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Mr. Bercow: Will the operations of the proposed European defence agency be subject to the terms of the protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality in the treaty of Amsterdam, and to those of its intended successor?
Mr. Hoon: I understand the benefit of applying subsidiarity to the arrangements because we clearly do not want a European capability solution that would mean that one country, or a small number of countries acting together, could solve a specific problem. That is the benefit of having an agency to look across all members of the EU, examine their current military capabilities, identify shortfalls and gaps and, indeed, suggest where solutions may lie.
Mr. Hoon: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall move on to my conclusion.
Anyone with any experience of international or European negotiations knows that the best way to secure Britain's interests is by engaging with our partners and allies to secure the best way forward for Britain. I have been conducting some interesting reading lately and I am sure that all Conservative Members have been reading the latest pamphlet that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) produced. He recently wrote:
- "the more influence Britain has in Brussels, the more influence we have in Washington and the wider international community."
I have set out a consistent and coherent set of policies and actions that delivers a European defence structure, takes account of the relative strengths of NATO and the European Union, reflects the modern security environment and allows us to enjoy the benefits of a strong European defence dimension as well as a positive transatlantic relationship.
5.15 pm
Mr. Paul Keetch (Hereford): May I add our condolences and sympathies to those offered by the Secretary of State to those people recently hurt in Iraq? I am sure all hon. Members would join us in that.
I welcome the debate, although it is difficult to understand how much further forward we are since last week's statement on NATO and European defence. Nevertheless, as already expressed, there are legitimate concerns about what impact the discussions within the EU and the intergovernmental conference will have on NATO. Judging by the comments of the US ambassador to NATO and the consultations with other EU and NATO partners, it seems that will have to handle those with more sensitivity and transparency in future.
I, too, suspect the Conservative party's motives in calling for this debate, as I think the Secretary of State and others do. Perhaps the Conservatives are trying to draw attention away from their other problems—I note the poor attendance of their Back Benchers—by concentrating on their usual anti-European rant. If they had really wanted to draw out some of the things in a defence debate that members of the armed forces are concerned about, they could have called a debate on a range of issues—overstretch, which the Conservatives go on about, armed forces housing, pensions and defence medical services. Those are more relevant to the men and women who serve in the armed forces than NATO and EU defence policy.
Hon. Members on both sides of the House are in agreement that the primacy of NATO must not be threatened. They also agree on the hierarchy to which the Secretary of State recently referred, which was again set out by the Foreign Secretary last week, of NATO first followed by Berlin-plus should NATO decline to be involved, followed by EU operations without NATO support, as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, followed by wholly autonomous operations. Provided that that remains the Government's position, it is entirely sensible and we will continue to support it.
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South): The inference I drew from the Opposition was that they regretted Europe's positive response to the request by our American allies for Europe to do more. Does my hon. Friend think that there was a disappointed air to their contribution as a result of Europe for once responding positively and getting its act together?
Mr. Keetch: I have enormous sympathy with my hon. Friend. If he is patient, I shall come to that.
Mr. Jenkin: A cursory reading of the motion shows that we welcome Europe's greater contribution to global
defence. What interests me, however, is whether the hon. Gentleman will press his order of priorities, which has some merit, on the Secretary of State, because it is not written down in anything that the Government have signed with our European partners. The so-called right of first refusal for NATO over EU operations does not exist, as we saw before the Prague summit when France threatened to veto the continuation of the Macedonia mandate unless NATO as a whole agreed that the EU should take it over. France did that with finesse to produce what it wanted.
Mr. Keetch: I shall deal with the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) first. I share his concerns about the Conservative view of the issues. An anti-European rant does appear to run through the Conservative party.
I am concerned by the lack of even-handedness in the shadow Defence Secretary's attitude to the reality between the United States and Europe. His is a political party that supported—hook, line and sinker—the deployment of Her Majesty's armed forces in Iraq and asked hardly a single question about it because our forces were acting with United States armed forces.
In answer to the specific question, I do believe, as Liberal Democrat Members have said on many occasions, that there ought to be a formal right of first refusal. The Secretary of State answered that point well in his speech; there is no such formal right, but there is a series of arrangements between Defence Ministers which we need to look at.
No party or Government in Europe or, indeed, the United States should be against European security and defence co-operation. As the shadow Defence Secretary said, that belief is underlined in the motion in his name. However, American anxieties about European defence arrangements must be set in context. Successive American Administrations have supported defence co-operation in the EU since 1962. Even the Opposition motion expresses a belief in enhanced European military capacity, even if it is not explicitly developed under the auspices of the ESDP.
