European Union (Amendment) Bill

I listened carefully to the noble Lord on the defence aspects of common foreign and security policy and I could not disagree with him more. I led NATO for four years, but I am also a passionate European. More than both of those, I am a passionate realist. I live in the United Kingdom; we are part of the European continent and a European community of nations. If we are to look after ourselves and our neighbourhood, we must have provisions to allow that to happen. Simply relying on the institutions, capabilities and attitudes with which we dealt with previous enemies will simply not be good enough in future. What Mr Gates, as America’s Defense Secretary, said in his confirmation hearing, was absolutely right. The American Administration of President Clinton and that of George W Bush when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary—and now Robert Gates—supported the concept of European defence. That is a European defence that is not competitive with NATO, is not a duplicate of NATO and is not, as the noble Lord, said, a ghost of NATO. As somebody who led that alliance, I assure him that the proposals in the Lisbon treaty under the provisions known as Berlin Plus, whereby the European Union for autonomous missions can neutralise the capabilities of NATO through a prescribed procedure, are all designed to ensure that Europe has the capability. Almost exactly 10 years ago I was there when the St Malo declaration was signed, which was the stepping stone to Europe taking more responsibility for its own affairs—and so it should. If we have learnt anything from Bosnia and Kosovo it is that we are not right to depend on America always coming to save us. If this great European Union of 27 nations, accounting for one third of global GDP—exactly the same as the United States of America—cannot raise its own game to be able to deal with problems, sometimes not just in our backyard but inside the back door, what are we worth? Do we wait for what the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, said was the decision of the Americans on some occasions to say sorry; they could not do it as they were full up. That has already happened. In the early part of 1997 Albania went into meltdown. A country simply collapsed, perversely enough, over a banking scheme that went wrong—a pyramid scheme that got out of control and led to a country essentially going into meltdown. Workers destroyed their own factories and machines. Enver Hoxha’s huge stock of rifles and ammunition was broken into and people shot each other. In that crisis the United States of America said no. NATO said, ““Too small, too local, not our business. Europe, you look after it””. By a process of a coalition of the willing, led by the Italians who had a direct interest in the people who were fleeing across the Adriatic sea, a number of nations, which did not include the United Kingdom, and a bit of good luck, Albania was saved, and it is now joining the European Union and NATO itself just 10 years after that took place. It is not an imaginary scenario to say that something will come along and that Europe will have to take responsibility for that. The Albanian experience took place just before we came in, in May 1997, and I cast no blame on my predecessor Michael Portillo for taking his decision then. Through what we experienced at the end of Bosnia and in Kosovo, I have been worried ever since about what we would do if something else happened in Europe. The issue is one of capabilities. I am reassured, rather than worried or scared, by this treaty because for the very first time a European Union treaty has actually taken responsibility for where we need to address that. For from not mentioning NATO, as the noble Lord said, the treaty states in Article 42 of Section 2: "““Commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, for those States which are members of it, remains the foundation of their collective defence and the forum for its implementation””." So that is what we wanted. For a long time we have wanted the European Union explicitly and categorically to state the role of NATO, and there it is in stark terms. For those who say that it hardly mentions NATO, NATO is there. Not only that, but the architects of the Lisbon treaty also listened to the key issue of European defence: the inability of Europe to translate a wiring diagram into capabilities to deal with a crisis. I used to say when I was Defence Secretary, and then repeatedly and relentlessly—to an almost boring extent—in NATO, ““You can’t send a wiring diagram to a crisis””. You can have all the fancy procedures in the world, all the books and magazines, and all the great PowerPoint presentations; at the end of the day, you have got to be able to send soldiers, aeroplanes and enablers if you are actually to tackle and deal with a crisis. Article 42 of Section 2 states: "““Member States shall undertake progressively to improve their military capabilities””." It then goes on to say how that will be done: a European Defence Agency, the subject of a later group of amendments. That was a British idea, floated by the British Government in order to give some teeth to the sentiment here, that we will progressively improve our capabilities. We have taken two major steps forward in the European Union in, first, recognising the deficiency, which the treaty does, and, secondly, by saying that NATO is the cornerstone of what we do. Nobody is suggesting that there is going to be a single European army. I do not even think that William Cash and company down the Corridor have gone on about Mr Prodi’s European army any more. There was never any thought of a European army, and there is none. If there is to be a European rapid reaction force, it will be made up of components from different nation states, usually with a headquarters based in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe at Mons. That will almost invariably be the case—after all, the troops serving in the aftermath of the Pakistan earthquake and helping the African Union in Darfur are all being co-ordinated by SHAPE in Mons in Belgium. So we are not talking in those terms; we are talking about component parts that will allow Europe to fulfil its own destiny and deal with problems and crises that occur in our neighbourhood. We listened to the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, in the previous debate, telling us of fantasies that we have heard so often before: that Europeans will drag this mighty United Kingdom into something that we do not want to do. I do not know where the noble Lord has been, but I know where he started off: in the Royal Air Force. It was the United Kingdom trying to drag other European countries into dealing with serious problems. I cannot think of a single instance where other European countries have dragged the United Kingdom unwillingly into dealing with some of these problems. The noble Lord must have had a memory lapse when he remembered the Falklands because he used the unwillingness of the Europeans to back the United Kingdom