Joint declaration by the British and French
Governments on European Defence, Anglo-French Summit,
London, 25 November 1999
1. A year ago in St Malo, Britain and France launched
together a major initiative aimed at building European security
and defence. This paved the way for the progress made at Cologne.
2. In the Kosovo crisis, our two countries played
a major role in working for a political settlement and in NATO's
military operations. This crisis reinforced our conviction that
the European nations need to increase their defence capabilities,
thus enabling them to conduct effective EU-led operations as well
as playing their full role in Alliance operations.
3. We therefore call on the European Council in Helsinki
to take a decisive step forward for the development of those military
capabilities and for the setting up of the political and military
instruments necessary to use them. This is necessary to give the
EU the autonomous capacity to take decisions and, where the Alliance
as a whole is not engaged, to launch and then to conduct EU-led
military operations.
4. We are fully convinced that, by developing our
military capabilities, while reinforcing the
EU's capacity for action, we will also contribute
directly and substantially to the vitality of a
modernised Atlantic Alliance, by making a stronger
and more balanced partnership. NATO
remains the foundation of our collective defence
and will continue to have an important role
in crisis management. We expect NATO and the EU to
develop a close and confident
relationship.
5. Our top priorities must therefore be to strengthen
European military capabilities without unnecessary duplication.
We call on the European Union at the Helsinki Summit to:
- Set itself the goal of Member States, cooperating
together, being able to deploy rapidly and then sustain combat
forces which are militarily self-sufficient up to Corps level
with the necessary command, control and intelligence capabilities,
logistics, combat support and other combat service support (up
to 50,000-60,000 men) and appropriate naval and air combat elements.
All these forces should have the full range of capabilities necessary
to undertake the most demanding crisis management tasks.
- Urge the Member States to provide the capabilities
to deploy in full at this level within 60 days and within this
to provide some smaller rapid response elements at very high readiness.
We need to be able to sustain such a deployment for at least a
year. This will require further deployable forces (and supporting
elements) at lower readiness to provide replacements for the initial
force.
- Develop rapidly capability goals in the fields
of command and control, intelligence and strategic lift. In this
respect:
- We are ready to make available the UK's Permanent
Joint Headquarters and France's Centre Operational Interarmees
and their planning capabilities as options to command EU-led operations.
As part of this, we intend to develop standing arrangements for
setting up multinationalised cells within these Headquarters,
including officers from other EU partners.
- We want European strategic airlift capabilities
to be strengthened substantially. We intend to work urgently with
our allies and partners on ways to achieve this. We note the common
European need for new transport aircraft. We have today taken
an important bilateral step by signing an agreement on logistics
which will include arrangements by which we can draw on each other's
air, sea and land transport assets to help deploy rapidly in a
crisis.
- We welcome the ongoing transformation of the
Eurocorps into a rapid reaction corps as decided by the five Eurocorps
members in Cologne, which will contribute to giving the EU a more
substantial capacity to undertake crisis management tasks, in
particular by providing it with a deployable Headquarters. Our
two countries intend this to be a contribution to the enhancement
of key assets available both to the EU and NATO. The UK is ready,
in due course and with the agreement of the Eurocorps members,
to provide British forces to the Eurocorps HQ for specific operations
as the Eurocorp nations have already done in the case of the British-led
Ace Rapid Reaction Corps.
6. We also call on the Helsinki European Council
to set a clear target date and appropriate review and consultation
mechanisms to ensure that these goals are reached. Our work towards
the achievement of these objectives and those arising from NATO's
DCI will be mutually reinforcing. We also welcome the contributions
of the non-EU European Allies and of WEU Associate Partners to
this improvement of European military capabilities.
7. In addition to the decisions on military capabilities,
we call on the European Union at
Helsinki to:
- Set out the political and military structures
to enable the Council to take decisions on EU-led military operations,
to ensure the necessary political control and strategic direction
of such operations and, to this end, to endorse the proposal which
the UK and France have put forward on the role and composition
of a Military Committee and a military staff and the planning
and conduct of EU-led operations.
- Provide the basis for participation of non-EU
European Allies and the involvement of WEU Associate Partners
in EU-led operations.
- Underline the need to develop thereafter modalities
for full co-operation, consultation and transparency between the
EU and NATO.
8. We reaffirm our conviction that strengthened European
defence capabilities need the support of a strong and competitive
European defence industry and technology. The restructuring of
the European aerospace and defence industry is a major step which
will help to improve competition in the global market. We welcome
this recent consolidation and restructuring of European defence
companies and, in the same spirit, give our full support to the
finalisation of the Letter of Intent. The strengthening of our
armaments industry will foster the development of European technological
capabilities and will allow transatlantic cooperation to develop
in a spirit of balanced partnership. We look forward to early
progress toward the establishment of Airbus as a single commercial
business with a fully united management.
9. We are committed to the efforts being made to
harmonise future defence equipment requirements. The successful
cooperation between the UK and France, together with Italy, on
the Principal Anti-Air Missile System - which will provide world
class air defence for our Navies well into the next century -
is a good example of how we work together. So too are the French
SCALP and the UK's Storm Shadow programme for a long range precision
guide air to ground missile, which is based on the proven French
Apache missile. We are partners too with Germany on the future
medium range anti-armour weapon for our respective infantry.
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