Nations in Focus MT 3/2022 · 55 has five years to enact his transformative vision for Europe, to create a Europe that has strategic autonomy in all critical areas, that has the soft power advantage of economic power, and an organic military capability when a hard power option is required. On paper, Europe does have the ability to achieve the goals that Macron has set for the ‘new era’: the difficulty comes with how to make this a reality. With the best will in the world, nobody is going to expect Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, to be the leader who will take the EU into a bold new era! The problem with the EU leadership in Brussels is that it is overly bureaucratic and incredibly slow to react. Dynamism has not found a home in Berlaymont! As such, devolving more powers to Brussels is not the answer to building a new and more vigorous Europe. A Leading Role Understandably, then, Macron might feel that France has to take the leading role and, in the context of diplomacy and strategic policy, France is well equipped for this, in that it has two great advantages: a UN Security Council seat and the French strategic nuclear force. Diplomacy and deterrence are certainly very important, but there will come a time when Europe will need a hard power option in terms of deployable military forces. There are those who would point to the establishment of the Franco-German Brigade in the late 1980s, and Eurocorps in the early 1990s, as steps along the road to an EU military capability. The difficulty in all of this comes when seeking a military capability that is deployable and more than just political window dressing. Rapid response to an escalating crisis is what is required. As previously noted, Brussels and rapid response are very rarely used in the same sentence. In contrast, France has deployable military capabilities that can be rapidly brought into action, and the required command and control linkages. But that leads to the question of who else could – or would – provide military capability to a true European military force. Unknown to many, there is already a potential solution to Europe’s need for a credible military capability, stemming from an arrangement between France and Belgium. In November 2018 France and Belgium signed the Capacités Motorisée (CaMo) programme, which sees the Belgian Land Component acquire 60 EBRC Jaguar and 382 VBMR Griffon armoured vehicles to establish a new mechanised brigade. What makes CaMo so important is the aim – to serious interoperability between French and Belgian forces, so the Belgian brigade can easily integrate with equivalent mechanised French formations. Once the Belgian brigade and a French brigade can train together, the next step is to develop doctrine that can support joint operations. This provides the basis to expand the concept further via the addition of another brigade, support units and a headquarters. Once all of this is in place – voila! – the makings of a reinforced division. The key here is to have a force that can be deployed rapidly to crisis areas. Start with an airmobile force to be deployed in the first instance – a perfect mission for Europe’s A400M fleet – then feed in the rest of the division. President Macron is certainly serious about building an EU military force, and he has the political muscle to start making this a reality. In these circumstances, it is inevitable that France will play a central role in a future European military force. At the start, the force will most probably be based on brigade-sized units, but the endpoint will inevitably be an EU army, although for political reasons it will have to be called something else. One major obstacle remains though: a re-invigorated NATO. At this point, it is hard to see how a European military force can coexist with a more active and larger NATO.
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