Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-87)
Major-General Messervy-Whiting CBE and Mr Nick Witney
5 JUNE 2008
Q80 Chairman: Is this not the dilemma:
you either have the classic definition of a camel as a horse developed
by a committee—which is what I suspect you would have if
it were developed in a more normal Council process—or you
have something elegant designed by a very limited number of people,
but which other people do not share ownership of. How do we solve
that problem?
Mr Witney: I am not even sure, My Lord
Chairman, that having it worked on for four months through the
Brussels committee process would help. It is not what happens
within the Brussels ring road that matters at all in this case,
it is whether in 27 national capitals the people who take the
key decisions about how defence budgets are spent and foreign
policies set believe this sufficiently to have it influence the
way they implement their national policies.
Q81 Lord Anderson of Swansea: The
normal culture of Brussels is transparency which obviously poses
problems for intelligence as you have mentioned, and you have
talked of the bureaucratic coup in the formulation of the last
document. To what extent in your judgment should the European
Parliament be involved, what are the processes available for an
input from the parliamentarians in Brussels?
Q82 Chairman: Particularly in view
of Mr Solana's meeting with the Parliament yesterday.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: He opened
the plenary session at three o'clock yesterday afternoon and this—or
at least common foreign and security policy, including the European
Security and Defence policy—was top of the agenda. Two European
Parliament rapporteurs had produced reports which were considered
by the plenary session essentially relating to the European Security
Strategy. Solana, as I understand it, is not only going to talk
about this and take the temperature with heads of state and government
next week, on 18/19 June, but is also under remit to discuss where
he has got with it in the informal foreign ministers' meeting
this autumn, I think in September. I believe there will be this
time a much greater transparency process with not only Member
States but also with Parliament and that process has started.
Q83 Lord Anderson of Swansea: That
might partially solve the ownership and policy problem which Lord
Hannay mentioned.
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: It might
do but I think Member States feel that they own something if it
has been tabled as a document in one of the formations of the
European Council and is looked at by ambassadors and is looked
at by ministers and is signed up to as a Council document. That
gives Member States a real feeling of ownership and I am not sure
that this document will necessarily go down that route. One reason
why there was this sleight of hand with this document—a
precedent within the EU—was the production of their crisis
management procedures, which started off as an in-house secretariat
document as to how the internal machinery in the EU Council should
deal with a crisis. It was not meant to be a comprehensive bible,
it was meant to be a guideline, a thing you referred to—have
we ticked all the boxes in addressing this crisis. But Member
States insisted on taking ownership of that and to an extent it
was a good thing that they did, but it led to an interminable
drafting process and something that ended up being a great number
of pages long as opposed to a practitioner's guide.
Chairman: At least you have seen that
in one of the parliaments or Member States a certain amount of
attention is being paid to it. Lord Hamilton has a final question.
Q84 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Can I
move slightly away from this document and the realities on the
ground and go back to hard power. What it really comes down to,
it seems to me, is that these are national decisions taken by
individual governments within the EU and that really depends on
the political will to actually risk the lives of your troops.
What I want to know is whether anything is really going to change.
There is this great pacifist tradition or anti-military tradition
in Germany, for instance, where there seem to be quite large numbers
of troops who could be deployed although things have changed there
a bit. I remember in the late Eighties or early-Nineties an admiral
called Velascom (?) who was the chief of defence staff came over,
and I remember him saying quite specifically that there could
be no question of Germans being deployed to the Balkans because
the history of Germany in the Balkans was so absolutely horrific
that it would be completely unacceptable. The Germans now are
in the Balkans, so things are changing in some areas a bit. It
seems to be going rather backwards with the French, they used
to very gung-ho about charging off into places and doing things
but they seem to be more reluctant now to risk the lives of their
troops. I can never quite understand what the French Foreign Legion
is doing—they are always painted as being extraordinarily
gung-ho, dying to get into action all the time, so where are all
of them? What is going to happen with other European countries?
What I wanted your personal opinion on is where is all this going,
are we seeing a Europe that is going to get increasingly pacifist,
more and more reluctant to risk the lives of their troops, or
do you see any signs that it might go in another direction?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: The real
hard-power decisions will always be taken by Member States and
national parliaments—I hope they are, as an old soldier.
Having said that, I would be slightly more upbeat; I do not think
the EU is going backwards on the European Security and Defence
Policy although the French perhaps have a particular problem at
the moment in terms of restructuring resources and over-commitment
in the same sort of way as we British have. I do see the EU doing
more and more of these operations along these lines, provided
the troops are there to do them. At the end of the day if we are
in Afghanistan and others are in Iraq and those sorts of commitments
stay, there is not going to be an awful lot that we the Brits
are going to be able to contribute.
Q85 Chairman: Can I ask Mr Witney
if he would like to comment before calling Lord Selkirk.
Mr Witney: It is a little hard to predict
really. The latest enlargement of the Union has probably been
helpful; the Poles are thoroughly determined to establish this
and the Estonians are surprisingly stepping forward in a positive
role. As for the French, they have their money problems but the
2006 intervention in Congo would not have happened without the
French making it happen and Chad would not have happened without
the French making it happen. Even the Germans have actually come
a long way and they have over 10,000 troops deployed at the moment.
That is only a relatively small proportion of their very large
Armed Forces and there are lots of caveats but how it goes—I
just come back to this thing of whether publics can be convinced
that this is the sort of thing that they want to be behind, whether
they feel a sense of pride at their guys going out there and doing
these jobs or whether, as for example I am afraid is the case
with Afghanistan, far too many European publics think that this
is some ghastly American global war on terror mistake that Europeans
are now being leant on to bail the Americans out of. I do not
share that view, but that is how a lot of people in Europe see
Afghanistan. At the end of the day it is all to do with how these
things are perceived politically, whether the political will is
there.
Q86 Lord Hamilton of Epsom: Do you
think that would change if there was a terrorist outrage in a
German city, killing very large numbers of civilians walking along
the street?
Mr Witney: I do not know Germany well
enough.
Q87 Lord Selkirk of Douglas: Can
I ask the General a question: why do you perceive the French to
be totally over-committed as far as providing military resources
is concerned?
Major-General Messervy-Whiting: It is
not so much over-committed in the same way as we the Brits are
but, as Nick mentioned, they have got resource problems at the
moment, budgetary problems perhaps even worse than ours.
Chairman: Gentlemen, can I thank you
both very much indeed for coming and talking to us. It has been
a further important part of our education on this subject and
we are taking more evidence next week and the week after—we
are seeing François Heisbourg the week after next, just
after the French White Paper has been published, so it will perhaps
be an appropriate moment to raise some of these points with him,
and then we will be going to Brussels where we will obviously
be seeing some of your successors. Could I thank you very much
indeed, we have very much appreciated your coming and the evidence
that you have given to us.
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