Can Starmer's EU security pact keep Britain safe as Europe tightens its defence?

2 October 2024, 13:09

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is heading to Brussels today as part of a drive to improve relations between the UK and the EU.

During the general election, the Labour Party placed heavy emphasis on improving ties across a range of issues and their manifesto promise to ‘seek an ambitious new UK-EU security pact to strengthen cooperation on the threats we face’. So what could such a pact look like?

It is important to first point out the difference between the EU as an organisation and EU member states. The UK continues to enjoy strong relations with most individual EU member states, especially militarily through NATO.

For example, the UK and France have the Lancaster House Treaties which have established very close military cooperation at the operational level (even if the political relationship can be testy at times), and military industrial cooperation with Germany has grown in recent years with the Boxer armoured fighting vehicle and the tank fleet upgrades.

Deeper bilateral relations over military industrial cooperation help boost production capacity and reduce development costs, which benefits everyone. It also boosts collective deterrence and operations, something further explored here in a recently published report by the Council on Geostrategy. But deeper cooperation could become increasingly difficult as the EU establishes greater control over defence industrial policy.

Earlier this month, the mammoth 328 page report by Mario Draghi on ‘The future of European competitiveness’ was released. It included a detailed section on defence which placed heavy emphasis on increasing European strategic autonomy to handle increasingly hostile threats, like from Russia following its continued aggression against Ukraine.

Further coordination and consolidation of defence industry across the EU is needed, although individual members – looking out for their own defence firms – may push back. Crucially, the report states that historically, defence industrial policy in the EU is fragile and broken up - something the EU aims to rectify.

As the EU gets more control over the defence industrial strategies of its members, the UK will want to make sure it does not get locked out of deeper defence industrial cooperation with EU member states because of EU rules. This will be the crux of any UK-EU Security Pact. As the world becomes more volatile, it is in the interest of both sides to ensure they can continue to work together.

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William Freer is a Research Fellow (National Security) at the Council on Geostrategy.

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