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Mr. Brazier: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way in the middle of the compelling case that he is making. Perhaps a significant item to add to his list is an extraordinary piece of geography: Mr. Solana is located in the EU building, not the NATO building, in the city of Brussels. [Interruption.]

Mr. Duncan Smith: All I can say, echoing the words from a sedentary position of the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, is that that is exactly where Mr. Solana is meant to be. Hon. Members guffaw, but my hon. Friend is right. That is exactly the point. That is where Mr. Solana's responsibility and reporting lines are. He is there to report back to the EU, so my hon. Friend is right to make the point. There is no involvement for Mr. Solana with NATO.

Let me come to the last point about the Washington summit, which is vital. As I have said, it warned against the development of a programme that was not "open to all members". Non-EU NATO members such as Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Norway and even Denmark--which, the Secretary of State may remember, opted out of the process at Maastricht--have been left out, while the EU embraces neutral states into the process.

The point was made earlier. Many of those nations, if not all of them--certainly Turkey--are very angry because, having been willing and strong participants in NATO, and believing themselves for the most part to be nations in Europe, they find themselves--for no other reason than that they are out of the EU--excluded from a process that is supposed to be part of NATO. They are outside. We have some inside that have never shown capability within NATO, and forces and structures separate from NATO are being developed.

The train was kick-started at St. Malo. It has gone on, detouring at Washington, and stopping at Cologne and Helsinki. If where we now say we are is not where the Prime Minister wanted us to be originally--he changed his mind--what was the purpose of the exercise in the first place? The Government always say that this was simply about delivering the Petersberg tasks more efficiently, but the more we look at the structure and capability under the process, and at the separateness of it, the more clear it becomes that the forces under the headline goal of the ESDP are not just intended for the Petersberg tasks, which after all fall for the most part at the low-intensity end of the conflict spectrum.

Originally, the so-called Petersberg tasks were defined as being within NATO and WEU led. The prime example of that was operation Alba in Albania, where some 7,000 European troops were mobilised.

Interestingly, the previous Government's view of Petersberg was made clear by my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Sir A. Hamilton), then Minister of State for the Armed Forces who said in a written answer:

The development of WEU as a means to strengthen the European pillar of the Atlantic alliance will be based on the principle of complementarity between the facilities and activities of NATO and WEU, so duplication should be avoided.

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He went on:


WEU would have no permanent forces or headquarters ultimately of its own.--[Official Report, 17 May 1993; Vol. 225, c. 80-81W.]

It was the intention of the previous Government that that should act as a structure to deliver Petersberg, but that is not now the case.

Let us look at what the French have been saying about the Petersberg tasks. The French Defence Minister, Alain Richard, speaking to the General Affairs Council on 15 November, said:

We could increase the strength of deployable forces. The land component should allow us to deal with two simultaneous crises, including the high intensity one with a long term requirement for forces. The ability at sea and air lift components to project forces and carry out deep strikes would be significantly increased. Here we could envisage supplementing by 6 to 7 brigades and 600 to 700 aircraft including 400 to 450 combat aircraft.

All that envisaged to deliver peacekeeping tasks under Petersberg? It beggars belief.

In May, the Secretary of State helpfully explained the Government's position:

at the Helsinki European Council last December, all EU leaders committed themselves to meeting a challenging target for collective capability.

As usual, the Secretary of State's seemingly level-headed rhetoric is not matched by the views and opinions of politicians across the channel, even discounting the usual talk about Mr. Prodi. I shall not go into the usual quotes about Mr. Prodi's calls.

Mr. Andrew Robathan (Blaby): Go on.

Mr. Duncan Smith: No, I shall not do that, as we have all heard enough about Mr. Prodi's calls to know what they are. However, it is worth having a look at a few other people in France in relation to defence policy. The French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, talked about taking

a decisive step towards building a political Europe.

The French European Affairs Minister, Pierre Moscovici, said of defence policy:

We don't agree with the Americanization of the world . . . We are saying that together we can build a new superpower . . . and its name will be Europe.

President Chirac said:

developing a European Union foreign defence policy is a fundamentally political project . . . if it does not happen, the very life force of our continent will ebb away.

In case right hon. and hon. Members thought that such super-power dreaming was confined to the French, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, said in a speech to the Bundestag on 10 December that the development of the European security and defence identity was

another pillar in the process of European unification.

Such views are held not just in Germany and France but a little closer to home. The Prime Minister started to use the same language when he went to Warsaw, and talked about the creation of a European super-power. Locking together the comments that I quoted, one is struck by the fact that there are ambitions that the Government never seem to admit. As I shall explain shortly, the dangers are far too grave to be laughed at.

Dr. Julian Lewis: In fairness to the Prime Minister, he said that he wanted to create a European super-power,

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not a European superstate. Can my hon. Friend or, indeed, anyone else, throw any light whatever on the difference and distinction between the two?

Mr. Duncan Smith: I find it difficult to throw any light on the what the Prime Minister says at any time. The example that I gave was a classic case of the Prime Minister saying two things that run counter to one another and pretending different things to whatever audience he is addressing. He spun the super-power message to the audience in Europe which, he thought, wanted to hear that. However, to the audience back home, such as The Sun, he spun the message about not being a superstate.

Mr. Malcolm Savidge (Aberdeen, North): If the hon. Gentleman will excuse me, I thought that our debate was supposed to be about the defence of Britain, not attacking Europe.

Mr. Duncan Smith: The hon. Gentleman's intervention spoke for itself. Indeed, that was all that it did.

Mr. Bercow: Does my hon. Friend think it significant that the former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, when reflecting on his experiences in government, recently observed that member states will not be able to dine a la carte any more? He said that Europe needs to develop effective political institutions, which demands sacrifices of Europe's peoples and mobilising them in a common cause. Could that be any clearer?

Mr. Duncan Smith: Absolutely not. I hope that the quotations that I have used say something similar about defence.

I am trying to point out that grandiose ambitions have no part in strengthening NATO and are more about creating a European view that is against of our other allies. I am not in favour of that, as it would be bad for the rest of the world.

The Secretary of State discussed America's attitude to ESDI. He and his colleagues are always saying that that is all right, although I agree with the hon. Member for Stockton, North that the Government are not all of that opinion. I shall deal with what the Secretary of State said. Last year, the Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbot, warned against what should not happen. He said:

We would not want to see an ESDI that comes into being first within NATO but then grows out of NATO and finally grows away from NATO, since that would lead to an ESDI that initially duplicates NATO but that could eventually compete with NATO

Straining every spinning sinew, however, the Government try to re-interpret every United States comment on the issue. On 11 October, The Times somehow reported that William Cohen's speech in Birmingham, to which the Secretary of State referred, demonstrated a

sharp break with America's previous tepid support

for European security and defence policy.

At a subsequent press conference, however, having read and denied such reports, Mr. Cohen went on to say:

I know that some have interpreted my prepared statement as somehow being divergent from the US position. It is not . . . What we don't want to see is a separate planning bureaucracy established that is independent and separate from that of NATO itself.

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As I explained earlier, however, that is what we are progressively getting.

It is small wonder that Mr. Cohen has previously voiced concerns. On 6 February, in Munich, he said:

My fear is that we will see European nations construct a new bureaucracy.

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