Establishing a European Security and Defence Union

10 November 2024

Resolution submitted by JEF Political Commission 3: External Affairs and Global Governance. Adopted by the European Congress in Paris on 27 October 2019. Amended and readopted by the Federal Committee in Budapest on 10 November 2024.

JEF Europe,

  • Bearing in mind the previous attempts to establish a unified European Defence Community;
  • Regretting the lack of political will of several EU Member States to integrate national defence and security structures;
  • Noting that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022, marks a fundamental rupture in the geopolitical situation in Europe, especially considering contemporary Russia’s expansionist, irredentist and revisionist ideology and aggressive stance against European unification and liberal democracy;
  • Acknowledging the underestimation and misinterpretation in the recent history of the Russian Federation and its aggressive behaviour, which has led to a shift in European defence policy and a failure of previous security arrangements, which being partly invited by the large scale reduction of European defence capabilities following the end of the Cold War;
  • Recalling that the objective of European defence is the defence of European citizens and European sovereign territory, prevention of conflicts and the management of international crises, in accordance with the international law; emphasising that European defence also encompasses safguarding against hostile foreign interference and military intervention in EU candidate countries throughout their accession process;
  • Regretting that the Union’s common military means are out of step with its diplomatic ambitions and are insufficiently developed to meet the challenges of the contemporary world;
  • Emphasising that the level of European integration has already reached such levels that a security challenge in one Member State would affect all other EU members;
  • Bearing in mind the competing interests of different NATO members and the military non-alignment of some Member States that are not members of NATO;
  • Recognising that NATO still forms the cornerstone of European security today, and that the continuing cooperation between the EU and NATO in the areas of security and defence has to be ensured;
  • Acknowledging that defence as a concept is wide in scope, covering civilian, health security, cyber and hybrid threats, while we have nonetheless seen that conventional warfare of aggression is still a relevant threat in Europe;
  • Recognising the relevance of a European Security and Defence Union as a human security response mechanism to the effects of climate change, such as floods, forest fires, heatwaves and storms across Europe, as the unprecedented death toll of the floods of 2024 in the Valencian Community shows we are now not just in the era of climate action but adaptation and resilience;
  • Noting with interest the creation of a specific Space and Defence portfolio in the EU Commission;
  • Bearing in mind that any military actions require a fully integrated common foreign policy, defining the common political position, as an essential precondition for the creation of a common strategic culture;
  • Acknowledging that Brexit deprived the EU of one of its main intelligence powers, being also a member of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, and thus increased the dependency of the EU on third countries’ intelligence, leading to having even less of EU intelligence to barter with the third countries;
  • Recognising the progress made in Defence and Security cooperation, including the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), the Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC) and the European Defence Fund (EDF) in 2017, as well as the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (CARD) in 2019;
  • Appreciating the creation of the European Intervention Initiative as a positive step towards further defence integration but regretting that it was created outside of the EU framework;
  • Affirming the necessity to develop a European common strategic culture;
  • Acknowledging positively the Military Erasmus Programme as a useful tool for knowledge sharing and creating connections between officers of different Member States’ armed forces which might facilitate future cooperation and integration projects;
  • Regretting the inadequate decision-making process for the use of Battlegroups, which resulted in them never being used;
  • Welcoming the adoption of the Strategic Compass but worrying about political engagement from the Member States needed for its full and meaningful implementation;
  • Stressing that the Strategic Compass ought to align interests, capabilities and desired strategic outcomes serving the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy agenda;
  • Recognising the potential behind the idea of Pooling and Sharing, which stresses the importance of increasing synergies and effectiveness within one security architecture and aims to prevent duplicated structures as opposed to absolute investment goals in terms of GDP percentages;
  • Recognising that the multitude of parallel defence cooperation initiatives and structures can be partially overlapping, thereby creating confusion and inefficiencies;
  • Recognising successful regional integration of the military capabilities of member states such as those of the scandinavian air forces as a model for future European military integration;
  • Alarmed by the growing number of conflicts, many with all out warfare going on, in the world, where traditional deterrence and guarantees as well as the capacity of the international community to take actions seem weakened;
  • Alarmed that this rupture has merely caused public pressure for more state-level solutions, which are insufficient to effectively tackling collective security challenges;

