anonymity, indicating further discussions notably with the United States.
Britain has sought to ease US concerns about the plans by saying an EU planning arm will never rival NATO, insisting the alliance forms the bedrock of Europe’s defence.
The EU facility, likely to comprise what was described as a skeleton personnel drawn from member states’ staff officers, would only plan for operations that NATO does not want to be involved in, Britain says.
In a report on Friday, French newspaper Le Monde said the trio of EU heavyweights had ditched plans first floated by Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg for an EU military headquarters at Tervuren, outside Brussels.
Instead, the planning facility would be based in the EU district of Brussels, in the same building as the bloc’s military and police staff, and comprise about 130 staff officers, it said.
Michel declined to go into detail about the plans but admitted that the Tervuren headquarters will not happen. “We haven’t achieved this objective,” he said.
But he added that the scaled-down nature of the plans had helped to win over pro-US European countries due to join the EU next year, notably Poland, which had been opposed to undermining NATO.
The plan, Michel said, “benefited from an approving silence from certain countries which in their previous interventions had put forward arguments against”.
He quoted Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz as saying during the Naples dinner: “We don’t see the need for this but there’s been a shift and we won’t oppose it.”
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