Even now, despite the rhetoric from some quarters, the current US Administration has been supportive of the ESDP for the most part. Baroness Symons said in the other place on 22 October that
- "the guidance from the State Department is still supportive of ESDP."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 22 October 2003; Vol. 653, c. 1614.]
All nations have the right to decide on their own defence and to speak to other nations if they want to do so. I do not believe that that undermines the north Atlantic treaty at all. So far, all the discussions and documents relating to the ESDP have stressed the primacy and inviolability of obligations to NATO, and we agree with that.
We supported the Government in their efforts to make progress in this matter at St. Malo in 1998. We have also supported the attempts to improve interoperability, joint procurement and shared capabilities since then through the Helsinki headline goals, the Prague capabilities commitment and the NATO rapid reaction forces. As the Secretary of State said, a major goal of the ESDP is to increase capabilities, and that goal is beginning to be realised, albeit too slowly. The French announced a major increase in defence spending earlier this year, but sadly they have not been followed by others. The Helsinki headline goal process is beginning to deliver improved capabilities—deployable capabilities—in many areas. That process complements, rather than diverts from, NATO and it makes both the ESDP and NATO stronger.
NATO and the EU are not in competition. Everybody agrees that the EU needs to do more, and that is what St. Malo was about. How those capabilities are organised is not, as the Americans would say, a zero-sum game. The Defence Secretary and I are in good company—which includes leading Conservatives and others who are extremely important in defence—when we make that point. Two former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, Lord Bramall and the late Lord Carver, two former Conservative Defence Ministers, Lords Heseltine and Gilmour, and a former Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Hurd, signed a joint letter to The Daily Telegraph in November 2000 which said:
- "European defence co-operation is not about creating a Euro-army in competition with Nato: it is an essential underpinning of the Atlantic Alliance . . . ESDI and Nato are entirely complementary and it is not helpful to the public's understanding of this important issue to suggest otherwise."
The capabilities that are available to NATO are the same ones that are available to the EU. There are no separate British troops, tanks, warships or aircraft with a little NATO flag that will, some time, turn into a little EU flag; they are the same capabilities. It is important for us to remember that.
The EU has done a splendid job in Macedonia, in the Congo and with the police support mission in Bosnia. If the NATO mission in Bosnia is brought to an end and the EU takes over, I wish it well in that task. The Government appear to accept that no new structures, which could compete with NATO for joint operations, are needed. Indeed, the Berlin-plus arrangements make any such structures redundant. The EU has been assured access to NATO planning assets. Who could require more? Provided that the Berlin-plus arrangements, which have been agreed by all concerned, including NATO members, are followed, there should be no problem or conflict of interest between the two formations.
We have had some discussion of the draft proposals produced by the European Convention, and there are concerns about the way in which the ESDP could develop following the adoption of a European constitution. In fact, the problem is more likely to be that the addition of many new members slows down co-operation and encourages states to seek national
solutions instead of getting involved in more complex multinational negotiations. We, too, welcome the expansion of the Petersberg tasks set out in article III-210 of the new constitution. The way in which those tasks are defined and implemented will be decided unanimously, as has been said, and we support the view that there should be no qualified majority voting on defence and foreign affairs.An armaments research and military capabilities agency is a good idea, which we support in the interests of saving money and improving defence co-operation. Any enhancement of European capabilities will benefit NATO, but the key point is the way in which those capabilities are configured and deployed. We, too, have concerns, as structured co-operation should not discriminate against other EU countries that want to take part. Moreover, a mutual defence guarantee could be seen as a threat to NATO, as the Secretary of State has just accepted. The Government have declared that they are aware of those issues and have resolved to deal with them during discussions at the intergovernmental conference—we shall take them to task if they fail to do so.
The Liberal Democrats have always believed that the real value added by the ESDP to British security lies in sharing the military burden and increasing capabilities through pooling assets. Progress on reaching the Helsinki headline goal has been painfully slow. Achieving further and deeper collaboration on the provision of capabilities is, in fact, the real issue facing European Defence Ministers at the moment. Many targets have been set at the behest of the Americans, the British and the French, most recently at Prague, but considerable work needs to be done to translate those targets into deployable assets. Pooling capabilities has long been a theme of Liberal Democrat defence policy, but considerable potential remains for more sharing. A range of civilian and shared military support operations could be operated jointly by NATO and the EU in a similar way to the AWACS—airborne warning and control system—planes that currently fly under NATO command.
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