Britain was the EU’s largest military force, but with Brexit, only France remains as the bloc’s main military power.
US pressure on Europe to take more financial responsibility for NATO, is driving the EU’s decision. The aim is “to incentivize defense cooperation by overcoming the lack of budgetary synchronization” on defence between EU nations.
The fund will operate much in the same way as the European Stability Mechanism — the eurozone’s permanent bailout fund, an EU official told Politico.
Some 19 countries — including France, Germany, Italy and Spain — will start talks on the fund next month. Member countries will contribute on a voluntary basis
At a meeting of national defense ministers in Brussels, they also agreed that the fund will be run by the European Defence Agency, but gave no indication of the numbers to be attributed to the fund to be operational sometime next year.
The fund, driven mainly by Germany and France, is an effort to push ahead with defense integration in the wake of Brexit. As Britain is leaving the bloc, and has always been skeptical of military integration in the EU, no obstacles remain.
Thursday’s talks come a week ahead of US President Donald Trump’s visit to NATO, for the summit in Brussels. Trump’s presidency “raises serious questions about the endurance and credibility of the security guarantees given by Washington”, according to Corentin Brustlein, head of the Security Studies Centre at the French Institute of International Relations.
“At present, there has been positive interest [for the fund] by 19 member states,” a senior EU official said, adding that the fund “will remain in the hands of member states, all of them can participate in the negotiations and then each can decide to remain or not.”
Defense integration was at the center of Thursday’s meeting of national defense ministers, where they discussed the so-called “permanent structured cooperation,” or Pesco, that allows European nations willing to engage in greater military cooperation to do so without waiting for the consensus of the others.
British politician Nick Clegg described the prospect of an EU army as a “dangerous fantasy”. France is the only other nuclear power in Europe after the UK’s departure.
There have also been rumours that EU states are planning a nuclear deterrent, possibly taking control of France’s arsenal, as they feel they can no longer rely on the US or Britain for protection.
Assuming command of the nuclear weapons possessed by member states for the purpose of common European defence, is being discussed at a high level according to claims published by The New York Times (NYT).
Potential developments could mean French nuclear warheads deployed across Europe, with Germany contributing to the cost of the programme, and a central European nuclear command centre established for the bloc.
The British weekly, the Economist reported in March, that the calls by President Trump for NATO alliance members to meet the defence spending targets they had agreed to as recently as 2014 at the Wales summit, speeded up the EU defence plan.
Germany has already moved to set up a joint air force with France, as well as to join defence initiatives with the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, and the Czech Republic as part of a drive to integrate European militaries.
The planes are set to be based at Eindhoven Air Base in the Netherlands, and at a German military base at the Cologne-Bonn airport, sources told Reuters.
In November last year, the EU Parliament passed a resolution to create a “European Defence Union” to hand more powers to the military components of the Common Security and Defence Policy.
“Terrorism, hybrid threats and cyber and energy insecurity leave EU countries no choice but to step up their security and defence cooperation efforts, thus paving the way to the European Defence Union,” the EU parliament said after passing the resolution on the European Commission’s European Defence Action Plan of 30 November 2016, COM(2016) 950 final.
The “joint interoperability” will likely see Britain stripped of its ability to design, build and supply their own weapons systems and munitions.
In recent months, the EU has achieved integration of German and Dutch army units, and also swapped command posts, a policy which has allowed a senior French officer to command British troops.