JEF Europe therefore,

  1. Calls for the establishment of a federal European military in the framework of the federal European Security and Defence Union in the following successive phases;funded by the EU multiannual financial framework including through proper European own resources; Starting from the first phase: a unified EU force;
  2. Calls for the short-term integration of Eurocorps, the EU Rapid Deployment Capacity, and other multinational groups into a first nucleus of European armed forces,open to all the European citizens, and complementing the Member States’ militaries and adhering to the Common Security and Defence Policy;
  3. Calls for the EU to make the new EU Rapid Deployment Capacity envisioned in the Strategic Compass easier to use than the current Battlegroups, i.e. by reforming the decision-making procedure, in order to encourage the use of EU capabilities before the national ones;
  4. Declares that nationality of a Member State should not be an obstacle to serving in another Member State’s armed forces,
  5. Strongly encourages the utilisation of the enhanced cooperation mechanism as defined in the Lisbon Treaty’s Article 46;
  6. Calls for the EU to steer the European defence industry towards further harmonisation, cooperation, integration and defence sector concentration, which would facilitate common procurement of military equipment and technology, with pooling and sharing benefits for all the system and would make the defence sector more independent from foreign supplies and technologies, and more cost-effective, with also prioritising European arms supplies;
  7. Calls for joint elaboration of uniform European conditions and controls for the export of armaments and dual-use products from the European Union to third countries, avoiding countries which violate humanitarian law and favouring countries which respect human rights, democracy and the rule of law;
  8. Calls for institutionalised cooperation under the framework of the European Security and Defence Union on the use of military assets for disaster prevention and relief, such as in the case of floods, forest fires and droughts, which is made increasingly relevant by climate change; which is followed by the second phase: the unification of the Security and Defence union as part of the treaty revision;
  9. Calls to increase majority voting in the decision-making on defence and security policy, overcoming the unanimity system;
  10. Urges the EU and its Member States to take concrete actions, based on federalist principles, to move towards the creation of a real European Defence Union;
  11. Calls on the French Republic to pass on its United Nations Security Council seat to the European Union so as to take major decisions that impact the the Union’s security interests as a whole;
  12. Calls upon member states to exclusively engage in military operations abroad under the Common Security and Defence Policy, once the aforementioned changes to decision-making have been made;
  13. Calls for the European Union to establish unambiguously the notion that a military attack on one Member State is a military attack on all Member States, and every Member State has the inalienable right to defend their territory;
  14. And about the new EU Security and Defence Union, as the third phase;
  15. Encourages the EU institutions to include in the priorities of the future European Security and Defence Union the fields of civilian crisis management, space defence and responding to cyber and hybrid threats;
  16. Calls for a European Security and Defence Union to be governed by EU Institutions, and in particular, calls for the European Parliament to have address and control power on the developing European Security and Defence Union also by creating a dedicated Committee;
  17. Demands that the Union commits to the limitation, disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, and commits to the existing nuclear weapons in Europe to be under the joint European Defence Union;
  18. Calls for the establishment of a common strategic culture, based on an operative common foreign policy;
  19. Urges the EU Member States to move towards a deeper integration of the intelligence community and the establishment of a European Intelligence
    Agency, in order to reduce their dependence on third countries;
  20. Calls for the continuing expansion of responsibilities and capabilities for European Security and Defense from the Member States to the common European Army, alongside the foundation of a permanent operational EU headquarters and a joint military training academy;
  21. Demands the EU support candidate countries to progressively integrate into the EU’s Security and Defence Union during the accession process;
  22. Declares that the ultimate goal of the EU Security and Defence Union must be to create a European Federal Military answerable to the European government which would eventually become the primary force for securing European security and interests whilst Member States militaries will take on a more supporting role.