March 24, 2003	Monday	Muharram 20, 1424

BRUSSELS: After a frosty summit failed to bridge deep differences over Iraq, European Union leaders are divided over whether to move ahead faster or to slow down efforts to build a common foreign and defence policy.

The three leading anti-war members — France, Germany and Belgium — want to force the pace by holding a special summit within three weeks to plot closer military integration.

They took the initiative without involving Britain, Europe’s leading military power, which is fighting alongside the United States in Iraq, although Paris and London have been at the heart of growing EU defence cooperation since a 1999 St Malo summit.

Chastened by the fault lines exposed among the 15 EU members and 13 candidate countries, Britain is now more inclined to slow the pace of integration in European foreign and defence policy.

“Iraq has been a reality check. A common foreign and security policy is about two things: the political will to work together and the capabilities to act. For the moment Europe has neither,” a normally Europhile senior British official said.

London is now more likely to oppose proposals in a Convention drafting an EU constitution for majority voting in EU foreign policy decisions or the creation of a European “foreign minister” seated in the European Commission.

Within the EU, an influential school of thought argues member states must be forced through institutional mechanisms to harmonise their foreign policies, as they have in trade policy.

Graham Watson, leader of the European Parliament liberal group, called last week for Britain and France to yield their permanent UN Security Council seats with veto power in favour of a single EU seat at the world’s top table.

The opposing school argues nation states will never risk their soldiers’ lives by majority vote, and that political consensus and real military capabilities must precede institutional change.

TOOL KIT: The Franco-German-Belgian idea is that a pioneer group of nations would move ahead with defence integration, as they did with the single European currency, pulling others along behind.

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel said closer military integration was the only way for Europe to be taken seriously as an entity by the United States, instead of being used as a tool kit for “coalitions of the willing” with no influence.

But the tensions could also pull the EU further apart, with a self-appointed “hard core” pressing ahead with a joint defence policy, leaving a reluctant majority in the slow lane.

Analysts question whether a European defence without Britain makes any sense, especially since Germany and Belgium are two of Europe’s laggards in defence spending.

“If this initiative helps those countries to invest more in serious military capabilities, it will be good for everyone. But the way it has been presented, it seems to be more about politics than about defence,” a senior EU official commented.

Facing acute budgetary strains, Berlin has cut defence spending, which is equivalent to 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product. Belgium’s military budget is 1.3 per cent of GDP, close to the bottom of the NATO class.

The EU has struggled to put together a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force for limited crisis management tasks ranging from humanitarian relief to peacekeeping operations.

It will take on its first small mission in Macedonia next week and has ambitions to take over the bigger peacekeeping task in Bosnia from NATO next year.

POLITICAL WILL: Even if the bloc found the money to procure key missing capabilities such as airlift, air-to-air refuelling, all-weather aircraft, reconnaissance and precision-guided munitions, it would still need the political will to act in real crisis.

Yet the Iraq case illustrated that the 15 do not share the same threat perception on issues such as weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and missile technology proliferation, nor the same concept of the legitimacy of military action.

Several EU states have either a deeply pacifist streak or a parochial vision of security interests that feels unconcerned by distant threats unless there is some former colonial link.

EU president Greece is considering practical steps to try to narrow those conceptual differences by launching an exercise to draw up a common security strategy for Europe based on a common threat assessment, diplomatic sources say.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who has been largely neutered in the Iraq crisis by the inability of the 15 to agree a common stance, could be put in charge of such an effort.

He notes the EU started from similar differences over the Balkans and Middle East but reached common positions on both.

One problem would be reconciling fundamental differences in attitudes to the US. While many in Europe, even in governments that sided with Washington, have misgivings about the sway of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration, only a minority want to build the EU as a counterweight to US hegemony in the world.—Reuters