wholeheartedly at that time as an example of how weak-kneed these European foreigners are when it comes to defending our interests. His memory lapse must have involved him forgetting that the Americans did not support us in the Falklands either. The United States sat firmly, albeit occasionally uncomfortably, on the fence while the task force went down to the Falkland Islands. Mrs Jeane Kirkpatrick made absolutely certain that President Reagan was not going to support the Iron Lady in her mad escapade that would overturn American foreign policy in Latin America. What help we got—and we got a lot of help—was done under the counter, surreptitiously, and was rarely admitted until after it was all over. Of course Europeans are going to be divided. We have been divided before. NATO was in existence when America went to fight in Vietnam, but there was no question of asking NATO to get involved in Vietnam. Even this country did not get involved in Vietnam. When it came to Iraq, there was a division among the allies, as there was in the United Nations Security Council. There will be times when we will act together and times when we are divided and individual countries will go their own way or be part of coalitions of the willing. However, where we need to act, where we should act and where there is a collective interest in doing so, we must have the capabilities. I am a bit tired of the arguments over the Iraq war. I supported the invasion at the time, as did the Conservative Party and a number of other people, but we have gone way beyond that, and terrible mistakes were made after that as well. I think that if we had not dealt with Saddam Hussein at the time we would be dealing with him now. The fact is that there was a division among the allies at that time. Some felt it was important and urgent that we went ahead, and we did. The idea that anything in this treaty or, indeed, the previous treaty or the Maastricht treaty—which was, after all, signed by the Conservative Government and is the first time that a European defence was talked about in a treaty—is going to bind us and grip us together is nonsense because we will remain in charge of our own destiny. I believe that European defence is good and will reinforce NATO as a whole. Where I am critical, almost to the point of feelings of anger and impotence, is because we in Europe are able to do so little. We talk a great game. Even the critics of the treaty talk a great game about what we can do, what they can do, what they will do and how they will drag us into it, but the reality is so puny. The European Union is an economic giant, yet it is a military nonentity. If we take the graphic statistics, boots on the ground are what count in most missions today. There are 1.5 million Europeans in regular forces and another 1 million in reserves. That is about twice what the United States of America has, yet of all these people who the taxpayers of Europe are paying for, only about 2 per cent can be deployed in the kinds of missions that will be required for the future. Lots of them are ready and prepared and are part of grandiose plans to stop the Soviet Union invading Europe; there are still tank formations that have that primary objective. However, in terms of what we need to do now, only 2 per cent of all those troops can be used. We have twice as many fast jets in the European portfolio than the United States of America has, but only 10 per cent of them can fly day and night in all weathers and deliver guided precision weapons, the only kind of weapon that will have any utility in future. In each of the catalogues—apart from tanks, of which we have more than enough—we are grossly and seriously deficient. If a decision about Kosovo had to be taken today, I sometimes wonder whether we would be in any better position, almost 10 years on, to be able to do what we did then—to complete a mission in 78 days without a single casualty on the allies’ side and to achieve all the objectives that we set out. I fear and worry that we cannot. We are not much further on, but I certainly hope that, in this treaty, we have started to do what is necessary. In the previous debate, and probably in this one as well, we will talk about the reality of what is going on. My noble friend Lady Ashton outlined a number of the areas where the common foreign policy is working and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, mentioned a few areas where there is great potential for the future. One experience during my time in NATO has almost disappeared from the scene. It was an insurgency in the small country of Macedonia—still obliged by the United Nations to be called the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It was scandalously—and I say that with great deliberation—excluded from an invitation to NATO membership at the recent Bucharest summit because of an unreasonable and indefensible veto by Greece on that country, simply because it will not change its name. However, in 2001, it was beset by an insurgency and all of the agencies came together—the European Union, NATO, the OSCE, the World Bank, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the European Union’s representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. Everyone got involved. Javier Solana and I went to Macedonia 11 times between March and November of that year. It got huge coverage and was the biggest story of that time. In the Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, wrote an article saying that it was an unmitigated disaster that we were getting involved in yet another Balkan swamp. The strap line to his front-page article said, with the characteristic understatement for which Simon Jenkins is so well known, that I would not be content until the Balkans were aflame from the Adriatic to Istanbul. However, all those agencies came together, worked together, on the ground at the highest and lowest levels. A peace plan was designed and, of course, Macedonia is now on the brink of both European Union and NATO membership. If people would like to learn a little more about it, the Royal United Services Institute has just published a small book by Mark Laity, who used to be my representative in Macedonia at the time, chronicling both what happened there and the lessons from it. It is well worth reading for those who would like to know, not about the scary prospects of European defence, but about how it works in action. I think that is of more relevance, frankly, than a lot of the scaremongering we have heard as each stage of the European integration debate has gone along. However, I say, and I know that my successor would also say, had he been here in the House of Lords as well, that what the treaty proposes—the Berlin-plus arrangements and European defence as part of the common and foreign security policy—will strengthen and not compete with NATO. It will not duplicate NATO but provide assets that will be useful to NATO as a whole. Overall it will add to our capability as Europeans to be able to defend ourselves from the threats of the future rather than the enemies of the past.