There is much, and perhaps too much, enthusiasm in the now variegated network of pro-Europeans that has spilled over from the ‘Ursula majority’ by embarking a part of conservatives and reformists and even a few federalists on Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal to ‘rearm Europe’.
Or rather: to rearm the national armies in the European Union in order to strengthen support for Ukraine and, above all, prepare to counter the possible imperialist aims of Moscow, which, having conquered the Russian-speaking but non the pro-Russian-regions of Ukraine with Donald Trump’s agreement, could theoretically direct its troops towards the Baltic States and perhaps also towards other countries that were part of the Soviet empire until 1990.
Re-arming presupposes the belief that, in all these years since the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the EU countries that are part of NATO have disarmed and that therefore the time has come to prepare ourselves to react to Moscow’s for now hypothetical expansionist threats by increasing our expenditure in human resources, means and industrial investments.
According to the most recent calculations of the IISS in London, partially corrected by the 0CPI in Milan, in 2024 the member states of the European Union and the European countries in NATO would instead have invested more in their defence than Russia, which had to compensate for the losses in arms and human lives resulting from the aggression against Ukraine.
These figures, which represented ‘only’ 1.95 per cent of European GDP, start from the fact that European manpower resources would have been reduced to less than half of what they were twenty years ago as well as in artillery, weapon systems, combat aircraft, tanks and destroyers according to a recent Bruegel report that justifies the rearmament hypothesis.
Non-European countries, particularly African ones, are well aware that they must rely on European exports, which have increased in France by 59%, in Germany by 41% and in Italy by 43%, with a policy that tends to perpetuate old colonialist relations and that takes advantage of the fact that the European Union has never introduced a system to control the sale of armaments jealously managed at national level with non-transparent entanglements between Ministries of Defence and private arms industries.
The European rearmament, announced by Ursula von der Leyen, will now have to be translated into legislative acts of no easy conception to overcome the obstacles that we could call ‘constitutional’, if a constitution of the European Union existed, to move from a market economy to a war economy and to replace European welfare with a European warfare.
Of that plan, the smoothest instrument will probably be loans totalling EUR 150 billion over four years, according to the SURE model introduced to cope with the rise in unemployment caused by COVID, thus shifting from welfare to warfare without knowing at the outset which countries will benefit on the basis of their financial sustainability and that the loans will have to be repaid by the beneficiary states.
The larger sum of EUR 650 billion should instead come from national public investments, which will be permitted using the emergency clause in the Stability Pact and which will therefore also in this case favour those countries with greater financial sustainability, leaving it up to individual governments to decide whether to divert unused resources from the structural funds (regional, social, agricultural) to defence.
The European Commission initially avoided raising highly divisive issues between governments such as the idea of a common budget and debt, Eurobonds, or a strengthening of existing instruments dedicated mainly to the defence industry such as the EDIP programme for which only one and a half billion euros are currently earmarked and whose regulation is in co-decision between the Council of the Union and the European Parliament.
Neither Ursula von der Leyen nor High Representative Kaja Kallas raised the issues of interoperability between national armies, the chain of command, the priority of European investment in Europe, which were raised in the Draghi report and could have been put by Kaja Kallas on the agenda of a meeting of defence ministers, possibly together with foreign ministers in Council formations chaired by her.
No one proposed adding to the strictly military theme of European defence issues that are part of the values of the European Union such as civil defence and peace education, the European volunteer corps and the role of the European Union in building, maintaining and enforcing peace within the framework of the United Nations Statute because the objective of deterrence, which does not exclude nuclear deterrence, appears to be a priority.
No one then raised the issue of the substantial failure of the first permanent structured cooperation (PESCO) with twenty-six countries distributing almost eighty micro-projects and a substantially irrelevant impact on the future of a common defence.
No one in the institutions has raised the idea of giving transitional institutional substance to the joint action of the ‘willing ones’ by adopting the Schengen method to create an intergovernmental framework outside the treaties but with the commitment and prospect of integrating the agreement into the reform of the European Union and bringing this group of countries as such into the Atlantic Pact if the more ambitious idea of the European Union as a whole opting out of the countries that are not members of NATO is to be ruled out.
We pointed out the excessive enthusiasm of old and new pro-Europeans, with which some federalists have also unexpectedly joined in, at the announcement of the European Rearmament Plan based on an increase in national expenditure with a formula that has now entered the generalised commentary: ‘this is an urgently needed first step on the road to common defence’, but such a step could be taken in the opposite direction to the road to common defence.
No one has recalled that defence is one of the instruments but not the only one of foreign and security policy and that it would have been urgent and necessary for the European Council to identify the EU’s strategic interests beforehand and based on Article 26 TEU, to set its objectives by defining general guidelines and adopting the necessary decisions.
No one asked the European Parliament why the Assembly did not organise a six-monthly debate on progress on CFSP and defence provided for in Article 36 TEU by promoting the participation of representatives of national parliaments in plenary and ‘agora’ for dialogue with civil society and stakeholders.
In contrast, the European Parliament resolution on the ‘White Paper on the Future of European Defence’ raises the question of democratic control, which would be totally excluded if the legal basis of Article 122 TFEU proposed by the European Commission were adopted.
Such scrutiny would instead be guaranteed if the legal basis proposed by the European Commission in 2022 for the EDIP regulation on the European Defence Industry Programme based on Articles 114.1, 173.3, 212.2 and 322.1 TFEU and providing for the ordinary legislative procedure and qualified majority voting in the Council were used.
Should the European Council and then the Council decide to apply the legal basis of Article 122 TFEU, which excludes democratic control, the European Parliament would have the possibility to go to the Court of Justice on the basis of Article 263 TFEU to check the legality of the legislative acts adopted by the Council, but also by the European Council, leaving open the way to subsequently demand a revision of the treaties according to a democratic constitutional method.
With this objective and in the conviction that there is in the European Parliament a nucleus of MEPs ready to relaunch the constitutional action of the Crocodile Club, we will be in the squares for a free, just and united Europe.
Rome, 24 March 2025
Pier Virgilio Dastoli